Playing a bit of catch up here, but we wanted to let you know about Tsuku Boshi‘s winter release of the Waxy Tomb LP GridDrip. The French label specializes in experimental, electronic, and art related music projects, and Waxy Tomb definitely touches all those buttons. The project is the work of Bay-area resident Julia Litman-Cleper and we are told: “Waxy Tomb” is the pet name of a disequilibrium chamber, used for the cooling process after self-columns have been collapsed or dis-localized.” Litman-Cleper is an artist, designer, and educator with a Masters of Science in Architecture Studies, Design, and Computation from MIT. The artist explains:
“I scientifically research how physics simulation and interactivity influence our causal perception of the world and vice versa, suggesting methods to design interfaces which foster intuitive creative expression, communication, and storytelling.”
Previous releases from Waxy Tomb have included 2013’s infra_shape (Weird Ear Records) and Mind Rats (Brad Grammar), 2012’s split releases Mollusk In Water/Take One Try All (Hormone Pills) (Weird Forest Records) and Anoarmholdsyou/New Realities (KDVS Recordings) with the sound artists Sagan Genesis and Psychic Reality, respectively. In addition, Waxy Tomb was part of Ratskin Records 50 tape GOLD BOX compilation, appearing on a short cassette with Different Dentist.
Browsing the artist’s website quickly reveals that Litman-Cleper resides somewhere in the future with a strong interest in how humans interface with digital realities, as well as their real and physical surroundings. As such, Waxy Tomb’s sound offerings can be seen as a further extension of these preoccupations. GripDrip came out this past January, and the 12-track LP, sampled below via the Tsuku Boshi Soundcloud embed, offers quite the head-spinning collection of audio. Many of these come in under or just over the two-minute mark, with the album track “PastLines“–which you can hear in the sampler–running the longest at just over four minutes. It’s as though these are provisional attempts to sketch out the imagined audio realities of digital objects and urban space. Often narrated by a seemingly disembodied vocal source, Waxy Tomb collides together computer tones and modem-speak with hair-trigger snippets of flushed rhythm making for soundscapes that bridge the narrowing distance between human and automated reality.
