Electronic music composer Jack Hertz has released a new LP entitled Blackouts available for digital download and streaming via his netlabel Aural Films. The 12-track collection was inspired by and recorded during the recent rolling blackouts in California. Six of the state’s most deadly wildfires have been started by overheating electrical equipment and Pacific Gas & Electric alone was blamed for 19 major fires between 2017 and 2018–including last year’s Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise and killed 86 people. In response to the threat during fire season, this year PG&E used preemptive outages shutting off power to millions of customers without warning.
While the musician is more than aware of the irony in creating an electronic music album about rolling blackouts, the medium’s dependence on power also makes it the perfect setting for confronting “the strange calamity of depending on companies that put us in harms way without recourse.” Hertz goes on to explain:
“When electricity was shut off with little warning, people in cities, towns, and all walks of life were left in the dark with only the excuse that Pacific Gas & Electric didn’t want to be liable for another wildfire. In the time since, we have learned a lot about our reliance on them and how powerless we are, in both senses of the word.”
Blackouts is a collection of Eurorack works, and they buzz throughout with a dystopian ambiance. Beginning with the latent threat of “Dangling Wires,” Hertz crafts atmospheres of vividly creeping dread. Across evocative tracks like “The Darkness,” “Primitive Living,” and “Intentional Malfunction,” scintillating aural events suggesting electronic circuitry on overload combine with the fried-out drift of “negative” space. Seeming to relish in that place where his sounds crackle and spark apart or grow into menacing clouds of nitrous oxide, Hertz reminds us not only of the catastrophic impact of being without electrical power, but also, ironically, the devastating impact that power can have on our lives and the environment around us.
