FM40P mkII by NYZ

Following on the mind-melting FM40P, David Burraston returns to Psoma Psi Phi with FM40P mkII, another unique session exploring four-operator FM synthesis by way of Burraston's own curious methodologies.

Two extended runtime tracks make up a full hour of immersive listening, with "honka_#1a" feeling like a completely synthetic free jazz session, or perhaps a computer brain thinking about what "jazz" might sound like based solely upon a series of text-based inputs. There's still an oddly human sense in the note fingerings and sections where some notes extensively sustain and others blip once before disappearing into the fray, an implication of fluidity without latency or hesitation giving way to clusters of ideas overlapping with each other in a stack of musical Venn diagrams.

The twice as long "DRN1" piece presents the four-operator designs in a completely different light, simultaneously more angular and also more inert, with metallic, pipe-like overtones struggling to return to the surface and almost always being pulled away from their resolutions and displaced into some other shape beneath folded sawtoothy waves. Across the forty-minute piece, more and more stasis occurs, a paralysis of more and more held notes, gradually accumulating in a whorl of wavering shimmer.

Another intrepid and stimulating sensory experience being added to an already large catalog of rich sonic material, FM40P mkII continues to illustrate with inimitable immediacy and masterful restraint just how deep the well goes within the machines whose time has come and gone in the eyes and ears of the general public. Burraston may want us to consider the very real possibility that new tools are not quite as necessary as they seem, or further, that they should first be used to maintain and redefine the tools and systems of the past.

NOTE: After some confusion from listeners, we'd like to make clear the fact that all NYZ/Noyzelab catalog releases at Psoma are available ONLY as abridged digital versions for name-your-price/free download, and in their full unabridged editions as physical CD-Rs. There is not an unabridged digital version of anything from NYZ at Psoma, and the physical editions do not ship with unabridged digital versions either (that is, if you do not count the digital music present on the compact discs). For listeners only interested in unabridged digital versions, we encourage you to visit https://noyzelab.bandcamp.com to purchase those directly from NYZ, or even better, subscribe to his Bandcamp output and just get everything.

Sleep fictions, lucid maps and gnostic states. Asemic systems designed by night smokers, bedroom alchemists and oligolaliacs, for intimate applications. Est. MMXVII.

2026 NOTE: Shipping is currently suspended while we relocate.

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