With an awesomely apostrophe’d (last) name like “d’Eon,” you might suspect a supernatural ability to bypass the laws of physics and independently time travel, not just through years or decades, but through eons, prior to when even dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Amoebae make refreshingly uncritical listeners if you’re an artist/producer just looking to wallow in personal creativity, but if you value your work and therefore consider improvement a perpetual goal, humans are obviously the audience that you’d like to consider. Hopefully humans are the purchasers of the new d’Eon EP Foxconn / Trios, because the Montreal native endured some unexpected whiplash going back three years just for the sake of it. Those trips to the Paleolithic offer so many more reclining opportunities!
The release on Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare’s Knives imprint was originally recorded in 2012, during which Chris d’Eon was firmly entrenched alongside Hippos In Tanks doing a series of conceptual Music for Keyboards. He also did a dual album thing with Grimes back in 2011, and excepting his unexpectedly solid DnB work under the Kallisti moniker, you might have a general sense of what to expect: Something experimental! Something conceptual! Something… akin to one of those super cool reversible jackets that you had as a kid?
Here’s d’Eon on the latter point; the EP is out November 27:
The tracks comprising the record freely and irregularly travel both forward and backward in MIDI-time. By putting together small arrangements using low sample-rate soundfonts in a tracker, and by writing short loops that are legible both forwards and backwards, the MIDI information can be traversed in any arbitrary direction at any arbitrary intervals and still be harmonically and contrapuntally sound. Ordinary rhythmic patterns are inherently legible regardless of the firing order of events because of a snare’s inherent role as the up beat and a kick’s as the down beat. If all notes in a phrase and all chords in a progression work equally well with their neighbours before them and their neighbour after, the direction of the clock is irrelevant. If those conditions are met, a 32-bar, two- three- or four-chord pattern with a single melody is easily made into a fully through-composed piece of music that could continue for hours without any pattern repetition at all.
Also, go here for a sample.
Foxconn / Trios tracklisting:
01. Sobha Renaissance Information Technology
02. Transparency Part III – ii
03. Satyam Integrated Engineering Solution
04. Foxconn I
05. Samsung India Software Operations I
06. Samsung India Software Operations II
07. Infosys II
08. Datamatics Global Services II
09. Foxconn II
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