A fresh new PAN joint straight out the oven: James Hoff’s Blaster

A fresh new PAN joint straight out the oven: James Hoff's Blaster

Rub those palms together and think about pizza dough, because PAN’s got a new full-length out right now and you’re a fool if you think I’m not going to use a bunch of food analogies to talk about it. The full-length is from the New York-based sound artist James Hoff, and it’s called Blaster. And get this: you know how sometimes you throw some salt into your soup to make it a little tastier? This Hoff guy did basically the same thing, except instead of salt it was a computer virus (called the “Blaster” virus) and instead of a soup it was 808 beats. He used “the mutated results as building blocks for seven new compositions” which make up side A of Blaster.

Side B is a long, stitched-together piece of many of the sounds Hoff made into a “scratch record for DJs” in order to act as a “point of potential transmission” to help these virus-sourced sounds to find new hosts (i.e. other compositions by other artists). Because that’s the whole deal with Hoff’s project here: he’s interested in the capacity of viruses and sounds to self-distribute and replicate throughout a network. Sort of like how sometimes you have two sandwiches, but then you give your buddy one of them because you couldn’t possibly eat both of them in one sitting and you feel like he’ll just get more use out of it. Except in this case imagine that the sandwich went to your buddy on its own accord, like it just sprouted legs and walked on over like a weird sandwich monster thing.

Blaster is a follow-up to Hoff’s 2011 PAN LP How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away, a release that drew together the sounds of historic riots and modern warfare, and it’s available now. Do I even need to tell you that’s it’s mastered by Rashad Becker? I mean, you probably guessed already, but if you didn’t, now you know. If you’re feeling hungry (or even just a little peckish), you can make Blaster yours over on Boomkat.

Blaster tracklist:

01. Blaster
02. Lasterb
03. Asterbl
04. Sterbla
05. Terblas
06. Erblast
07. Rblaste
08. Scratch

• James Hoff: http://www.james-hoff.com
• PAN: http://p-a-n.org

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