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K-Space
To infinity and beyond
A phone call from drummer Ken Hyder: "How would you feel about a CD that changes every time you play it?" No cut-and-dried response to that question, but now there's opportunity to experience the potential exhilaration, potential frustration of such a slippery phenomenon. Infinity (Ad Hoc CD) is that elusive artefact, the endlessly non-replicating document&183; It's the third release from K-Space, the trio Hyder runs with multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson and Tuvan throat-singer, percussionist and musical shaman Gendos Chamzyryn.
Hyder and Hodgkinson started visiting Siberia in 1990, playing with local musicians in remote rural villages and hanging out with shamans. In 1996 they first played as a trio with Chamzyryn. K-Space came into existence. The name alludes to the researches of Russian astro-physicist Nicolai Kozyrev who conceptualised time as a channel for energy and created mirrored chambers for experiments into thought transference, distant healing and other human capabilities preserved now only in shamanic practices.
Bear Bones, the group's first CD, established their singular approach to improvising - an animistic expressiveness and unpredictable reworking of time. With Infinity, the latest stage of the K-Space project, a new dimension arises as the music object is restored to flux. Listening is a one-off experience, as at a concert. In K-Space thinking, sophisticated technology becomes a means to access states of heightened attentiveness.
The technical breakthrough came when Hodgkinson met software designer Andy Wilson. Together they investigated ways to locate a selection of sound files within different contexts and to use them in different ways - varying dynamic levels, for example - so that repeated plays produce a stream of previously unheard music. The number of audio files was restricted to fit the data limitations of CD format but, combined and permuted, they create a soundworld that seems limitless.
"It's very far from random, though," Hodgkinson explains. "We wanted to build an experience like an open dynamic field of ever-changing possibilities in which what isn't heard informs what !s heard. We made a kind of global plan in which the fundamental idea was to vary the type of variation, to make clear distinctions between different kinds of pathways in order to limit the risk of everything coming out sounding more or less the same".
The result is identifiably K-Space music but it's no longer possible to revisit a favourite moment or even press a pause button to temporarily suspend the flow. The compensation for that loss is a uniquely energised listening situation. Placed in the tray of your computer and activated, Infinity runs each time for around 20 minutes. "We wanted a length of time where we could hope for the listener's concentration," Hodgkinson continues. "Long enough to take you through something, short enough to be grasped as a whole play that can be compared with other plays."
After hearing the CD numerous times, you are struck by the radically different forms it can take, as this K-Space mobile reconfigures in unanticipated ways. Currently I'm hearing a delicate duet between plucked strings and clarinet; next time this might be the twang of a jaw's harp, fervent drumming, incantation by a crackling fire or a burst of raucous laughter. You start to realise that in a sense it's all there all the time, that as Hodgkinson says the unheard actually does inform what's heard. The boundaries dissolve, the pathways open up and once again you plunge into K-Space.
Julian Cowley
Infinity is out now on Ad Hoc
9:37 AM
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