Ben Chatwin – Altered Signals

Vinyl LP pressing. Following Staccato Signals, the much-acclaimed third album under his own name, composer/producer Ben Chatwin returns with it’s companion piece Drone Signals.

Unlike Staccato Signals where Chatwin started with a blank slate and built the music up layer by layer, finishing with the string quartet, this time the process began with everything on hand. The task became dismantling the tracks stripping them apart to see what was left, letting certain sounds or instruments become the focus, and then rebuilding the arrangements around them. This allowed elements to breathe, yet also to become more static. The less chaotic and more ambient nature of these pieces suggested a related album of versions, a conceptual sibling Drone Signals. Feeding string parts through an array of modular synthesizers, utilizing modern sampling and granular synthesis, Ben remolded what was once players performing in a room into new microscopic electronic textures. By using the final element of the previous album, recording the strings, as a starting point to feed into his machines, Ben developed a central conceptual tool of his previous album giving up control even further. The result is a fractured and dissembled interpretation of Staccato Signals as performed by modular synthesizers.