Jindabyne by Sam Price

“Price’s improvisation is very musical, almost song based. He likes to sit on a groove, yet his tunes feel like a very unique hybrid, where real drums mash up against sweeping oscillations of synth, guitar, occasional vocals and who knows what else...” - Cyclic Defrost

Jindabyne is an EP formed of improvisation. Improvisation that's experiencing some kind of identity crisis. A melding of acoustic drums, voice and the machine. The machine, comprising of linked, tiny synth boxes, was controlled by MIDI. MIDI that's constantly being mutated by other non-deterministic boxes within the machine.

Are we willing to cede control to the machine? Sam Price constructed his own machine with the express purpose of sonifying this rubric. The modules that comprise this new machine are controlled by pseudo-random data of near infinite possibilities but the parameters being modulated are as old as music itself – pitch, note length, volume and timbre. The challenge is to make sense of the data flow to lend form to the sound and form in turn bringing finality, the end of possibility.

Following a road trip to that uncanny, beautiful town Jindabyne, the material was recorded in a shed and mixed in a sauna in a ritualised paradigm of one track per week, all live to hard disc, single takes. The end result hopefully belies its process.

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