If there one thing that can be said of experimental musician Derek Piotr, it is that he resists resting on his laurels. From our first experience of his work through the Piotr-Heslin collaboration back in 2014, to the avant garde pop of Tempatempat or indeed any other of his eight full albums and various other releases, Piotr displays a constant desire to explore and innovate, almost treating music as a form of contemporary art.
His most recent release, Grunt, was perhaps his most experimental and adventurous— a record he summed up in an interview last September as “ugly, direct beats, free time sound structures, grinding glitching samples. Voice across the frequency spectrum, sub bass drone, occasional tender vocal performance. Distortion and #voicenoise.” From this array of digital and human sounds, Piotr draws inspiration and meaning, the album serving as a journey into the “uncharted hinterlands of biodigital sound […] new worlds both organic and cybernetic that celebrate the nuances of non-heteronormative identity.”
Following on from Grunt, Piotr is putting all of his focus on to one of album’s tracks for a new EP, Repeating Bloom. The release features various remixes and reworkings of ‘Repeating Bloom’, what Dr. Michael Waugh describes as “de- and re-constructions of one of the album’s few repetitive rhythmic compositions.”
Piotr enlists the help of a number of collaborators to realize this, with UK-based microsound artist Simon Whetham, producer Elsa Hewitt, Japanese ‘OP-1 wizard’ STEEEZO “EEE”, and Iowa City’s electronic artist Chaircrusher all involved. In addition, the release invites Reuben Walton to remix the track ‘Let’, also from Grunt.
In preparation for the EP’s release, we’re happy to share Simon Whetham’s take on ‘Repeating Bloom’. The original track had something of a harsh, mechanical sound, the industrial whirr kicking into stunted rhythms like malfunctioning technology, though Whetham strips things right back. If the original was a self-propelled automaton then Whetham’s version is the machine’s ghost, clicks and hisses as picked up on radio scanners, vestigial blips of past energy left to haunt the air.
Indeed, Simon Whetham’s bio describes how his inventive and unorthodox recording techniques allow his to capture “unnoticed and obscured sonic phenomena,” with his current interest based around “exploring ways to retain physical traces of sound and transforming energy forms.” His take on Piotr’s work only further exaggerates the interplay of the biological and digital, where memories might be coded as pure information, hanging unseen in the air around.