Description | As the designer describes:
My name is Plumbutter. My face is a psycho-geographical map of the cities of Baltimore and Cleveland. I am a drum-machine, but let me tell you I am more than that, for I also am a “drama machine”. Thus there exists in me, a dialectic between drum and drama, like cops and gangsters, male versus female, or rural versus urban. You can see my wild spaces are represented by a deer-horn, and my downtown by a factory, and in between, a vast swath of suburban developments. It is a gradient of these three areas- urban, suburban, and rural- that informs my electronic synthesis.
Urban, in me, represents a strong sense of rhythm, churned out of machines powered by transformers and electricity which comes from an incinerator, a smokestack. You can see the silhouette of this silo on the left. The factories' product is “beats”, the pulse of urbanity.
These pulses are connected, patched with wire, to suburban “inputs”, to hear them. The beat is there converted into more human-shaped forms, electronic sounds that convey meaning in their resonances. An organo-form matrix of three types of suburban developments: Gong, AV-Dog, and Ultrasound.
Gong represents the palaces of ritual like a gong which signals the entrance of dignitaries, or courses in a special meal. Gong is triggered by an urban beat, but only after pausing for the proper duration of time, and it is the simultaneous action of multiple gongs that creates change-ringing, or hocketing, across a stereo field.
AV-Dog is a complement to Gong in the suburban matrix,and they are both placed together in checkerboard fashion. AV-Dog resonates the urban trigger, like a dancer or a pool of water. Yes, that is more like it- that the urban beat triggers divers who jump into a pool, and create waves there. These waves jostle sonic buoys, which are the output of this development. They show the rate of resonance within the urban product, they are a detector of resonances at the frequencies of human brainwaves.
Ultrasound is wedged in the heart of suburban development. It represents bats, which should be present in a good suburb. They indicate lush foliage, and they eat mosquitoes. And they sing at ultrasonic frequencies, which is what this module is all about- listening to ultrasound.
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