"Featuring 16 tracks of beautiful yet unsettling electronic music recorded exclusively on a Eurorack Modular synth, ‘System’ will be released on August 19th via Venetian Snares’ Timesig imprint.
Speaking about the album Fraioli said, “I’ve spent much of the past decade building up my own sound design company, Jafbox Sound, and in recent years have become fascinated by modular synths. I’d been making a series of performance videos, showing how they work and that inspired me to start making music as Datach’i again. I suddenly realized I had a growing collection of tracks that worked together and had something new to say. Aaron heard some of them and encouraged me to start thinking of them in terms of an album and here we are.”"
On with the interview - Hey Joseph cheers for
taking the time to answer some questions. I've
had the pleasure of listening to 'System' your
new album prior to this interview so I'd like to
bring up a few questions relating to specific
tracks as well as the process in the general. A
quick note for the readers we'll also be
creating a video interview for Modular Podcast
after the album release where we'll go into
detail and have a group discussion about gear,
techniques and approaches where we can all
share experiences alongside Datach'i. So
watch out for that one.
My first question about the album has to be, what gear did you use? The
promotional material around the states an all modular set up, deliberately making things hard to force working with limitations. Was literally nothing else used?
The only non-modular sound on the album is the Luminist Garden by Folktek which was used on the track “Luminist Modular”. I played this instrument during the performance of the patch and processed through the modular. It’s more used as an effect rather then a musical part. What’s funny is that out of the 108 tracks I made for this release, that’s the only one that has anything used out side the modular system. So I like that its on there and is the last track and sends you off in a slightly different space.
The opening track has flurries of single notes that swell and echo across the choral backdrop, was that composed / sequenced to be specific and repeatable or is there an element of random generation possibly feeding a quantizer to create that line?