All Ears: Some New Ways To Hear Distortion
The acorn must crack in order for the seedling to sprout. That's the energy I felt when I saw Rashad Becker, a German mastering engineer and artist, perform his own music live at London's multi-venue MODE Festival back in September. The setting was a gutted building in the middle of the city's shopping district, which added its own layer of dissonance. This kind of move – staging cultural events within the bones of long-dead industrial spaces – often goes hand-in-hand with gentrification, but usually takes place in more residential areas. Yet here we were, in capitalism's lap, dancing in a patch of decay. From behind a sheet of mesh fabric, Becker bent over his hardware. Synthesized bells took on the quality of flint, generating sparks as they fell against each other. As distortion burnt holes in the melody, it felt like my psyche was cracking, too.
"Narratively, in that piece, the intention is to create a sense of delirious desperation," Becker told me a few weeks after the festival. The source of the scorched textures I heard in his live set was his Haken Continuum synth and a liberal use of saturation. "Very
