Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt
ARTIST INFO:
Accidental Guitar
The Aesthetic of Failure
SEAN DERRICK COOPER MARQUARDT
www.soundcloud.com/berlindolls
AKA:
(MoreBlackThenGod)
www.soundcloud.com/more-black-then-god
(Deathgripsfanclub)
www.soundcloud.com/deathgripsfanclub
(Drone Messiah)
www.vimeo.com/83497799
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt (Chicago, Berlin) improviser, composer, employs his signature “accidental guitar” method on music of haunting, sonically jarring loops. At times cavernous and resonant as a cathedral, his recordings explore the depths of the drone, exploiting glitches and mutating overtones into chorus-like swells, mechanical revolutions and washes of beaded static. These meditations upon cyclical time and the ubiquity of the elements seek to elevate our natural world to pure and infinite tonality, soaring above us like mass aural hallucinations.
Sean Derrick Cooper Marquardt continues to blur the line between improvisation and composition, using chance as the foundation of loops and drones that fill space and seemingly expand time.
This artist has over 300 album and compilation releases to his name.
Daniel Kaufman
ARTIST INFO:
harmonic distortions.
DANIEL KAUFMAN
soundcloud.com/danielkaufmansounds
Releases also on the following labels -
Absence of Wax, Kimberly Dawn, Lighten Up Sounds, Puzzle Records.
A game of damage, liner notes -
"A game of damage is a reference to Consider Phelbas, which is an incredible book by Iain M. Banks. Damage is a card game enhanced with psychological tokens and emotional pressure by direct mind-to-mind contact, where the "tokens" of play are actual living beings who are killed when a player loses a round."
"These songs were composed in the spirit of the game of damage, thus resulting in the shredding and altering of existing melodic structures, as well a general sense of chance and destruction." - Daniel Kaufman
Recorded in San Francisco, mixed & mastered in Austin, Texas.
Review
"Marquardt’s piece is like a draft coming through a crack in the ceiling. For ten minutes it seeps in as a high frequency wisp, somewhere between guitar feedback, headphone leakage and a straining elevator mechanism, while tiny wooden knocks mimics a broken clock hand, limping arrhythmically between 11 and 12. What is this? Someone’s living quarters? A neglected attic space with a dirty mattress thrown in it? As a dwelling it is curious and somewhat uncomfortable, and the atmosphere builds in my ears like compacting wax. Marquardt’s employs what he refers to as an “accidental guitar” method. Indeed, the sounds present here are the instrument equivalent of burps and fluey sniffs – body by-products, too often rejected as a form of human waste or sonic perspiration.
In contrast, Kaufman’s opening drones feel like a gush from a hot tap. Initially I feel soothed by the lo-fi synthesiser chords and feedback sirens that cling to each other, although the energy that drives his two pieces soon starts to feel anguished and strained. His method is inspired by the fictional card game Damage, which appears in Iain M. Banks’ book Consider Phlebas: a duel of telepathic psychological manipulation and the gambled lives of mortal creatures. The pieces quiver as though Kaufman is fending off the emotional infiltration of his competitors, climaxing in groans and glimmers that stutter to the verge of breakdown. His mind is finally hacked – a sphere of warm tone falls under the excruciating severance of a blunt knife, coughing and shrieking as the whole is gradually prised into two." -
www.attnmagazine.co.uk/music/8731 
