The most sophisticated synthetic music around is made by a Syrian Communist living in Berlin, who is perhaps better thought of as a fiction writer. Rashad Becker writes (political, social, historical…) narratives and then sonifies them into non-linear compositions that unpick causality in music.

His Traditional Music Of Notional Species releases are best thought of as a series of sociograms—animated maps of how (sonic) beings interact. These pieces felt iteratively infinite, as established sonic characters—with the timbral qualities of a non-traditional-traditional instruments—interact with each other, potentially endlessly. The series Based on a True Story generated scores from historical occurrences and processes that have had a significant impact on recent social history. E.g. Chapter G (Part 5) specifically references the Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path Communist Party of Peru) and the life of Maoist founder Abimael Guzmán between 1982 and 1992. More recent pieces mirror the brute implications of revolutionary dialectics and the challenges these carry to the modernist economy of emotions.

But this is also body music: abstract but informed by the club, or by bodies in space, sometimes collected as ‘dances’: you might sway. The overall affect is of an imaginary social gathering where every single occurrence is obviously synthetic but has a material timbral character that potentially could be Alemu Aga’s braying harp, Maryanne Amacher scraping a metal pan around under the Sun Pyramid of Teotihuacan, Gagaku shō players, or the pig bladder flutes from the Pontus region of Anatolia. You can be moved to move by this music, but you might also be wondering what you accept as real within auditive environments…

It is totally singular and incredible—otherwise sounding conceptual music to dance to—and some of our favourite music of the last decade.

Two articles give a really great insight into Rashad’s thinking: this interview with Hanna Bächer and this great review in 4 Columns by Reinaldo Laddaga.

Join Rashad Becker for a Study Session on Friday 15th November where he’ll chat about the communist, conceptual methodology that informs his ground-breaking synthetic music

The music programme at Episode 11 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.