works > subspectral

2023-02-05

Subspectral

Full Length Album released under my musical alias Stripe of Mirrors

14 tracks – 1 hour, 14 minutes

Listen: album.link/subspectral

Subspectral is an introspective, internal journey through landscapes and architectures of temporal ruminations and emotions pertaining to the Other world. A labyrinthine of time, textures, and spaces, that resonate between the finite experience of life and infinite experience of death, settling and leaning deep into the void that one leaves when they move into the next plane, only to find acceptance, familiarity, and hope.

  1. Title A
  2. Heartbeats
  3. Terra Cycle
  4. Taps
  5. Sayon
  6. Grinds
  7. Whisps
  8. Title B
  9. Peliculated
  10. Shimmers
  11. Columns
  12. Regions
  13. Births
  14. Title C

More tracks and live streams on Stripe of Mirrors

Music Videos

Shimmers

Featuring Adam Roth’s world of “Astramid”, hyperreal time/space astronauts appear to be created from an amalgamation of elements from ancient Earth history and a far, imagined future. His hand drawn character illustrations were used to generate what appears to be a hyper-realistic future-past fashion look-book. To complete this process, we collaborated on custom animation tools built upon Stable Diffusion, an open-source AI image model, to develop a stop-animation look that contributed to a filmic presence and realism, giving the characters even more form and life to compliment the ethereal and transient percussive sounds in the track. Throughout this creative process we would generate thousands of image “gens” exploring the results and selecting our picks, sometimes running them through the model again and again as way to achieving a certain (im)materiality through image, coaxing and pulling out what we wanted to see in the final characters.

So much of the process is a discovery. A single diamond in the rough of a deluge image gens can sometimes take days. We began to discover the edges of our visual processing abilities, and the creative process becomes somewhat of a waking, shared dream. The “three” of us — Adam, myself, and the AI – dreaming to create something we hadn’t seen before.

Adam Roth’s world of “Astramid” continues to be developed in the realm of print, motion, and a physical toy line.


Peliculated

The video for “Pelicuated” is a personal homage – a collaboration with my dad post-mortem. This video is created from footage of his color 16mm short film of the same name, and the audio track was original composed with this footage in mind, as it was always a goal of ours to do audio/visual collaborations. The original 12 minute short was part of his graduate thesis at SFAI in the late 70’s, depicting slice-of-life scenes from San Francisco, incorporated many of his original transfer and exposure inventions. The film won the 1978 New York Independent Film Festival. Since then, the original print has been lost. This video is my way of incorporating some of my favorite of his film visuals with my sounds, hopefully elevating both in the process. The entire piece was remastered and upscaled to 2k – far more clear than the original NTSC/VGA footage telecine – offering a glimpse of details in the footage that is chromatic, vivid, and painterly.

Some of my earliest memories are of the creative chaos of my dads studio, exploring snippets of 8 and 16mm celluloid frame strips strewn on the floor edits or playing with the splicers, eventually learning how to clean film reels and learn the telecine for film to video transfer. Never one to be a medium purist, he would always dive head-first into new creative processes. He introduced me very early on to using computers as creative tool via an Amiga 1000 with Deluxe Paint, and later the Video Toaster. While computing can be conceived of as just an other tool in the toolbox, even since those early moments I contextualized computing as a creative method, a form of literacy, and a way of processing and thinking, which I continuing to embody to this day.


Taps

“Taps” is one of the longer, internal and contemplative tracks on Subspectral featuring many rhythmic ringing overtones and layers. The animation for this piece was created by traveling within the latent space of the Stable Diffusion image model, but I never allow the model to resolve a specific image or recognizable object, nor use any color, so the result is an aimlessly transient spectral exploration that never arrives at a conclusion. Just as the brain thinks it recognizes an object or form, the image has moved on. In my process I generated thousands of images, and then explored the results and curated moments that to me resembled flora, ink blots, Rorschach tests, clouds, moods, spaces, and strange forms that seem uncomfortably inhuman but evocative. The piece is a metaphor for the undulating discomfort of growth and infinite introspection between spaces. It’s a subliminal and subtle hallucination, like a synthetic dream that can’t be shared with words but still resonates a feeling upon waking. I found glimpses of beauty in this strange uncomfortable unknown. I would ask myself what would happen if I were to intentionally steer directly into these strange areas, could I ever be comfortable within them? Perhaps the recognition of various generative procedures resolves in my mind as a type of process as I am exploring a new visual literacy with these new image models. After a while, the aesthetic artifacts and tendencies of the sampling method do became familiar, but still remain entirely synthetic, alien, and mysterious.

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