Fake World with Nicolas Jaar
2015
Role: Electronic Musician, Sound Artist
Background: In Mar ’15, Aseem was one among 6 producers selected for a production seminar with Nicolar Jaar. Spread over 5 weeks, the seminar included discussions on important subjects like the business of electronic music, publishing, and touring but the focus of the seminar was in the creative search for meaning through sound. As such, the experiments were more cerebral, and although a lot of technical music production talk ensued, the result was a collection of pieces and experiments that are more academic and conceptual in their approach.
A couple of tracks from the seminar:
1. Fake Present
A one minute piece with no sound ever repeating. Every sound is constantly changing with the intention of creating a fake present, a constant here-now. All sounds were created and sampled from Euro-rack modules.
2. Fake World
Adhering to very strict guidelines around time, this piece tries to create and understand a (fake) world. In the first minute, this world and it’s habitants are introduced. Introduction of problems and elements of chaos in the second minute lead to an effort to understand and perhaps even fix these problems towards the third minute, failing thereat, there is an acceptance of the inability to ‘fix’ the world. In The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra, he makes reference to the feedback systems in nature, ones that extend from the animate to the inanimate world. In this world, parasites like ticks seem to invade the habitat and as their numbers become too much (and the host diminishes), they eventually start dying out again while the host gets some of his life back until eventually they fall into a (temporary) equilibrium at the end.