Listen To ROC///OPT/'s Album 'RM1X201806201807'

Tokyo via Whanganui multi-instrumentalist Brandon Sayring has unveiled a new collection of electronic works from his ongoing studio project ROC///OPT/. Sayring's highly listenable and evocative MIDI sonics open up cinematic universes of sound, while his occasionally 'hands-off' compositional approach recalls at times the generative methodologies of German experimental artist Oval. Currently based in Japan, Sayring is known to be close friends with club producer Lilstiffy and romantic pop musician Tender Moonlight, both of whom have coincidentally recently been spotted performing in the Tokyo region. Sayring kindly shared some words on his ROC///OPT/ project, the genesis of his latest creation, and the mysteriously numbered song titles of each track...

"RM1X is the hardware it was produced on and the numbers following are the dates I made the track, in Japanese format yyyymmdd, and the album is the same but 2018 06 to 2018 07. I made it within those two months.

I guess ROC///OPT/ has always been an outlet for me to experiment with electronics and hardware. I started the project in art school where I would make tape delays, clock radio distortions and put underwater mics and speakers into fish bowls to pass sound through different liquids. Just wire stuff together and try make dance music with it.

The past two albums have been a little different though. The last one was more focused on limiting myself to 3 pieces of hardware and then using MIDI note detection software to feed the sound of the instruments back into themselves.

Most of it has been more about the process and the ideas than anything else though. In art school I was kind of interested in the resonant frequency piece 'I Am Sitting In A Room' by Alvin Lucier and I would take that same idea but apply it to PVC pipes I have heated and bent into different shapes with a rigged double tape deck loop, so each piece was playing the resonant frequencies of weird spirals and wobbly pipes. I did a bit with sending channels from the mixer through those pipes and through clock radio distortions which acted as compressors."