A lean, blue-hued futuristic city adorns the cover of Ikonika‘s Distractions, her first album in the last four years. It’s not clear whether the processor-like structures depict a city or the inside of a computer, which positively describes the old metaphor of cities as relentless modern machines. This place, however, is not overbearing and it does not attempt to overwhelm your senses – on the contrary, it is quiet, almost ascetic, at least in comparison to the usual cyberpunk images of future electronic cities. The music is equally lean and direct, a reduction of the relentlessly mechanical to its simplest emotional keys: great beats, short experimental voice clips, a sense of echoing space at slow speeds and considered paces. The distractions within an ordered, functional machine are not the product of spectacle but of something much more low-key, a reductive passion in which speed and light do not…

Let’s start with Leah Kardos’ “Little Phase”, from Bigo & Twigetti’s Summer compilation of last year. Press play ~ and then we’ll play a game.

The game is called the exquisite corpse.  Most of us played it with paper in primary school, as seen to the right.  I remember playing it during recess and later in detention.  But there’s a twist to this version: it’s played with music.  Using “Little Phase” as a starting point, the music was passed artist to artist through the rosters of Bigo & Twigetti and Moderna Records until it became something entirely different.  The process began last October and concluded this April.  Because the original files were available, the game was also influenced by another ~ telephone.  The last piece, Tim Linghas’ “At the End All Is Black”, bears echoes of the original, yet demonstrates how far the game has progressed.

So what happens…