Mark Cetilia: The New Way
MORE Records (2022)
Mark Cetilia’s performances use improvisational, generative feedback loops — between himself, his machines, a space, and a group of listeners — that exist within a specific time and place. To create a permanent counterpart of his ephemeral process, Cetilia looked to Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, RI, a space that has long provided him inspiration and community. He replaced the audience with an empty, many-roomed building, its windows and walls miked throughout to offer a system of reverberation that flowed to and from him. He filled the emptiness with sound, fed it back into itself, and molded it into churning, throbbing slabs of rhythm and texture.
Cetilia’s background as a DJ came into play when paring down over seven hours of recordings, only selecting tracks he could see himself using in a set. This resulted in a record that pulses and pumps with visceral life below its harsh surface. One can imagine industrial hedonism soundtracked by the alien techno of “Acidevac” and “Cismys,” or a straightforward drum tool layered with “Metosia” or “Benzaplex” to take it to another world.
As with the music, the track titles are based on a generative process, one that uses a simple PHP script to scramble syllables from a database of prescription drug titles. Each title is oddly familiar, funny, and utterly plausible — a mixture of chaos and intention. The record is at every level a collaboration between the human and the inhuman, the mind and the machine, an attempt to extend the mind beyond itself, a path to “The New Way.”
— Matt McEver (Karl Jaims)
Composed, performed, and produced by Mark Cetilia,
improvised + generative analog / digital electronics.
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Seth Manchester
at Machines with Magnets, January – March 2021.
Lacquers cut by Dietrich Schoenemann
for Complete Mastering & Distribution.
Plating by NiPro Optics.
Manufactured by Sunpress Vinyl.
Art + design by Josh Plotkin for MORE Records.
Funding for this recording was provided in part
by the RISD Professional Development Fund.
You mentioned last time that you were also working on a new work called "The New Way" that seems to be an attempt at exploring the way music affects experience. Was that simply a statement that you were experimenting with, or was also just an attempt for you to figure out what you want the listener to make of it?
It was both. It felt to me like the work as a whole was working towards the same goal of looking at how music can help us to experience and connect more deeply with things. Not that I'm a philosopher, just that when I was making that work, I always knew that I wanted people to think that some of the work I was doing was really just experiments involving different ways of thinking about how we experience. This was not some kind of academic endeavor, or just some sort of project for that kind of thing; it's an attempt to be
— GPT-2
Track Listing
Side A
Vaxceril [08:33]Metosia [02:56]
Gesolyte [06:30]
Side B
Phetrio [05:07]Acidevac [06:56]
Benzaplex [05:55]
Side C
Capslus [08:38]Cismys [09:21]
Side C
Ptarex [01:44]Novexafed [06:45]
Kantamine [04:22]
Revar [05:07]
Reviews
Dusted Magazine
KJFC
Textura
Touching Extremes
Yellow Green Red
Availability
Available via Bandcamp and streaming on all major platforms.