Drum & Bass, Halfstep, Jungle Acid Elephant Recordings
Breakslinger - Binary

bandcamp |
acidelephant.de |
binarypatina.de

The album ‘Binary Patina’ documents the music of two audiovisual live-performances that were staged as facade projections of over 800 square meters in size. For the second installment of ‘Binary Patina’ in 2015, the at the time unused former Prosecutor’s office of Trier, Germany, was used as the canvas for a dynamic pictorial layer that addressed the threat of global surveillance in the digital age: Audio-visual samples of contemporary discourse, historical data on US drone strikes from the Dronestream API (banned by Apple), excerpts from the Snowden leaks, maps and 3d-renderings of NSA’s Dagger Complex near Frankfurt and GCHQ headquarters in the UK, partially obscured beyond recognition, were synthesized with the music and real-time-generated visuals.

With half the tracks credited to individual artists, the tracklist shrouds a big part of the collaborative effort that went into developing the live performances and refining the music for the album. Breakslinger (and his aliases Bokeh and Cmycmyk), Myom, Flextronic and vocalist Semuta have already known each other for years. For ‘Binary Patina’ they teamed up with the internationally acclaimed media artist JeongHo Park, who wrote the software that generated moving images from multiple sound sources and controller data in real-time.

While the ‘Binary Patina’ events were around 30 minutes long, the tracks have since grown and 15 have been chosen for a full 70 minutes long album. The eclectic selection is forward-thinking and at the same time rooted in genres like drum’n’bass, dub, downtempo, bass music and electronica.