BOOSTED, out now on 29 Speedway, is a collaborative album and malevolent viral entity conjured through the combined effort of Brooklyn-based behemoths MURDERPACT and global data sorcerer TRNGS.
Meeting online in 2018 and sharing a few stages in 2019, the dawn of 2020 found these three musicians employed at the same venue and presented with an opportunity; the venue’s brief sponsorship by Red Bull. This granted the trio a full day of recording time at NYC’s Red Bull Studios to produce music for some sort of venue-curated series.
The studio session actually happened, yielding hours of high fidelity recordings; dense electroacoustic improvisations; ancient-alien ritual beats and futuristic power jazz. BOOSTED falls somewhere between Autechre, Miles Davis' Electric Band and Boredoms, divided into three BPM’s; 140, 160, and 180.
However, weeks later a pandemic gripped the planet. The venue closed, the trio quarantined, Red Bull’s music program was shelved and its studio shuttered forever. The trio retained the recordings and immediately set out to sculpt something far greater and stranger from the sludge. In the intervening four years, audio from the session was sent back and forth across the globe, rearranged, mixed, remixed, chopped, looped, layered, broken into stems, and reassembled to create BOOSTED.
The album is available as a digital download and in the form of a possessed flash drive spawning a tightly orchestrated and visually punishing piece of malware that arrests control of the user's desktop for the album's duration.
Designed by artist Mark Fingerhut, the software incorporates images of insects, cars, cosmic entities, natural anomalies and linguistic symbols are streamed to the user in rapid succession, while computer windows, error messages, notepad windows and loading bars dance across the desktop in lockstep with the thematic movements of the music.
The result is a brutal software experience whose classification lives somewhere between a music video, a game, a drug, and a visualizer. At the end, the three audio files are deposited onto the user's desktop, along with some illustraions from designer Brian Mark.
Production: Hampton Albert, John Bemis, Christian Cahill
Mixing / Mastering: Ben Shirken
Software: Mark Fingerhut
Artwork and USB design: Brian Mark
