Source Massive is so named because the music consists entirely of patches for the synthesiser plugin ‘Massive’ by Native Instruments. Massive is decades old at this point. In its heyday in the early 2010s it was a favourite of bass music producers; at the age of about fifteen, in 2011 or so, it was the first plugin I ever pirated on my own. Here it is the basis of everything: all of the music derives from patches written in Massive and performed live. There are no samples, and when various effects external to Massive are used they are only ever applied as muscles and skin to the skeleton of the sound sequenced and performed in Massive itself.
In the late 2010s, during a dual obsession with John Cage and Autechre, I had the idea to write a set of autonomous patches that would play themselves live. The compromise between autonomous music and the composer’s or performer’s input in Cage was particularly important to me, and certain (probable) misconceptions I had about the way that Autechre’s live music was being performed led me to the idea of using Massive as the total basis of all of the sound. The strength of the concept, for me, was that music derived entirely from the same synth could be animated both by my own tastes and by the more inevitable logic of the software itself. All the sounds would be commensurable with each other; the division between the horizontal development of compositions and the vertical particulars of sound design could be blurred; LFOs within the patches themselves could be sequenced and then set in motion to make something that sounded utterly synthetic but behaved strangely biologically.
I hope something of that vision remains in the three live performances collected here. I found during my time writing Source Massive that I did not have the technical knowledge to build a completely self-organising live music system; but this was a happy accident as I discovered also that I did not want to be excluded from the process of actually improvising with these compositions. Sneinton, Nivôse was recorded on the 3rd of January, Colwick, Ventôse was recorded on the 13th of March, and Nine Ladies, Prairial was recorded on the 24th of May.
The decision to include three short sets instead of one longer one was influenced by the massive corpus of live recordings that Autechre released over the last decade—and indeed they are the biggest influence on the sound itself as well—but much of the structure and pace of this work was also influenced by the ‘electric’ period of Miles Davis. There is a strong current of neurofunk drum and bass in these tracks, for which I am particularly indebted to the work of Noisia, Billain, and Gyrofield. In my sonic palette I also draw heavily from techno and UK bass music, so I want to express my gratitude to Jeff Mills, Regis, Randomer, Clouds, Blawan, Mala and Coki. John Cage’s guidance hovers over everything, but certain specific sequences would not have been possible without some studies of Sunn O))), Coil, Ricardo Villalobos, and Vladislav Delay. Finally, thank you to Magda, Emmett, Alex, and Erin for help offered in the logistics of performance.