AQAXA ‘Corporeal EP’

Available formats: Streaming, Digital download [PUNCH005], Limited Edition SD card [PUNCH008]

Contact Details:

email Ian & Ed at punchuprecords@gmail.com

Turning Memories into Music

AQAXA harvested sounds from audio messages, voice memos, and videos filmed while travelling. These form an archive of sonic memories that AQAXA explores aided by AI algorithms. Together with other means of electronic music production, these personal sounds are broken into pieces and recomposed. A process of music making as well as a way of remembering.

Physical release

AQAXA's 'Corporeal EP' will be made available in the form of a very limited edition SD card, in a beautifully designed, hand-numbered Digipak. (https://aqaxa.bandcamp.com/releases)

This continues AQAXA's form for exploring new ways of mixing technology and music. From the creation and production process right through to the relationship between creator and audience, AQAXA prefers to explore new ways of doing things.

The SD card will contain:

- All songs from Corporeal EP in 24bit WAV, 16bit flac, and 320kbps mp3

- A high quality Pro-Res file of the official video for Xennial Sehnsucht

- 4 pieces of EP artwork (TIFF)

- 1 artist press shot (TIFF)

- Extended liner notes (PDF)

- A unique 1 second fragment of the original 26 second audiovisual 'memory' that was the genesis of, and features in, 'Knee-jerk Drifter'.

The use of its personal audio/visual 'memories' is fundamental to the creation of AQAXA's music, therefore this represents an opportunity for fans to not only own the EP itself, but an essential building block too. This is similar to an artist giving fans an isolated vocal track or instrument from a normal release, except this is a memory from AQAXA's personal life, and its release thus represents a new aspect to the artist-audience relationship.

The SD cards will be in a limited run of 26. They will cost £26 each, and will be shipped on or around the 26th June 2021.

NFT

AQAXA minted an NFT for one of the audio/visual memories on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that this digital memory has been made unique and will be put on sale. The buyer will, supposedly, be the sole “owner” of this ephemeral trace. It can be found here: https://rarible.com/token/0x60f80121c31a0d46b5279700f9df786054aa5ee5:364970:0x550cb6cf00c7182f5a217947e93e488b9a8e8e52

NFT and blockchain technologies are hotly debated topics, with advocates underlining the potential that such decentralised technologies have for giving artists more control on their work compared to centralised systems such as streaming platforms, and critics pointing out the massive amounts of energy required to make these systems work and the resulting considerable impact on the environment.

Minting a personal memory on the blockchain and putting it on sale as a unique item despite its digital – and thus infinitely reproducible – nature is, for AQAXA, also a way to reflect on the concept of ownership and attributed value in an increasingly immaterial reality. The financial value of NFTs and other blockchain tokens is currently extremely volatile. While these technologies offer the promise of decentralising control and distributing power, they are also the subject of wild speculations and come with an increasing environmental cost that might accelerate climate change and contribute to a slow, irreversible extinction process. Similarly, artificial intelligence might bring human creativity and ingenuity to unexplored territories, or exacerbate divisions by introducing bias and making human labour redundant. This extremely polarised precarity is the background for AQAXA’s music.

About AQAXA

> *I was travelling constantly, I guess I was trying to fix something. During that period, I experienced difficulty sleeping, focussing, and I also had troubles with my short term memory. My partner at the time would tell me about things we had done just a few days earlier, and I would find myself in the embarrassing situation of remembering nearly nothing of what she was talking about. Sometimes I even pretended I actually remembered, just to feel less awkward.*

> *You’re not still recording, are you?*

AQAXA weaves audio messages and voice memos recorded over the years into an enveloping, warm, and pulsating kind of electronic music. The exploration of this personal archive is guided by machine learning algorithms, with which AQAXA performs, building new narratives from ephemeral digital remnants of its recent past.

AQAXA found its long lost sibling in Berlin two years ago. Talking wasn’t easy, but it saved them.

AQAXA’s music is explorative, viscerally brutal, and quietly caring. AQAXA places electronic stethoscopes on its body to capture what’s inside. Now that’s truly “introspective.” /s 🙃

AQAXA is just another silent stranger sitting not far from you on public transport, just another face in the dataset used to train the face detection algorithms that tagged you on that photo, is that notification sound you heard but that was coming from someone else’s phone. I wonder what their life is like.

> *Our memories are not linear accumulations of events. What we decide to remember, and what we attempt to forget, shape our personalities. But what happens when we let our machines decide?*

EP Cover Artwork

AQAXA - Corporeal EP - Artwork 3000x3000.jpg

EP Release Notes

> *Your phone reminds you that “you have a new memory.” Algorithms scan your photos and videos, look at their features and metadata, and stitch together a slideshow of events that happened “on this day,” years ago. You are prompted to remember but with diminished agency over the process.*

Corporeal EP – AQAXA’s debut release on Punch Up Records – marshals deep beats, densely layered synthetic and acoustic sounds, and echoes of sonic memories fused into warm sheets of noise. The result is a space that is both introspective and euphoric.

> *Our memories are not linear accumulations of events. What we decide to remember, and what we attempt to forget, shape our personalities. But what happens when we let our machines decide?*

AQAXA · Corporeal EP

Xennial Sehnsucht Video

Official music video for 'Xennial Sehnsucht' by AQAXA, taken from 'Corporeal EP, released on Punch Up Records 23rd April 2021.Stream and Download from Bandca...

Credits

Music: AQAXA

Filming and editing: Tim Grabham (http://www.iloobia.com)

Additional footage: AQAXA

Corporeal EP includes a remix of Xennial Sehnsucht by Frieder Nagel

About Frieder Nagel

Frieder Nagel offers up a mystical world, full of warm synths and detailed sound clusters. He invites his listeners to get lost in an universe that spans from euphoric to devastating excitement. His debut ep Distract Robots (2019 | InFiné Music) was described by XLR8R as an"otherworldly treat tak[ing] the listener down a constantly morphing auditory wormhole full of light, darkness, and cosmic bliss".

Frieder Nagel on remixing AQAXA’s Xennial Sehnsucht:

“It was difficult to choose between all those beautiful sounds ... they are massive and have a super rich sound design. There is something important happening on every frequency.”

What’s Next?

AQAXA has already started devising its next project. For Corporeal EP it took its own recorded memories and used them as source material. Now it wants to open the same process up to anyone, including you.

Anyone who uses Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is already doing this every single day. Every voice memo of that cool idea you woke up with, every email sent to secure a job interview or renew your passport, every photograph of special moments with your family or that sunset you saw on holiday in Thailand - they have that now. They have it, and they use it to profile you, advertise products to you, predict your behaviour and much more. These companies’ stock price is based on one thing - your data.

This is something each one of us does passively every single day of our lives. So why not take control for once? Why not decide what your memories are used for? Why not wrest back some small level of control over your data and your life?

Here’s how it would work: you go to a secure website, and upload a voice memo of whatever you want. It can be a confession, a regret, something you’re grateful for, something you wish for. It could be complete gobbledegook. It could be a lie. It could be a diatribe about someone or something you hate, or a hagiography of something or someone you love. It could be the sound of the street outside your house. It could be the buzz from an overhead powerline, the cry of a bird of prey, or the ocean lapping on a pebble beach. Only you will ever know what it is.

The data will be fed into an AI algorithm that will anonymise, reconfigure and reconstitute all the voice memos in aggregate, and then output new audio. AQAXA will then curate and select samples from this audio that spark its creativity, and use it to make the music for its next release.