Ben Carey Shares ‘State of Latency’ Video from New Album ‘INVENTIONS’
Ben Carey has shared a new video for ‘State of Latency,’ taken from his forthcoming album ‘INVENTIONS,’ out September 14th via Hospital Hill.
Carey spent two years gathering material for the record, working with analogue synthesisers, tape machines, laboratory electronics and other equipment across studios in Sydney, Melbourne, Stockholm, Den Bosch and New York. He seems less interested in using those machines in the usual way, and more in seeing what happens when he pushes them somewhere unexpected and lets things get a little unpredictable. You can hear that in ‘State of Latency,’ which develops slowly, almost as though the piece is assembling itself while you listen. Small electrical movements gather and fall away, details come into focus and then disappear again, and there is always a sense that something else might emerge from the system. The video by Rachel Peachey and Paul Mosig follows the same instinct. Carey gave them the album, some background on the ideas behind it, and then left them to interpret the music as they wished.
They responded with volcanic landscapes, atmosphere, electrical and plasma phenomena, and moths disoriented by a false moon. More unusually, the editing itself is determined by audio analysis, moving through six sequences before eventually returning to a state of latency.
Peachey & Mosig explain: “We approached the composition structure of the video as a dynamic system. The imagery is composed of volcanic landscapes, atmosphere, electrical and plasma phenomena and moths disoriented by a false moon. The editing sequence is determined entirely by audio analysis and moves through six sequences before returning to a state of latency.”
It works beautifully with Carey’s music, partly because the images never seem to be explaining it. They flicker between natural and electronic forms while the track continues underneath, shifting, accumulating and occasionally seeming to dissolve back into itself.
There is an idea from Gilbert Simondon running behind ‘INVENTIONS,’ particularly his writing about invention as something closer to growth than the simple execution of a predetermined plan. Carey doesn’t turn that into theory for theory’s sake; on the record it becomes something quite practical, a way of listening to what a machine is already doing and following it somewhere unexpected.
‘State of Latency’ may be the clearest example of that approach, music suspended somewhere between control and discovery, with a video that understands the same thing without trying too hard to tell us what it means.
Headline photo: Tamás Molnár
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