Coding, collapse & clarity on r hunter's 'Yield'

“What does it mean to be a formalist today?” poses the listing for Naarm/Melbourne-based producer r Hunter’s ‘Yield’.

For many, questions like this on a Bandcamp listing may serve only as a blur, quickly scrolled past as a heated digging session prioritises a page’s play button and little else. In many ways, it’s in this environment that questions like this become all the more crucial.

‘Yield’, released last year on the Naarm label and sometimes multi-day music event Absorb, sees r hunter, real name Asher Elazary, exploring the space between the intentions and results of electronic music production. Using Supercollider, a platform for algorithmic composition which some people may recognise as being akin to coding, Asher has structured the process of creation in a way that “defer(s) musical decision to a place beyond my own expressive intellect.”

The result is, in many ways, music that sits beyond categorisation. While electronic in its form and in many of its borderline vocal expressions, ‘Yield’ moves at a speed that makes it nearly impossible for the listener to latch onto any one genre-based idea. Moments of ambience are sandwiched between pulsating percussion and grinding subfrequencies, and while a ‘beat’ regularly emerges, it’s often gone before there’s time to properly ‘find’ it.

At a time where creativity has in many ways become more homogenised than ever before, whether in the pedestal-placing ideals of an increasingly clout-controlled culture like dance music, or in the endless replication of art, image, video and sound by artificial intelligence, ‘Yield’ sets itself apart as something as both less human, and more real than the vast majority of what surrounds it.

Now, several months after its release, ‘Yield’ has found a new life in the form of an accompanying work by Naarm-based artist Eek (Henry Lai-Pyne), which combines portions of tracks ‘ark2 (feat. bela) and ‘My Experience’.

The result is an experience that does not seek to provide physical proof of ‘Yield’, but instead to apply its thinking to an entirely new medium. In bringing the video to life, Henry echoes Asher’s position, saying that “Visual media is a language that has never been this accessible, urgent, and ambiguous. It is a huge part of how we communicate and manipulate information.

To coincide with the work’s release, Mixmag ANZ posed a series of questions to both r hunter & Eek to better understand whether placing work like theirs in the context of its surrounds is even necessary.

R HUNTER: Looking back at the trajectory of my own music, I had a bit of a realisation that I had gone into writing every record I had made with a kind of conceptual idea that had ultimately fallen apart – but in that failure is where I found the most emotionally/intellectually/spiritually exciting and resonant music.

My reaction to this was to say, “O.K., what if I went further? What if I made the most severely process-driven modernist music I could think of with the expectation that this fantasy of perfection would collapse?” I think this is actually a very old historical problem in music, that of rules-based vs. vibes-based music, and one that I think is an interesting internal contradiction to explore – one that often turns out to be a false dichotomy in the first place.

R HUNTER: Supercollider is a fantastic program for music composition, but it is also deeply archaic and weird. I don’t think you can ever know how using a tool will mediate your work, but you can always depend on some kind of mediation to occur... SC is endlessly expressive but also endlessly abstract, so I felt that the opacity of some of the software’s design decisions could actually be creatively inspiring to me.

R HUNTER: The main compositional idea that I had was to explore whether there was some way of expressing a sound’s character in relation to where the beat is falling in the musical phrase. Maybe sounds earlier in a sequence tend towards a particular character, and sounds at the end of the sequence can take on some other character. The timbral quality of the rhythmic events can change in response to structural characteristics you’ve defined.

This was something that had been rattling around in my head for a couple of years, and I served to underpin all the sequencing of the album. Whether you can actually hear this technique’s effect is another question entirely, but I found it to be very inspiring.

R HUNTER: It definitely wasn’t an accident. I see beatmaking as a kind of ur-state for many producers. I often come to electronic music with a loosely conceptual approach, but I still love dance music, and I owe a lot to my early years spent with Clams Casino, Waka Flocka Flame and writing rap beats on FL Studio.

R HUNTER: Documenting sound is something I have done for a very long time. I do it when I travel, when I walk around, and I do it just for fun too. It’s a similar practice to photography for me. I also think that, for me, having a digital artistic practice necessitates also having a recording practice where I’m listening to and working with sounds that aren’t ‘on the computer’, even if they end up there eventually; Place is so inextricable from sound that you simply can’t escape being situated, no matter how you’re working with material.

R HUNTER: No idea! Maybe briefly it confirmed the limits of my own musical language, but making any work changes you significantly, in my opinion. So whatever limits and precepts I had have now changed.

R HUNTER: Maybe… that sounds are amazing?

R HUNTER: Logos and pathos are exactly the same, and OTT is king.

EEK: From the get-go, I was convinced on the idea of doing a split (2 track) video, it’s a very interesting format that music videos have seemingly landed on, I believe this seeped into popularity through AAA hip hop videos in the late 90’s, early 2000s. It’s smart, I’m into it–

With the two of Asher’s tracks, I wanted there to be contrast, mainly in pacing and feel. Both tracks offer plenty of space and detail to play with and feature rhythmic fluctuations and arcs, which I felt could be fun to explore in editing. They’re also both moody as fuck, which I love.

EEK: Not entirely in the same sense as Asher. I would say the way I technically approached these videos is quite different to what I usually put out, which is mainly using the hoo-ha of 3D animation and generative visuals. I wanted the direction for this to be grounded in abstractions of collective experience, so I was more interested in processing sourced footage.

EEK: Visual media is a language that has never been this accessible, urgent, and ambiguous. It is a huge part of how we communicate and manipulate information.

EEK: Sure there were, and I’m sure there are simpler ways of presenting the ideas that I had, but I think a specific beauty in the format and meaning of Music Videos is in the welcome for ambiguity and abstraction.

The direction was the first time I really approached sourced footage in this way. Using and manipulating clips with a singular treatment was a decision to collapse all these different scenes into a continued abstraction– taking these experiences out of the world we know and can see.

The second half of the video (My Experience) uses colour filters to define chapters. This technique was popular in the beginnings of modern cinema (1910’s–), so I was interested to include this to balance out what was a very synthetic and corecore approach to image making.

EEK: It was mainly in isolation, with a few shared ideas and prompts rolling around during the early stages! I mean, there is a built mutual trust between myself, Asher, and Kavil– we’ve all been sharing the same spaces for quite some time, so it felt quite natural to connect on this project. I feel really lucky to have been able to run with the vision I had, and it was well-received on the other side.

EEK: I couldn't say. Maybe? And no, with the intention I had for these videos, I don't think it’s necessary– people who view it will impose their own meaning onto it.

-

'Yield' is available for purchase via Absorb's Bandcamp.