Gavin Russom - Telemetry

A new epic from the powerhouse synth musician, where everything changes and nothing does.

Gavin Russom's interests lie in the ecstatic qualities of repetition. He's had many occupations over the years – playing in the LCD Soundsystem live band, producing as Black Meteoric Star, collaborating with artists like Delia Gonzalez (as Gavin & Delia) and Viva Ruiz (as The Crystal Ark) – and they've all tended to explore this same subject matter, but exploring it using different musical forms. If you need a primer on his work, just head here.

His latest track, Telemetry, is a solo release under his own name and sounds like I Feel Love made for a nuclear winter, where across its 11-minute running time everything changes, yet nothing does. While many of his previous tracks have landed on DFA, this one comes on Entropy Trax, a sister label to the aptly-titled Ecstatic Recordings.

Says Russom about the track: "This came out of some deep digging into the abilities of one of my self-designed analog processors. I was demonstrating to someone how a second layer of filtering can turn a simple 16-step sequence into an evolving line which seems to never quite repeat the same way, sequences that don't strictly repeat but rather seem to have a life of their own that expands as their more rudimentary parts lock into repetitive motion… I built a track around it by building up layers around the central sequence that grow in impact as the track unfolds."

"The title 'Telemetry' sums up a nice connection between the machine and the body, as often it is used to track or monitor living creatures from distance. It also functions like a metaphor for what happens in a club as a DJ or musician uses the technological medium to bridge the distance between his own inner rhythms and those of the others, at a distance on the dance floor. Or at least that's how it works for me."