'>:) / Hextape [Premiere]
Local label Powertrip proudly presents >:) (‘angry smiley’) the latest offering from award-winning artist, Hextape. The album blurb reads, this ‘concept album … [is] directly inspired by the solo rave-like experience of an MRI machine’.
*Speaker crackle* Hello… Attention, rider! The MRI will be commencing shortly. Please change into the gown that has been provided and leave all electronic devices in the allocated lockers. Once you’ve entered the tube please remain still until the MRI has completely stopped. At certain points throughout your ride the MRI will reach a volume of 130 decibels - if this is of concern to you, please ask a member of our friendly team for noise cancelling headphones… while this will not eliminate the noises created by the MRI entirely, it will help to ensure a more enjoyable experience. *Crackle* the MRI is about to begin. Lay back and try to relax… You’re listening to MRI radio.
We feel like a dog with two tails at Verve to have the honour of premiering the second track on Hextape’s new release >:). ‘Acieed (in the brain)’ is such a brilliant rave track that Naarm music community will need to make a concerted effort not to overplay it. This track in particular bottles the irreverent, playful, boisterous energy of the album - in the first 30 seconds the salient siren-like synth repeats a few times before being modulated in the most hilarious way imaginable. Bridget (Hextape) then ditches that element entirely and embarks on a completely new uproarious polyphonic section. And on it goes, each new section highlighting not only to Bridget’s expertise as a producer but to their wit as well.
I have never had an MRI myself, but friends have described the experience to me through a great number of onomatopoeic words, these include whirring, buzzing, clanking, clunking, whooshing, chattering, and many more. One friend said, ‘I tried to lean into the rhythm to help the time past’, - a sentiment that is amplified in Bridget’s advice: the secret to an MRI is to ‘submit to the machine!’
If you are a stranger to Powertrip but this release has piqued your interest, then before you go in, I would offer similar advice – submit to the album.
I would suggest treating this album in the same way you treat an MRI, do not stagger it out or interrupt it – listen to >:) from start to finish. Not everyone will find this experience entirely comfortable, but like an MRI it will be of benefit if you manage to do so.
But this album encourages a one-sitting listen without any help from me. Very early on in the works >:) establishes the listener/album relationship dynamic – the album is a steep, jagged hill and you are a white-knuckled passenger on a bike with faulty brakes—do your best to hold on for 35 minutes and be sure to check out the exquisite views along the way.
Invented by medical practitioner and physician Raymond Damadian, the first MRI body scan took place in 1977. At the time of its inception, it was referred to as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI) but the “Nuclear” was subsequently dropped as to avoid negative associations – I doubt it could bear any more negative associations.
Before we go any further, here is my understanding of why the machine is creating such a godawful racket: there are three kinds of magnets inside an MRI, the superconducting magnet, the gradient coils, and body coils. When electronic pulses pass through the gradient coils it results in a secondary magnetic field. The changes in the magnetic fields are used to push the water molecules in our body out of position and then they quickly move back to their original place – the energy that is released during this process can be measured and translated into an image. These electrical pulses that are used to create these desired changes in the magnetic field cause vibrations in the gradient coils that result in the loud banging noises.
For >:) Bridget has both dipped into their bag of field recording and has gone to great difficulty to collect Zoom recordings of MRIs in action (not an easy task, bearing in mind that the radiofrequencies caused by the MRI interfere with Zooms).
“Taken during my time at the Melbourne Brain Centre, which formed the basis of this work”
As well as this, by way of synth hardware, Bridget has used a MS20 and Microkorg, and a Minilogue rather sparingly. I don’t pretend to know anything about synths, but it seems that essentially sounds are produced when changes are made to electronic signals. Which is basically the same reason why an MRI produces noise – I wonder if Bridget is the first to look at an MRI and think, ‘I bet that massive white tube would make a great drum machine’.
“I would categorise the MRI scanner as a percussion instrument. There are also hundreds of different sequences they can run so there’s a big range of what you can hear”
In this sense, and perhaps in the broadest definition of the word, >:) can be considered a metatextual work. And if you are willing to go digging the intertextual (if raves and albums can be considered texts) commentary is endless – as one example, though raves are not necessarily synonymous with drugs it would be fair to say that they often go hand-in-hand – many of these said drugs have a particular propensity to create out-of-body experiences. By a similar token Bridget speaks to the disembodied feeling of looking at the pictures of inside your own body that the MRI generates.
“The real union of the inside, outside, mental and spiritual, to me, is the motionless dance you do in the machine”
In the camp of more obvious rave/album parallels Bridget says:
“You may have to get to the other side of town at a strange hour – again, if it’s bulk-billed they’ll probably give you the first or last session of the day which could be 9pm or 5am (is this starting to sound as convoluted as directions to a rave?).”
Everyone I spoke to was unanimous in the opinion that an MRI is not an experience that you’d easily forget – in fact, it seems there is nothing quite like it. I mean… it's not every day we are forced to lie completely still for up to an hour, entombed in a massive machine that is whirring and clanging at roughly the same volume of a jackhammer, all the while panicked by the thought of what bodily issues the machine might diagnose.
“Whatever reason that lands you in the tube, it’s probably stressful. So, they feel like a kind of siren song, music you only hear under duress. Luckily, I’m not claustrophobic, maybe just desensitised from years of urbex”
Those who were not claustrophobic said the most difficult part was remaining still. A collective problem that has only ever become more pronounced throughout the decades. Consider for a moment that the average shot length in a movie from the 1930s was about 12 seconds –the present day average is 2.5 seconds. Our attention spans are getting shorter – we are becoming more fidgety and restless. As the Instagram account Reductress muses, ‘Woman listens to guided mediation on 1.75x speed’. In our fast-paced society it is hard to sit quietly for 10 minutes on a good day, how can people find the mental fortitude to endure an MRI for up to an hour under such undesirable circumstances?
“The surround sound is a major factor – I remember my eyes darting around as I obediently held my head and body still, looking for the speakers, and – haha – its dawning on me that the sound isn’t coming from speakers, but from the machine and its giant magnet interacting with my own organs”
One friend I spoke with said:
“It felt empowering making the choice to not listen to music – I wanted to remember the moment clearly … the sounds aren’t scary, but they are really loud, it sounds like someone is smashing a metal pipe against a door or something - there are all kinds of weird screeches and clangs. Weirdly, I found it kind of relaxing, but I know they scare the shit out of young children. The sounds are so erratic and random, and there are lots of sounds that don’t repeat twice – there is something interesting about that, because every time you hear a new noise, you think, ‘holy shit, is that a part of the machine that hasn’t switched on until now?”
In a similar vein, there are a number of sounds in >:) that are not repeated – and to bolster this notion, almost every song pulls from a completely different genre. It took me longer than I would care to admit, to realise that the variety of genres is technique that Bridget uses to emulates the erratic and random nature of the MRI. The genres that are drawn from include, jungle, hip-hop, techno, noise, classical, elements from rave and hard style, and much to my delight—having just discovered RP Boo this year—footwork.
Whenever I review an album, I usually start by looking for musical motifs, but among such an eclectic assemblage of unrepeated elements these motifs can be hard to find… some of the more obvious motifs are the use of call and response.
“I was treating these scans as an oral recitation that I had to commit to memory for my own rendition of it in the weeks to follow (when I’d sit down with a synth, cello, and laptop, to recreate the sounds and the emotions of a scan) and really wanted to remember the specific melodies and rhythms of the scans … I played with that idea a bit in the composition, especially the cello tracks where I’m treating the scanner as a duet partner”
… and the witty MRI radio gag, where an unknown radio host occasionally chimes in throughout the album with comments like, ‘you’re tuned into to MRI Classic FM’.
“Since making this album though, people have told me about their own MRIs and how the radio has entered that other world of the MRI too, which is what actually got me weaving that into the album, imagining radio stations that only exist inside the machine’s radiofrequency field … I wanted to capture the fleeting excitement of the experience – like you’re attending a very exclusive rave for one, full of secret radio stations and silly 90s cartoon and rap samples (back when your body felt limitless) and ghosts in the machine, and afterwards you’ll wonder whether it really happened or not.’”
Another motif is of the album is Bridget’s instrument the cello – a truly remarkable instrument. The cello has an enormous range (see Verdi’s Requiem: Offertorio) and interestingly, is said to be the most typical of the range of the human voice. The cello is capable of creating a stressful timbre like the violin but being in a lower register it lacks some of the shrillness – thus, creating similar frightening urgency, but with slightly more brooding and moody undertones.
It is perhaps through cinema association that I draw these conclusions, but I believe that of all the instruments in the orchestral pit the strings section has the widest range on the continuum of soothing to stressful. We know horn and woodwind instruments can sound incredibly soothing but down the other end they can only hope to accomplish eerie at best – something in the timbre is too breathy for it be properly jarring. The strings section on the other hand, well… we only have to look as far as Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho (theme) to see how frightening stringed instruments can be.
Cello strings were once made from the guts of goat and sheep – isn’t that a hauntingly visceral image (literally)… if Bridget’s previous album covers are anything to go by (featuring hell hounds a such) perhaps the image of a three-eyed caprine-like monster, playing a bloodied cello might be an idea for cover art?
I realise all this tells you a lot about MRIs and cellos and not very much about the album, but that is partially by design. Hopefully, there is enough here to intrigue you to listen… The production is of such high quality, the cello playing is of such high quality, and the ideas are of such high quality - I can assure you there is nothing else quite like it. . The album release is happening in Naarm this coming Friday at a location that is yet to be disclosed – keep your ear to the ground.
This album was produced on Wurundjeri and Gadabanud land.
Stay up to date with Hextape on Instagram, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp.
Words by Jack Long (@patrick.di_henning)
Photos by Chelsea Farquhar (@chelseafarquhar_)
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