Artist and composer ADR (Aaron David Ross) stops by NM on the occasion of his new album, Filter Failure and launch of his label with Gatekeeper partner Matthew Arkell, Legendarium. Reflecting on his past decade of cultural production—see: Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems, Grant Singer’s iconic 2012 cult short, IRL; collaborations with Dis, Kelela, Lafawndah, Mykki Blanco, Ryan Trecartin, Telfar, Korakrit Arunanondchai—ADR discusses how he sees the industry and our sensibilities co-evolving.
LGND001 - Out July 11th 2021 on Legendarium
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FILTER FAILURE Filter Failure is the new album and audiovisual work by composer, producer, and artist Aaron David Ross (ADR). Following his work on the acclaimed Uncut Gems soundtrack and solo releases Deceptionista and Throat on PAN, Filter Failure takes the form of a cinematic song cycle, featuring ten animated tone poems which showcase ADR as both a cybernetic singer-songwriter and as a 3D hobbyist animator.
Filter Failure features ADR as a storyteller-architect-maestro, conducting an exodus across panoramic vistas of his making—landscapes, architectures, and lounges all brimming with iconography that mirror the album’s detailed compositions. Long engaged in a practice of reconstructing the archeology of classical, jazz, pop, and electronic music into new contemporary art & technological contexts, Filter Failure stands apart as a hybrid opus, synthesizing years of ADR’s obsessive genre studies that have spanned over a decade of solo releases and collaborative works.
The eponymous concept of “Filter Failure”—originating from theories around Web 2.0 digital workflows—occurs when our filtration mechanisms rupture from sheer access, resulting in being completely at the whim of the avalanche-feed of information and shifting contexts. As if reveling in the wreckage, Filter Failure is ADR’s most maximalist vision to date: a vibrant amalgam of symphonic wanderlust: ascending pizzicato, riffing drifts of digital wind, epic bacchanals of rhythm and bass. Throughout, ADR’s previously unheard voice is a clairvoyant chorus, remarking on its own fragmented subjectivity—a trace remnant of humanity’s hubristic meltdown now freed to encircle the world as a transcendent RPG protagonist. ADR’s vocals—frayed with layered tonality—ring true as both an evocation and a narrative degeneration of a cherished tradition of sensitive, introspective songwriters.
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‘THROAT’ is the 4th studio solo album by composer/producer Aaron David Ross (ADR). Arriving as the New York artist’s second release on PAN, ‘THROAT’ is made entirely from vocal sounds. It could only be crafted in the ultra-present; an age where the poetry of songwriting is flattened into catchy hooks. As words are sliced into sounds, ideas are reduced to sibilant syllables that still contain a range of emotional power, but deliver it in subversively different ways.
‘THROAT’ exploits these ways, borrowing vocal fragments from everywhere to collage a choral congregation of singing servers; pinging one another to create open-source equal-opportunity electronic pop music. Reichian polyrhythmic EDM drops into Bieber-esque beatboxing. Hypothetical K-pop stars conduct holographic choirs in altruistic ritual. Virtual summer festival DJs transcode into pure phonemes; anthropomorphizing formant-shifted vacuums of communication. When you drop the cargo of making sense, you can go so much faster.
As a classically trained musician inspired equally by pop and contemporary art & technology practices, ADR’s work has distinguished itself through its formal deliriousness and playful tenor. Besides ongoing collaborations with an international community of vocalists, producers, artists and fashion designers, Ross releases solo recordings, composes music for film, TV and advertising, and maintains a practice of live performance and sound installation.
EVERY NODE
"New York-based producer ADR has shared a collage-based new video for "Every Node," off his recently released LP Throat. The clip evokes the experience of scrolling through a Google image search for "mouth," and builds on conceptual questions explored on the new album about the relationship between mediated communication and the voice. Every sound on Throat is a vocal sample of some kind; "Every Node" finds ADR using the technique to produce something that's equal parts funny, gorgeous, and uncanny."