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.