Hieroglyphic Being - Quadric Surfaces

A Closer Listen

A focused light leads our gaze towards a world of colored patterns and moving shapes, as if we were looking through a microscope. The immensity of the fragment comes into view, a vibrant macro-choreography of infinitely small dimensions intertwined. New perspectives are revealed as our point of view shifts, highlighting, through plasticine and manual cinematic montages, the topological quality of point and plane. Simultaneously, synthesized sounds build up industrialized house rhythms, only to turn into uncertain patterns of electronic blips that open up like free jazz interactions, later condensing into space ambiences rooted in modernist electronic music. The images come from two short films made by Venezuelan visual artist Gabriela González Rondón, which lead our eyes effectively through the transformation of surface into figure, of figure into line, of line into light. The sounds are by Hieroglyphic Being, a long-time veteran of the US dance and electronic music scene, who deploys synthesized bits and pieces into abstractions that ultimately aim to integrate the gaze and the listening ear.

Entitled Parallel Spheres and Figures in Mynd, the videos emphasize an esoteric quality to the relationship between shapes, underlining that topological potential in which an object is understood as pure geometry, subjected to an endless number of deformations to the point of changing into another object altogether, but always in terms of continuity, not rupture or difference. The direct manipulation of images, film, and the use of stop-motion techniques let viewers clearly see González Rondón’s handiwork while figures flow into backgrounds, backgrounds into each other, and then back into figures once again. The eerily indistinct patterns of it all sometimes evoke symbols, sacred geometries, hidden connections articulated by a creator’s digits. They all suggest a meaningful context collapse where the distinction between analog and digital is that of the fragment and the whole, of vertiginously finding the universe in a waterdrop, continuity in discontinuity, an artificial signal within a natural one.

This gives sense to HB’s soundtrack being recompiled as an album called Quadric Surfaces. After all, quadric surfaces are algebraic planes with a certain kind of elasticity, a pliability that pushes notions of spatial continuity to certain limits. The artist’s interest in science is well-known, having referred to house music as an academic discipline, understood as a branch of mathematics, in the past. Mathematics is also the name of the record label under his care, implicitly proposing every new venture as a research project; in the case of Quadric Surfaces, it is conceivably an exploration of topological transformations, with most tracks named after geometrical spatial objects. While as an audiovisual artwork the sounds seem to track onto the images as aesthetic, topological parasites that uneasily follow a parallel path, as an album they suggest that their relationships are to be understood physically, as the interactive aural shapes and volumes of signals.

Last I knew, HB never fully changed his gear to “match” our times – his work is based almost entirely on synth stations, drum machines, and various other devices from the 1980s and 90s, when he first started making music. The only digital part of the entire kit is an iPhone loaded with sound modulating apps. His experimental, modernist ethos follows not the grand declarations of technological progress, but the quieter, almost silent affirmations of those for whom modernity is not embodied by the spaceship, but the bus, not a satellite, but an app. In the same way that global south scientists from public institutions contribute cutting-edge knowledge to the world with 50-year old equipment, HB produces unique sounds precisely from that context-collapse between the analog and digital, the continuity of things that have nonetheless changed. Quadric Surfaces is full to the brim of these sorts of experiments, in which a group of clean, sharp sounds converge into a beat, their evident analog quality in full display, only for their synth beeps to be deformed into drone noises that feel like continuous interruptions, like unfinished sounds. In this they are comparable to the video’s plasticine and its manual montages giving an artificial mechanical impression of its making, all these “cold” electronic sounds coming together seemingly on their own, but then evidently given “warm” shape by a demiurge.

As volumes and forms, these sounds push and pull into certain genres, but in their topological interactions they come to deconstruct identifiable beats and conventions. Beginning with “Quadric Surfaces”, the first track, there is something of the 90s and 2000s house music with which the artist grew up and directly participated in, with a danceable, near-industrial rhythm stretching eventually into an ambient, diffuse beat. This sort of deformation and transformation is the process to which all of these sounds are subjected, and while the surface might seem difficult to identify to the point of unknowability, the background to which its form is tied is always signaling that in fact, you probably know this shape from somewhere: house, industrial, noise, ambient, even free jazz. If we follow HB’s ideas and history, it’s easier to see the bases of this research field (in which all these genres turn into each other not by means of transitions from one convention to another but by geometric interactions between sounds) in the basic principles of dance. After all, dance and dance music throw shapes into disarray – movement as the source of spatial relationships between objects, the organic unity of the body extended, deformed into new and innovative geometries. The transitions between sounds mirror the transitions between moments within a dance session, not in terms of narratives and musical conventions, but of (mathematical) abstractions. Thus HB’s music collapses different times and places of dance musics, types of sounds, and genres, all as part of an experimental practice rooted in more academic views of research, particularly as scientific inquiry into forms.

HB’s production might seem straightforward, even vintage, but it is important to consider it under the light of a long history of thinking with electronic music; his work opens up a wormhole from Cairo to Darmstadt to Chicago (with a long list of in-between cities and times), a quantum map in which the territory of house music is also that of experimental electroacoustics, in which the field of avant-garde ideas of the late 1940s turn into the field of underground club party techniques of the 1990s when one adopts a slightly different perspective. In that collapse of long and short durations a mystery arises, a cosmic viewpoint that elicits the symbolic, plunging, through scientific ways of thinking, straight into the realm of the esoteric. As González Rondón’s figures dance themselves into an ecstasy of colors and sigils, it is hard not to think that all those images were not made to be seen, but listened to, opening up a gazing ear. (David Murrieta Flores)