On their forthcoming self-released EP Sun Cycle, experimental producers Tendryl and Lockbox approach collaboration through the lens of cybernetics, employing editing techniques that function to re-structure the perceptual impression of their music. The two artists originally connected last year through the NYC rave scene and bonded over their mutual love for IDM, breakcore, ambient and hardcore-leaning styles. Listening to their respective solo work, one can hear how these genres have been compounded in their music, albeit in distinct ways: Lockbox’s Neo Druid is an amalgam of mutated synths, esoteric sampling and off-kilter drum programming while Tendryl’s Knaves is an exercise in club music dynamics with a dystopian edge.
The overlap between the two producers’ sonic aesthetics also extends into their theoretical principles. They both cite Brian Eno’s Generating and Organizing Variety and Kim Cascone’s The Aesthetics of Failure as influences on their creative process with Sun Cycle. These are both texts that explore the ways in which contingency, environmental adaptation and technological error play a role in the creation of music.
On the “Sunbeam” edit of “Sunburn,” we hear Lockbox warp the stems of the original, transfiguring a techno pulse into vaporized rave. The edit stimulates the senses like a psychoactive drug, effectively enhancing the original track’s trippy tendencies. In the context of the record, the ‘Sunbeam’ edit functions to re-construct the listener’s perception of the music’s organizational framework. Like the post-digital innovators before them, Lockbox and Tendryl indulge the variables inherent in technology and embrace collaboration as an open-ended process, revealing a multiplicity of potentialities in their music.
Sun Cycle will be self-released this Saturday, May 2. Pre-order it here.