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Anthony Manning

Anthony Manning - Islets In The Pink Polypropylene (Mental Groove Records)

£24.99

RELEASED: 4th June 2021
Black Vinyl LP Half Speed

Format:  Black Vinyl LP (Half Speed Mastering)
Cat No:  MG132

Amazing and legendary 1994 album on the equally amazing and legendary Irdial Disc label, remastered at Emil Berliner Studios in half speed mastering

"Before IDM became a nation of Aphex and Autechre cosplayers, the genre was less defined by aesthetics than by a shared ideology. Here was a loosely connected axis of post-rave kids, united by little more than a shared willingness to subvert the tools of their techno idols and create sounds that hadn't previously been imagined. No record of the era better embodies this find-a-machine-and-freak-it ethos than Islets in Pink Polypropylene, the otherworldly debut by British producer Anthony Manning." Pitchfork

Anthony Manning says:
"The whole album was composed and realized on the Roland R8 drum machine. It followed the same process as the Elastic Variations pieces, with the major addition of many, many hours of editing. Each piece was composed as a series of patterns, of varying lengths ( 5,6,7 bars long ). The stock R8 sounds were embellished with one of several ROM sound library cards ( mostly the Dance card, number 10 ).
These patterns were created by tapping out a rhythm, then, in real time, using the Pitch slider as the pattern looped, to create improvised melodies for each of the pattern's voices. The rough version of each piece was built by stitching the patterns together as a song, listening to each addition over and over, to make sure the melodies flowed into each other in a vaguely coherent manner.
The entire process took many weeks per piece. Weeks of doing almost nothing else. Listening. Re-drawing. Re-writing. Listening. Round and round and round. When I could hear the whole thing in my head, from beginning to end, and nothing seemed to jar ( too excessively ), I knew it was done, time to move on.
I imagine it's very similar to the process of stop animation. Your days are filled with painfully tiny incremental changes that seem to be getting nowhere. Then, slowly, a shape, narrative, starts to appear. Then, all of a sudden, somehow, it's done. When all the pieces were complete the R8 was taken into Irdial's studio where some simple effects were added, each voice recorded individually for clarity onto 8-track tape and mastered onto an ex-BBC half-inch tape deck.
Then I slept. And vowed never to do it again."

And the title ?
"Soon after finishing the pieces I happened to read a magazine article about Christo's "Surrounded Islands" installation with the music playing in the background. There was something about a particular cluster of words within a random sentence that seemed pleasing and somehow appropriate. "Islets in Pink Polypropylene" seemed to make as much sense as anything else."

TRACKLISTING:

Side A:
1. Untitled
2. Untitled

Side B:
1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled