#mrdougdoug

I never played video games much but I’ve always been a sucker for the music, and especially for interpretations of that music. For me an Advantage album is way more addicting than any of the games its songs were taken from. What’s more addicting than either, though, is a record that sounds like it’s fucking with video game music - mimicking it, swallowing it, regurgitating it, anything that sounds more like a damaged video game than a regular video game that’s damaging my hands.

On his new tape, MrDougDoug - aka Doug Kaplan of the great Goodwillsmith and the also great Hausu Mountain - doesn’t actually fuck with video games, but with MIDI files of pop music. It’s more like an 8-bit John Oswald album than a dirt-filled Nintendo cartridge. But the result sounds like fucked-up video games, in ways that go past addicting and into the realm of the truly brain-addling. There’s so much shock and jolt and psychotic cutting and brutal repetition on SOS Forks AI REM that every track chops my grey matter into gruel. I mean that to reflect a pleasurable experience - if this is how my sanity is going to finally be diced and pureed, I'll take it.

– Marc Masters

DOUG KAPLAN on SOS Forks AI REM

Last Fall, I started a MFA program in sound at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Up until that point, I had almost exclusively worked in collaborative settings with Good Willsmith, The Big Ship, and The Earth is a Man — all of which are/were highly democratic ensembles. Stepping out on my own for the first time in a while, I’ve been working on albums that use the overabundance of the Internet as both source material and conceptual fodder.

The earliest phases of SOS Forks AI REM began with an old Disklavier we have at school: a piano that can be controlled by MIDI. Around the same time I started messing with the machine, Max – my BFF, constant collaborator, roommate, & the other ½ of Hausu Mountain – showed me a massive ZIP file on the Internet Archive featuring every MIDI file that appeared on people’s personal Geocities websites. At first, I was taking versions of metal hits like “Crazy Train”, “Nookie”, and “Freak on a Leash” and feeding them into the piano at insanely fast or slow tempos. Though this Nancarrow-esque excursion was fun, I quickly grew tired with the limited tonal palette of the out-of-tune piano.

I began working with the MIDI files in more traditional ways in Logic: keeping the files intact while dramatically altering tempos, and using Logic’s software instruments to make the most skewed sounds I could. Soon after making this decision, I had a vivid dream in which I was ambling through a bombed-out, dystopian future, “District 9” type of zone. I observed children holding their palms to their ears. As I got closer, I discovered that they were listening to music out of tiny speakers embedded into a single pore. The music was a distorted EDM lullaby, peaking at every note due to the miniature speakers. The dream led me to question the evolving ways in which we consume music: If speakers continue to shrink and if files continue to get louder and louder, what will future listening environments be like? I wanted to use material from the past – the MIDI files of popular music – to present one possible future.