Modular and the Power of Suggestion

I stumbled across Modular in the artist recommendation area of Bandcamp one evening while doing the menial but necessary tasks associated with being a band director. Although it was my intention to employ it was background music in my office, it immediately resonated beyond this function. Rather than take note to further vet the album at a later time (as I ususally would), I ended up streaming it in its entirety several times throughout the evening.  It seemed to capture all the epic post-rock grandeur of Tortoise’s best work while paradoxically remaining as intimate as a jazz trio recording. The room seemed to feel empty without it and nothing else really came to mind that could effectively follow it up. 



By the time I was ready to head home, I was sold. I was eager to get Modular in regular rotation, but I was disappointed to find, as is increasingly the case these days, that the album was not available in a CD pressing. Not to be dissuaded by lack of access to my preferred format, I purchased the MP3 album as soon as I got home and in the weeks to follow Modular came to be standard evening music in the household.

I heard a curious balance between improvisation and composition throughout the album that urged me to look deeper into the album’s inner workings. Normally, this would mean combing through the CD liner notes, looking for recording and performance clues. Most MP3 albums are sadly lacking in this regard, but Modular came with a 36 page interactive PDF that implied the album’s scope was much broader than I had suspected.

These “soft” liner notes suggested that Modular was informed by a meticulous data gathering system that used movements of clouds, tectonic activity, water currents, and other natural phenomena. This data was gathered by six analog sound components, each specifically designed to process information from aspects of a given environment. Each track on Modular was somehow based on the data gathered from nature. Beautiful pictures of these components in their respective settings and graphic renderings of acoustic data drove this point home.

I was spellbound by this idea. The components presented in the liner notes seemed functional, and the way in which the data was used added a third dimension to the spectrum of improvisation and composition. There was only one problem:

I could not for the life of me understand how it was done.

I strained my mind's ear with every playing, trying to figure out how the data was being used, but I could account for most of Modular’s sounds within the synergistic musicianship of guitarist Dan Phelps, drummer Matt Chamberlain, and bassist Viktor Krauss.  Were sounds generated from the data and used as backgrounds? Was it used as an organizing principle for the compositions and improvisations? Were there subtle envelope filters draped over the performances informed by the data? Was it in the guitar effects? Was it in the melodic material? The possibilities were endless, and my inability to suss out the truth was maddening.

Finally, after several months, my curiosity got the better of me. I actually contacted Phelps through e-mail and asked him directly how he used the data that he had gathered. He replied in a timely manner and apologetically admitted the “scandalous truth:” the entire data collection aspect of Modular was a fabrication of the graphics team of Nate Manny and Gabe Kerbrat. Although that made more sense than any of the outlandish methods that I had imagined, I was still quietly crushed. I really wanted to believe in the potentials in the proposed Modular method, and I truly felt like the pieces painted a compelling picture of the environments to which they referred.

I was not the only one that felt this. While I was still questioning how much my impressions were informed by the liner notes, my wife picked the track Constellation for her performance art installation. In its earliest iteration, this performance was to take place outside under the stars, and she picked the song out from a lineup of contenders because of a connection she heard with this setting.  Weather restrictions ultimately forced it into our garage, but the change of venue did not constrain the track’s suggestion of the night sky’s vast openness.



Despite having a more conventional creative process than I envisioned, Modular still succeeds at capturing something essential about the natural environments that inspired its concept.  I am left to wonder, however, if this perception is irrevocably influenced by my struggles to decode its "mythos."  As of this writing, I am unsure if the concept drove the music or the music allowed the concept to emerge.  Only Phelps, Chamberlain, and Krauss can really answer this conundrum with any authority.  In either case, the album has survived intense scrutiny and still never fails to engage my attention in terms of both musicianship and concept.  My investigation of and experience with the album caused Modular to emerge as an absolute favorite listen this year.