Digital release of Frame Drag cassette originally released by Los Discos Enfantasmes (now sold out).

Frame Drag is a record that explores many ideas, but the overarching theme of the record is the deliberate warping and manipulation of listener's sense of space-time, without completely fragmenting the music or sacrificing the sense of a rhythmic groove. The album treats the rigid grids often found in electronic music as elastic and malleable. Many of the tracks on Frame Drag were built on a deliberately warped and uneven grids. These uneven grids were deliberately designed to speed up and slow down the drum beats, samples, and recordings of live musicians, like a topographic map that distorts what it tries to represent. Space-time was also manipulated through the use of fluid and unstable reverbs and other types of processing and filtering. When I was making Frame Drag I was also channelling a lot of different musical influences, including hip hop, idm, footwork, noise, contemporary classical and various forms of jazz and improvisation. It was important to me that the record be an amalgam of several styles, and have a accessible aspects to it, familiar things with which I could draw listeners in, but also a more unfamiliar element that would contrast with, and sometimes merge, in a mutually disfiguring way, with the more accessible elements. Frame Drag also owes something to philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson, especially notions of time as being as fluid and continuous, rather than mechanical and discontinuous.


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Reviews:

"The latest batch of new tapes from Montreal’s Los Discos Enfantasmes revels in a brand of glorious weirdness. Fortunately, the uncanny sounds emanating from the cassettes are as infectious as they are obtuse, begging for multiple investigations from our questing auditory organs. Frame Drag, the latest release from Vancouver-via-Ontario
mixed media artist Ross Birdwise (formerly of If Then Do and currently a member of the Vancouver Electronics Ensemble), is an otherworldly exercise in syncopation within the framework of electronic music. Birdwise tugs at the rigid grid that most beat-based electronic music rides atop, twisting it to deformity without ever fracturing it entirely. The resultant music is a mutant sibling to the hip hop sub-genre known as
“chopped and screwed,” with beats appearing and disappearing in divergent, nearly random patterns. Disembodied voices waft in and out of focus, while a lone horn bleats out lonely melodies and violins swoop in like hungry seagulls. As strange as this sounds, the music is incredibly listenable, almost frighteningly so. I have not been able to pull
myself away from these otherworldly compositions, trapped as I am in the world of Ross Birdwise."

- Bryon Hayes (in Secret Decoder)


"Allow yourself to enter the melting pot that is Frame Drag — not only a series of electronic tracks, but more importantly an experience. The individual tracks are seemingly meaningless in the fluidity of the large experience that is the entire sound of the record. The transition between tracks seems at points almost aggressive, leaving you disturbed, yet hungry for more.

This composition certainly takes inspiration from hip-hop, jazz among other genres as made evident by the sporadic trumpet sounds, spliced vocals, and snare hits. It gives the record the ability to continually surprise and keep you on your feet.

Right when you think the arrangement has reached a ceaseless flow, you’re whirled into a different oratory journey just as mismatched and chaotic as its predecessor. It’s also important to note that Birdwise brings a fresh approach to time and rhythm that heightens the surreal and frenzied stream that is Frame Drag.

While ranging from simple synth sounds accompanied with soothing vocals to a fusion of samples from police sirens, snare hits, jingles, barking dogs, muted horns, and so much more, Ross Birdwise truly creates a beautiful mess with this record.

Frame Drag mirrors no rational journey, splicing sounds from almost every genre, keeping the listener entranced in a lovely disordered medley."

-Ibrahim Itani (in Discorder)

www.citr.ca/discorder/march-2014/ross-birdwise/

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