Partials: Jerz

The video was shot and directed by Sean Devaney, a director based in New York City. Set in Northern New Jersey amid sprawling suburbs and autumnal forests, the clip explores surveillance and paranoia in connection to the cultural anxieties emergent from our shared cybernetic reality of Wikileaks, NSA, and consumer informatics. The use of the drone in the making of the video connects to the techno-financial deployment of the drone as a technology that mediates our reality in increasingly varied contexts including consumerism, cinema, play, and war.

Partials combines electronic music production with orchestral arrangements to produce a sound more easily characterized by their contrasting influences than by grasping adjectives: the stabbing brass of Hudson Mohawke punctuates the phrase repetition of Reich, the abstract symmetry of Arca embroiders the early impressionism of Rimsky-Korsakov, while the analog textures of Boards of Canada twine with the mysticism of Debussy. Centering on the collaboration between composer and New Jersey native, Ryan Somerville and sound artist and producer Ben McCarthy, Partials’ live show combines a traditional string quartet, vocalist and pianist with samplers, synthesizers and live digital signal processing to create a sound that is at turns cinematic, overwhelming and darkly transporting.