Hailing from Karlsrhue Germany, Marek Slipek, a communications designer, also conducts a lab for sound research and conceptual design with cernlab. Firstly it is not exactly clear that the cernlab referred to is indeed the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern), or a project of Marek Slipek that references the name as a form of homage. However if you refer to the principles of Slipek’s cernlab listed below, especially the fifth, it doesn’t seem like an exceptional concern.
52.09 is a nine track album released on Nuremberg based Electron and consists of tracks marked delay 01-09. The tracks hold together in the stylistic manner similar to the device names: acid, electro, trip hop and minimal techno. The rhythms are often exploratory beyond these stylistic constraints; the sounds are honed to a precision and form that exudes the long performance history aspects to Slipeks art. Cavernous and industrial often, yet the sounds sparkle and glisten, in difference to the bleak take these sound concepts usually hold. An often ominous or immanent atmosphere is created by the conjunction of patterned repetitions, which build a psychological tension and leave residual trace. There is a wide influence of dub in the album within its formal construction and its affinity with sculptured bass forms as inherent to its identity. A predominate emphasis is on a textural interplay of rhythms, whether they be crushed frequencies, crackles, bright full tones, signal like or sharp beats. There is a significant amount of construction that suggest that the 101/303/909 are the key instruments that have influenced Slipek’s musical development and he masters the vocabulary of sounds developed from these machines in the 90’s with an aplomb not necessarily evident in the decade itself.
Generally speaking it is a well wrought musical form within the realms of musical forms that are not necessarily the immediate currency of today. But I still eat bread even though people tell me it holds little nutritional content and is really a form of delivering glue to your stomach. Given that perhaps we can never know of the true value of our work except in retrospect through another’s eyes I leave you with cernlabs self-definition in five sentences:
“First: I am because I calculate
Second: computer crashes caused by exceptional errors are part of the system
Third: there would be boredom without error
Fourth: fortuity is an inevitably occurrence based on the immutable laws of nature
Fifth: the sun is blue, if everyone agrees on it”
Innerversitysound
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