Bucket Brigade

Second release from Chicago artist Jacob Kart’s Bucket Brigade project, in which Kart sets up situations via a Eurorack modular synthesizer to manipulate degrees of randomness into fully realized compositions. A mainstay of Chicago’s improvising scene, Kart eschews overdubs on the recording, treating the machine as another intelligence or living organism whose spontaneous emissions can be played off of and interacted with. Though extremely pleasant to listen to, there’s a kind of edge-of-your-seat tension throughout most of these pieces that is located precisely where the pure waves, pattern inducing patches, and cellular logic of the machine meets the intelligence & in-the-moment reactions of an improvising composer.

One is reminded of nothing less than the final outcome of one of artist Sol Lewitt’s famous process & system based artworks, in which predetermined outcomes have nevertheless been graced by the vagaries of human intellect & ability.