Akira Rabelais

From his base at CalArts, Akira Rabelais advanced both conceptual thought and sonic experimentation through the works and tools he produced there. South Texas provided the setting for his early years, during which he often fired BB guns at metal plates purely to savor the resulting tones. That early curiosity about acoustics merged with his longstanding interests in philosophy and literature—surreal and magical realist passages he especially admired appear on his site at www.akirarabelais.com—and guided the body of music he began releasing in 1990. He has characterized his practice as that of “a composer writing software, not an engineer making music.” Among the applications he developed, the Argeïphontes Lyre gained the widest notice. Its array of processing options, among them Eviscerator Reanimator, Time Domain Mutation, Morphological Disintegration, Verwechslung Kaffeetass, and the Lobster Quadrille, enabled extensive manipulation of existing recordings. Electronic artists including Terre Thaemlitz and Scanner adopted the program to generate abrupt, disorienting transformations in their material. Rabelais applied the same methods on his own album Elongated Pentagonal Pyramid, issued by Ritornell in 1999, where overlapping strata of subtly shifting textures predominate. Eisotrophobia appeared the following spring.