Explore an intricate alien landscape featuring music from Nexciya and aircode.
To mark the two most recent releases from London label Alien Jams, CGI artist and producer Clifford Sage, aka Recsund, has created an intricate alien landscape within which the otherworldly productions of London-based, Swedish producer aircode and French producer Nexcyia are discovered.
Using Unreal Engine, Sage builds upon his previous project TUNER to create a luscious sci-fi environment he traverses in the form of a bio-mechanical hovercraft. The result plays out something like Annihilation‘s Area X being discovered by a ‘Let’s Play’ YouTuber, as Sage tunes in to extraterrestrial frequencies using a retro radio attached to a fishing line.
It’s on these frequencies that tracks from aircode’s EP Effortless and Nexcyia’s EP Crawl are discovered. On Effortless, aircode reflects on a year of sleep deprivation, disorientation and social claustrophobia. “The tracks represent this mixture of apathy and a scattered mind,” she explains. “On the verge of hyperventilation with constantly changing rhythms as you feel your heartbeat and breath loud and out of sync. The melodies are also somewhat dipping in energy”.
Similarly drawing from deeply personal experiences with loneliness, vulnerability and anxiety, on Crawl, Nexcyia meditates on posthumanist notions of otherness, utilising granular synthesis, field recordings and harsh samples to mount a powerful response to modern modes of anxiety and the feeling of being in some way other.
Using the program FMOD to create audio parameters through which interactions within the environment trigger certain tracks throughout the piece, Sage is able to embed these works within the landscape and in so doing making them discoverable by all those who enter the world of Tunein.
Tunein serves as a demonstration of a wider project that Sage ultimately intends to build out into a fully interactive experience, which will be downloadable and playable at some point soon. Both Effortless and Crawl are out now and you can find aircode and Nexcyia on Instagram.
For more information about Clifford Sage and his work you can visit his website and follow him on Instagram. You can also find Alien Jams on Instagram and Bandcamp.
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