Shift Coordinate Points

The title Shift Coordinate Points refers to a fragment in the science-fiction book Nova Express by William Burroughs. This book is a social commentary on the monitoring of life by man and machine. In this book, Burroughs makes extensive use of his famous cut-up technique. Burroughs utilises the jargon of secret services and government agencies as a metaphor for systems of social, intellectual, and sexual control. For Shift Coordinate Points, I immersed myself completely in the sound clips of the numbers stations while reading the book. (…) Over the years, the work evolved from a multimedia performance with visuals of found footage, to a purely electronic concert. In 2006, the work moved to another platform when the British label Entr’acte proposed to release the work on vinyl. In order to make it fit on a record, I needed to make a ‘hard cut’ and divide the work into two parts: ‘Arthur’ and ‘Brussel’. The first reinterpretation of the work was presented in 2008 for the ‘Disturbance’ project, a series of internet radio broadcasts. The new edition of Shift Coordinate Points opens with radio noise and a soft beeping sound, a fragment of ‘Swedish Rhapsody’. Aside from changing some of the transitions between the parts, I created two new parts, bringing the duration of the work up to 35 minutes. Although I did keep the sudden shifts in sounds, the whole musical experience gained space. The texture of the work also became a focus point; I gave certain sounds more grain and the whole experience therefore became somewhat noisier.