For his fourth album, “Zero Player Game,” local noise musician Jeff Carey used custom software and manipulated it with a joystick and video game controller to “an intensely artificial sound world where beats and bass lines are replaced with an elastic structure of synthetic texture, feedback and bit crushed noise blasts,” per a release.
On “EXT,” it sounds like a scrambled television or computer that bleats, screeches and plinks its way to life, giving way to long, eerie droning sounds. The video, making its debut here, uses aerial footage captured by the FBI–and later released via the public information act–during the Baltimore Uprising. At times, the black-and-white images are comprehensible–the Arch Social Club at Penn-North, a line of human protesters, the dome of City Hall–but during other points, when it sounds like the program is going particularly haywire, the screen resembles a sloshing abstraction.
By the end, though, the images of protesters and law enforcement gathering at the site of protests following Freddie Gray’s death are crystal clear, leaving an uneasy feeling about the security state as the camera hovers over the crowd with a set of crosshairs in the center.
Martin Schmidt of the group Matmos fittingly described Carey’s music as “like being beaten up by alien cops.” Watch the video for “EXT” here:
Carey is currently on a national tour in support of “Zero Player Game,” which is out now via the Baltimore label Ehse Records. The remaining confirmed dates are below.
November
12 Dayton, Ohio @ Skeleton Dust Records
13 Chicago @ TriTriangle
15 Pittsburgh @ 3577 Studios
16 Nyack, New York @ Nyack Village Theatre Boutique
17 Philadelphia @ Vox Populi
December
2 Washington, D.C. @ Rhizome
3, Johnson City, Tennessee @ The Hideaway
4, Gainesville, Florida @ The Limin Room
5, Miami @ Churchills
6, Orlando @ Wills Pub
7, St. Petersburg, Florida @ Paper Crane
8, New Orleans @ Mudlark
9, Birmingham, Alabama @ Firehouse
10, Asheville, North Carolina @ Static Age
