Ravel is Jenn Kirby's fourth studio album. It is released on Pan y Rosas Discos on 18th March 2022.
This album explores different aspects of the manipulation of time. I have been asking myself how the digital results of manipulating time relate to my perception of time in the physical world. Having become comfortable watching videos at 2x speed, I recently found myself wanting to 2x a video call. In that moment, getting the information in real-time seemed inefficient. I wondered if I saw efficiency as simply squashing as much as possible into as little time as possible, and what does that mean for making and experiencing music.
I chop up the sounds as I chop up my time - squashing some meaningful moments and escaping from time through rituals of repetition. I enjoy the frantic sound of fighting time, but I am equally interested in the moments of surrender.
I wanted to create and experience music in different time scales. While there is no auditory container for sound, there is a time frame. We have physical limitations to how we can perceive music, as the perception of sound is directly linked to time.
The artefacts that are produced from extended time-stretching are processed further to create textures and glitches. The results appear to me as fragments that suggest something lost or something found. Through a collapsing, expanding and ravelling of information, something new is created. It is not simply the same thing played fast or slow, but a new 'thing' that is very different to the original source, though still connected to it.
All these tracks began as improvisations. There are no restrictions to the processing and production, except that nothing gets redone. There is some quality in the spontaneity that I want to preserve. Though the material is shaped and transformed in many ways, it has an origin that is connected to a time, place and emotion.