Brett Naucke – Cumulative Index CD

Brett W. Naucke

Cumulative Index: Synthesis written & recorded 2010-2020

Label: Dassi

Brett Naucke’s Cumulative Index sits somewhere between a full length and compilation, culled from unreleased material made with modular synthesis from 2010-2020. It varies from the ambient as on songs like “Lex” to the cinematic “12/28/18” to the reverential on “2560 Sines for A. Morales,” showcasing the musician’s dynamic compositional skillset as well as his stirring interpretation of contemporary electronic music.

For ten years, Naucke has practiced and recorded the results of modular synthesis almost daily – there’s a massive amount of music. Cumulative Index is a cohesive, welcoming collection sculpted from a possibly intimidating whole. With Multiple Hallucinations (Hausu Mtn, 2017) he chose to wrangle his wealth of material by striking together thirty one-minute “hallucinations” – fragmented pieces amassed into a larger composition. This way of working continued on EMS Hallucinations (American Dreams, 2020) which took smaller bits recorded on the legendary Buchla 200 while in residence at EMS Stockholm and reframed them into longer compositions. While the hallucination series was an exciting postmodern modus operandi, trawling through vast amounts of material was exhausting.

Naucke needed to make sense of his earlier recordings – he needed closure. In the fall of 2020, he began re-exploring the depths of unfinished material, and rather than structure fragments into an onslaught of chaotic material closer to the Hallucinations series, he chose to focus on each track as its own world of sound. In observance of his previous releases, Cumulative Index sits sonically closest to 2016’s Executable Dreamtime (Umor Rex) and 2018’s The Back of The Garden (Unifactor) while still following the densely-driven, programmatic and generative synthesizer patches Naucke is known for.

Some of these songs exist in their original state; some were reworked into entirely new places ; some reorganized; some was live material never released; some re-recorded entirely, and some of it is brand new from the final months of 2020. Is it a new full length or new compilation? Who knows, who cares!

Cumulative Index also serves as the first release on Naucke’s new Dassi imprint, which is set to release several other releases throughout 2021 focussing on audio and printed material