Get a taste for James Hoff’s Blaster album on PAN

Listen to a track from the conceptual artist’s new album constructed of computer virus-infected 808 beats.

PAN is a label that can always be counted on to coax out intriguing ideas from its artists, but even by the imprint’s standards the freshly released album from New York-based artist James Hoff revolves around a concept few would dream of. Taking 808 beats and infecting them with a computer virus called Blaster, Hoff’s album of the same name is constructed out of the resulting sonic mutations, and is decribed by the label as an “exploration of the infectious qualities of sound, and how it too, as a carrier, makes it’s way through social networks, reduced to bits and programmed to infiltrate and replicate.”

The resulting audio is just as wild as the concept itself. Streaming below, album track “Erblast” is a veritable sonic barrage of semi-automatic percussion swathed in noise, all held together with rubbery monophonic synth bass. Despite the record’s almost academic concept, “Erblast” has more in common with Container’s tongue-in-cheek, funk-ridden take on hardware techno than recent PAN excursions into experimental territory from Valerio Tricoli and Dalglish.