Long players had become par for BT’s course by 2006, with his early noughties works (‘Movement In Still Life’ and ‘Emotional Technology’) having already travelled far from his origin sound. There’s nothing more relative than relativity though and three years after ‘Emotional Technology’, ‘This Binary Universe’ did for BT what ‘going electric’ did for Bob Dylan.
It’s an album that inverted everything anyone thought they knew about the artist: ‘counter-club-culture’ didn’t even come close! Again, through the power of technology, this month he revisits his most heterogenous LP with a remastering; a 4K upscale of its paired film and a first-ever outing on vinyl.
‘This Binary Universe’ had no commercially-minded lead single (‘Flaming June’, ‘Godspeed’ or otherwise)… or for that matter any singles whatsoever. It consisted of a lean seven tracks, however only two ran for less than ten minutes.
BT foresaw the album as his first multimedia project, engineering the music for playback on the DTS’s 5.1 surround sound system. He realised this through seven vignettes comprising its film, which saw a limited theatrical release in 2006. CG artist Scott Pagano developed four, while Mondi, Dose Productions and Transeau himself also created one apiece. They spanned a cinematographic range, from live-action and computer-generated to traditional animation.
For ‘Good Morning Kaia’, he used footage of his (then-just-born) daughter with the track’s ‘lyrics’ appearing only as subtitles, drifting in time to his piano notes. For its 2024 re-release, each piece has been re-rendered to 4K, upscaling every cell and frame.
‘This Binary Universe’ is out now on Black Hole Recordings.
© justaweemusicblog.com
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