BPM&M: XtraKcts & ArtifaKcts CD

King Crimson drummer Pat Mastelotto and Austin, Texas, engineer Bill Munyon have managed to modify their computers into musical electrocardiogram machines that output an array of avant-garde techno heartbeats and spacey jungles of drone. Their source and method: "remixing" miscellaneous sounds from inside Crimson's tape vaults. Their sound collages are like having video games playing inside your head while having 3-D glasses on your ears, which isn't surprising since Munyon is an audio sorcerer for video game developing. The technocracy convened within Munyon's E-Magic Logic set-up, an environment he considers to be more "musical", while he feels Pro Tools to perform more efficiently in the Video Post realm. Munyon is best left to explain just some of what went on - "We would import tracks off of ADAT and line the grooves up on the grid and chop, chop and snip - sonically, I wanted to go more and more noise, ambience. We had a DAT of telemetry, beeps and squeals, and I played it through some patch on a TC Fireworx and then just hit the FF scan button and new sounds formed. We did a lot of tracks where we would just let a track record all the way to the end and we'd twist knobs or drop in sounds and then go back through the track, highlight the best bits and throw the rest away." Because of the infinite scope surrounding such a project, they chose Crimson's analytically fearless leader, Robert Fripp, as its central haunting figure. "I found it to be like doing sculpture by throwing different colored clay into a pile and Pat and I would then carve out the shape," continues Munyon, "our clay was the guitar of Robert Fripp and the bass of Tony Levin disembodied from their original accompanying tracks. Nothing was sacred. I think that is what made it so fun. We were free to drop in samples from anything we had handy. The really great fun was that I had a 'bin' of guitar solos and bits and phrases that I would drop over the rhythm track and most times it worked." (Papa Bear Records- www.papabear.com)