Spectres by Supersigil

Around 2017, in between playing in bands on the London scene and scoring for theatre/dance projects, I started carving out time to produce my own experimental electronic music. From the outset, but especially during the pandemic, this project represented a realm of limitless possibility, where some of my most personal ideas found expression. The material was so different from my previous work that it made sense to create a new identity for it to exist under. Thus Supersigil came into being to channel this new music.

Spectres comprises 13 tracks I composed, recorded, and produced over the last seven years—the 28th release in my discography but my first ever completely solo full-length album.

While working on this record, I delved deep into Jungian psychology, concepts from which became central to the project. All 13 tracks are named after archetypes—innate, universal forces that shape our experience of the world.

In another nod to Jung, I call Supersigil my "digital shadow"—an alter ego I created online to help me access a part of my unconscious where previously latent and often terrifying truths lie. There's also a more literal meaning to that epithet: the insomnia I’ve always suffered from got much worse during the pandemic, and so I’d work on this music at night, becoming entirely nocturnal for weeks at a time.

Learning to self-record and produce my own music was a long process, and it wasn’t until 2021 that I felt ready to release anything under this moniker. By this time, I was exploring emerging technologies like blockchains and NFTs, convinced they could offer solutions to many of the music industry’s problems. The first Supersigil tracks I put out were audiovisual collaborations minted on Ethereum.

In fact, Spectres is one of the first truly web3-native albums, envisioned for and initially distributed exclusively via the blockchain. In September I began releasing individual tracks as NFTs which unlocked instant access to the whole album, months ahead of its official release. This will continue until the music hits streaming platforms on 23 November. For more info, visit https://www.bonfire.xyz/sprsgl/spectres.

This project also has a visual art component (a first for me). For each track, I crowd-sourced images associated with the corresponding archetype. These image collections were used to train bespoke Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), simulating the complex interplay between individual psyche and collective unconscious. A further GAN was trained on selected outputs from all the previous GANs, uniting the various archetypes to form an integrated Self.

By limiting the training time of these AI models, I found I could achieve results that mirrored the formation of archetypal symbols as I imagine them deep in our collective unconscious: primal yet elusive forms emerging from abstract swirls of colour. From thousands of outputs, I selected and manually edited one per archetype to create unique artworks for each track (click on the track titles to see them). A collection of 144 further images from this project was released digitally under the title Spectral Shadows here: https://rarible.com/collection/base/0xb3b592897ba2bd9d06231a56afba9cca9a11619b/drops

Ultimately, Spectres is more than a collection of WAVs and JPGs; it is a dialogue between the personal and the universal, a multidisciplinary exploration of the forces that connect us all. The album has taken me on a transformative seven-year journey through sound, imagery and psyche. In the process, individual and collective experience harmonise, casting a light into the profound depths of human interconnectedness.

Composer, guitarist, producer, and interdisciplinary artist.

Also runs multidisciplinary label Zyla and micro-label Aion Records.

alexrothmusic.com
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