Asp Burger by Bradfield Dumpleton

After last year's perhaps more atmospheric experiments (the trilogy of albums TECTONIC / MELANCHOLIA / STELLIFEROUS in response to displacement & change), I needed a burst of something more primal, to harness some raw energy and vent a spleen or two.

My process in creating instrumental music is much more about cooking and painting. I experience music in flavours, textures, shapes and colours. Rather than tell stories or communicate a message, I cook on the fly, adding ingredients as they emerge. With the ASP BURGER album, it was the title & cover image that opened the door, as well as the recent revelation that my neurological make-up is apparently Asperger's (now called high-functioning autism), which catalysed a deep process of personal review.

This collection began with the deliberately primitive tracks 'Family Law' and 'Coping Mechanisms', and their raw immediacy set the album's tone. I knew I wanted to explore an abrasive pallette, textures of grind & growl, splinter & scrape, something simultaneously visceral and fractured, but still riding on melody & rhythm, not just shapeless noise.

In choosing distortion as my primary colour, I wanted to find the edges of that distortion, where it began to disintegrate, find the subtleties in the dissonance & the sharp sparkle in the serrations. I drew on certain sound textures from my childhood music memories, in tribute: the earlier edges of bands like King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, Stooges, XTC, Stranglers, X, Gang Of Four, AC/DC... metallic edges, fat fuzz, shards of glass, angular & jagged, slightly skewed...just great sonic colours, and a good excuse to have some fun with some fave old rock idioms.

Asperger's can bring a sense of living on the outside of things, of operating through a window of remove, and the social frameworks many people take for granted don't really seem important. Like so many others on the spectrum who live without any formal diagnosis, I've spent my life inventing creative ways to adapt to a world that makes very little sense yet demands that you behave as if it does. You learn to appear sociably intelligent, emotionally responsive, articulate, capable, creative, while internally you often experience exclusion, confusion & dissonance.

This album is me looking back through the domino effect of this new information, reviewing the trail of symptoms...the depression, anxiety, family breakdowns, scuttled relationships, lost opportunities, anger at self. It's me understanding how I unintentionally isolate myself from those I love, and how they in turn misunderstand my own tangled surface signals. This music tries to describe how I shape the dissonance in my head each day into some kind of harmony.

A library of musical sketchbooks, mapping my various evolutions from 2005 to next week. Dedicated to exploring sound for its own sake. Many diverse delights here for the patient & attentive listener.

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