Spryk Releases Music From Audio-Visual Exploration ‘APEX’ With New Album

Functioning at the forefront of Indian artists exploring performance practices that utilise new media, augmented virtual spaces and technological innovations, Mumbai-based Tejas Nair aka Spryk has experimented with and propagated A/V and VR elements in music over the past few years. Presenting the biggest project of praxis, the sound artist, producer and label-head collaborated with visual artist Cursorama and live visual expert Naveen Deshpande to prepare a special commission for Magnetic Fields Festival 2019 called APEX.

“Since mankind's discovery of fire, its efforts to reach the pinnacle of innovation has intensified. The advent of technology and our ability to manipulate it has meant that we're constantly redefining what the apex is,” says Nair who explored this continuous human conquest towards the pinnacle of achievement with the work, presenting a soundtrack for it with the album. Exploring the marriage of sound, light and set design, Spryk detailed the journey of technological evolution with a visual-heavy set at the Magnetic Fields Festivals’ BUDx South Stage last year and offered a reflection with his ‘Boiler Room: Streaming From Isolation’ performance in August.

“The first time we used the cursor on a computer – and that wasn’t too long ago – the UI was quite glitchy, especially when we dragged it around too fast, and there was a left and a right click, concepts which are almost obsolete in the world of haptic technology today,” told Nair to Tejaswi Subramanian, explaining some of the facets of that evolution he tried to encapsulate and borrow from in the performance.

Distilling out the sonic element of ‘APEX’ with the 7-track album, save for the limited edition posters by thebigfatminimalist, Spryk presents fragmented musical shapes delivered over timbres that span from basic “natural”-sounding plucks and ambiences, to retro synth tones and more sophisticated products of sound design. Hinted quite clearly by the track titles, the album follows a narrative that evolves and dissolves in intensity while jumping in and out of ambient, club-friendly and leftfield sounds – whichever helps deliver the chronicle of human and machine’s evolution.

Listen to the album below and read Tejaswi Subramanian's feature on 'APEX' detailing the influences that went behind the commission here. For more updates, head to Spryk's artist profile.

Image by Abhishek Shukla for Magnetic Fields Festival 2019