The ancient Chinese manuscript I Ching has long been a source of spiritual and scholarly debate. Detailing the mystical forces and their binary yet harmonious ‘intermingle’ with each other contrary to the Western notions of combative, opposition such as light and dark or Heaven and Hell, the propulsive duality that lies under the moisture from rain or the movement of thunder can point to prophetic forecasting, according to the proto-Confucianists who wrote it, and its theories of divination have touched John Cage’s 1951 indeterminate Music of Changes piano piece, the psych-rock sprawler ‘Chapter 24’ from Pink Floyd’s debut LP, and provides a major inspirational underpinning to Glaswegian synth-conjurer Iona Fortune‘s ongoing Tao of I series.
At the forefront of Bristol’s ‘Avon-Garde’ among the visionary electronica of E B U or Kinlaw & Franco Franco lies BIPED, a “dystopian sound poet” donned in a balaclava crafting a multi-faceted world of digital video art, online immersive exhibitions, and experimental, electronic-infused folk (formerly under the alias TEDDY) which inhabits the frisson between postmodern incongruity and the earnest yearning for universal, humanistic meaning. Including an excerpt from I Ching‘s ‘Suo Kua’ on their Bandcamp for new release with Avon Terror Corps, the ‘Ten Wings’ series of texts provides thematic guidance to a conceptual piece of work that’s comprised of two halves, an exploration of the fragmented dissolution felt in the wake of lockdown balanced with the heights of humanity and solidarity in that summer of great, political resistance.
Folding Up / Contracting + Cumulative / Expanding exists in a transient, ephemeral plain of cascading digital detritus and amorphous collage, an aural teeter that threatens caustic industrial before delicate ambience just as deftly as BIPED veers between sung vocals and informal chatter. ‘Poor Mum’ captures the hazy twofold perfectly, a soothing blues number muffles in the recess of a processed voice which echoes the 2006 short Dining Room Or There Is Nothing. ‘Back To The Water’ too captures the subaqueous production both lyrically and sonically, the repetitive mantra of the title evoking an uneasy respite from the tape’s splintered textures,
“94% chance of trespass in this country” exalts BIPED on the fluttering jazz of ‘Silence’, a spoken word flow that spots the flotsam absurdity of society which stagnates atop the well of human possibility and potential. F/C+C/E hovers nebulously between the stifling cruelties of our atomised isolationism and the clusters of deep community which serve as a bulwark against Thatcher’s societal moulding. Protest, David Attenborough, and neoliberal alienation all pervade the littered samples layered into the dense musique concrète. t l k’s guest vocals on final track ‘Sodomised No More’ are a glitched-out soul number that tapers the EPs off into a whispered muse of honest uncertainty and defiant affirmation that concludes things on hope and angst in intertwined tandem.
From underneath the noise and moribund systems we’ve created for ourselves, the deep, arcane energy will find its way through, like nature reclaiming the faded ruins of a former empire. Harnessing the recondite secrets that lie buried underneath the stifling smog of rapacious capitalism, BIPED delivers a fascinating piece of experimental electronic music that, inspired by I Ching‘s “deep engagement in conversation and reality”, props up a mirror to our viscous morality and only poses more questions.