RM Francis – Hyperplastic Other
6.25.17 by Mike Haley

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I’m horrified of automation. All of us should be! At best I give it 69 months before machines handle every function in society and decide to melt us hu-mans down for fuel. In the meantime I still use the self check out at the grocery store, so sure, I’m a hypocrite. But maybe I don’t want to be judged for buying a Party Sized bag of habanero-pickle flavored chips. Well, it turns out the good ol’ self check out isn’t even a safe space for gluttonous purchases anymore, because now even the machines are judging us. At least that’s what it sounds like is happening on this RM Francis cassette.

“Hyperplastic Other” is a series of binary barbs, converted into MIDI blips and snips that sound like attempts at putting the toothpaste back into the tube, tumbling through the internet of things. This is apparently the best way for your Nest thermostat to talk shit on you with the neighbors SmartFridge™. We bags of organic mess hear “zip.. ziiiiip. zipblipblap bloop. ting. vyoooom” but those super gossipy appliances are actually making fun of me needing to run the AC at the slightest sign of humidity – My hair gets puffy, give me a break! RM Francis goes into detail about the creation process of these rolling sounds in the liner notes on the Jcard: “Hyperplastic Other was composed largely using a two dimensional array of 17,040 computer-generated values between 0 and 1, which was divided into 71 parametric paths. The array values were scaled and converted to MIDI messages; the paths were arbitrarily assigned to individual parameters of……” but all I hear when I read that is “zip.. ziiiiip. zipblipblap bloop. ting. vyoooom.” And that’s okay. I don’t think RM Francis will be the least bit concerned if you decide to approach these recordings appreciating the science behind the glitch or simply for the glitch itself. Hell, there was a chocolate cassette version of this! INDULGE! You’re vacuum is going to look down on you either way.

Grab one of the 100 non-chocolate copies of “Hyperplastic Other” from Nada’s Bandcamp, which is probably sentient at this point and already knows you want one.