Adrian Belew’s killer app

All things considered, Adrian Belew has had a pretty weird year

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After amicably stepping away from Trent Reznor’s reformed Nine Inch Nails project in June 2013 and being politely excluded from Robert Fripp’s reformed King Crimson later that year, esteemed guitarist and sonic disrupter Adrian Belew now finds himself currently on tour with his long-tenured Power Trio, and poised to unleash his experimental project called Flux, a music and visual art app that he’s been working on for five years.

For Adrian Belew, two highprofile band reunions that might have happened or failed to materialize are comfortably buried in the past, as bringing Flux to completion in late November represents a kind of validation in his own creative vision that neither road project was likely to accommodate.

“I’m tellin’ ya, there’s just Flux coming out of my ears these days,” he told Boulder Weekly a few weeks ago. “For me, it’s very inspiring. It just makes me think of things that I ordinarily couldn’t use.”

Flux is an app that randomizes Belew’s original songs, pieces of songs and various manner of sonic snippetry (solos, riffs, sound samples) and marries them to artwork, creating a sonic and visual experience that is never the same twice. The app uses probability rate logic to adjust and modify the rotation of the pieces, as well as manage user-defined preferences, i.e., being able to save and summon favorite bits that the user wants to hear again.

“Everything is recorded by me,” Belew explains, “The computer doesn’t actually make any music, so it’s not what they call ‘generative’ music where the music changes over time. That has been done before by people like Eno. These are all pieces — songs, musical pieces, sounds, effects, common ordinary things — that I record, and that I put into a content management system. … What happens is, over time, is that there are so many different versions [of the material]. Yesterday I did another version of a song we did two years ago for a sample, so now there’s three or four versions of that one song in there. … And they’re all cut into short segments, so if you hear, for example ‘Don’t Blink,’ you might hear only the first verse and chorus one time, then later you might hear the guitar solo, and then you might hear a different guitar solo the next time.”

The end result, of course, would be a sort of cubist Radio Free Belew, accessing portion-controlled servings of his alien-landscape guitar effects as well as his unshakable pop sensibilities, all jammed into close proximity, a kind of sonic ADD machine.

We wondered if Belew — whose solo work outside of his three-decade career fronting King Crimson has ranged from radio-accessible rock songs to mind-warping experimental excursions — felt the influence of Flux’s song-sample format exerting its pull over his composing process.

“The format that you have for songs has been there for 60 or 70 years. It’s been dictated by radio programming and other things. … And I’m pretty tired of that. I write a song and it may have four verses. And sometimes I’ll write something, and I’ll have a verse and a chorus, and that’s all I want.

“And I should say, that I still write things that are 12 minutes long that will never work in Flux that will need to be in a different medium, like a CD. So it’s enhanced my output greatly, I would say.”

As for the NIN reunion project that Belew signed up for in early 2013, and then left later that year, he told the press at the time simply, “It wasn’t working.”

He elaborated: “The concept that I was told by Trent was that he and I were going to … Start from scratch and redo the music of Nine Inch Nails. About two and a half weeks into the band, I had already learned about 20 songs, and we weren’t doing that at all. What we were doing was, I was playing exactly, note-for-note, precisely what was on the record; that was what I was being asked to do.

“By that point, the original guitar player that he had since 1993 [Robin Finck] had also been invited into the band, and he was also playing all those parts. He was a good guy and a good guitar player. And I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ I had to imagine myself playing someone else’s parts over and over for a year and a half; I’m just not that kind of player. And we both realized that.”

And as for King Crimson, who wrapped up a series of U.S. reunion dates a few weeks ago and, presumably, has gone back into cold storage for an indeterminate period of time, Belew is OK with it. (He toured the Crimson ProjeKCt band, including two players — Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto — who were part of Fripp’s revived project, last summer in Europe.)

“Y’know, I’m fine with all that. … I’m all about the future.”

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