Sound design studio Slate + Ash has launched a brand new digital guitar based mostly on sounds designed by avant-garde guitarists together with Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, and David Torn. Every guitarist contributed fragmentary sounds—loops, textures, resonances, and mechanical failures—that Slate + Ash used its playback engine to deconstruct and switch into various recursive preset sounds for the Kontakt 8 sampling platform. Watch a showcase for the software program instrument, which is titled Ruins, beneath.
Randall Dunn’s Williamsburgh studio, Round Damage, co-created the instrument, and studio co-founders Ben Greenberg and Arjan Miranda—in addition to ready guitarist Invoice Horist—contributed additional supply materials. Slate + Ash and Round Damage describe the instrument as an “infinitely recursive sonic artefact” impressed by the brief story that gave the latter studio its title, Jorge Luis Borges’ The Round Ruins.
