greg davis
new primes
catalog: 004
release: 23 september 2022
duration: 38:30
formats: vinyl + digital
vinyl edition: 200
greg davis, computer
An investigation into the compositional properties of prime numbers from Vermont-based electronic musician Greg Davis, New Primes employs custom-written software to translate prime number sequences into a mesmerizing universe of sound. Davis pares his sound materials down to their most basic — a network of pure sine tones — to create a collection of pieces ranging from the almost-tonal to the harmonically alien.
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In summer 2016, greyfade founder Joseph Branciforte found himself at a small record shop in Vermont, stocking up on music for a 6-hour drive back to New York. Among the records he chanced upon that day was a compilation of works composed using just intonation — a system of musical tuning in whole number ratios — which contained a track by electronic musician Greg Davis.
“I kept returning to a particular piece for sine tones, replaying it endlessly, without knowing who or what it was,” says Branciforte. “The harmony was like nothing I had ever heard before.”
That piece was Davis’ Star Primes (For James Tenney), Davis’ first foray into composing using just intonation. ”I began exploring using prime number sets compositionally around 2008,” says Davis. “I was invited by Important Records to contribute a piece for The Harmonic Series compilation and landed on using prime number sets as a way to develop just intonation tuning relationships and intervals. It felt like a unique position for me.”
To realize the piece, Davis developed a custom software system in the Max/MSP environment, using a network of pure sine tones. The software allows various prime number sets to be imported and used to control aspects of the musical composition, from its harmonic relationships and rhythm to its form and spatialization. This same system has been in development since 2008, appearing on Davis’ 2009 recording Primes (Autumn Records) and in its most recent incarnation on New Primes.
”I start by choosing a fundamental frequency for each piece and multiplying that frequency by each of the prime numbers in a given sequence to determine the overtones above the base frequency,” Davis explains. “Most of the overtones are transposed down several octaves to fit within a comfortable 3- or 4-octave audible frequency range. This becomes the ‘scale’ or harmonic space for each piece. The panning, fades, metronome speed and other variables of each overtone are related to its frequency. Rhythmically, each sine tone follows its own beat cycle by stepping through multiple octaves and silent pauses, which create overlapping prime number rhythmic patterns. The lower overtones generally have faster rhythmic cycles and the higher overtones are slower. All of this acts as a way of relating the rhythmic aspects of the piece to the prime number sequences and integrating it with the harmony, while still retaining a musical texture that sounds interesting to me.”
Branciforte and Davis eventually began a correspondence, discussing the musical and software programming details of the project. “Speaking with Greg was a decisive moment in the development of greyfade,” says Branciforte, who, at the time, was toying with the idea of starting a record label focused on generative and process-based music. “This was a blueprint for exactly the kind of music I had imagined releasing. There was so much conceptual integrity to it, but it was still addictively listenable.”
Davis and Branciforte’s conversations led to the first performance of the material in over a decade. “Joseph invited me to rework the Primes project for an 8-channel performance at the Fridman Gallery in New York in 2019,” says Davis. “I kept the basic structure of the original Primes software but worked quite a bit on its rhythmic functions, creating the ability to shorten or elongate the time scales of the various tones, as well as developing a method of crossfading between their octave displacements. Finally, I selected a group of new prime number sets to use as material.”
New Primes documents this latest evolution of Davis’ system, distilling his expansive 2019 multichannel performance into a stereo version designed for home listening. Recorded over two days in October 2020 and mixed live to 2-track by Davis, the music on New Primes ranges from the almost-tonal to the harmonically alien. The titles of the pieces simply refer to the name of the prime number set used.
“The pieces you hear on the finished record are snapshots of an endless generative music that could last for hours, days, or even longer,” says Davis.
Although the music on New Primes suggests mathematical relationships with an otherworldly scope and scale, the material was carefully edited and sequenced with an ear towards its album presentation, capturing both the variety and depth of Davis’ system in LP form.
produced by greg davis & joseph branciforte
mixed by greg davis live-to-2-track at greyfade studio
mastered by joseph branciforte at greyfade studio
vinyl cut by scott hull at masterdisk
data visualizations by zach bodtorf
BANDCAMP DAILY (US): Massive, dissonant, slowly evolving expanses of sound. Using the music programming software Max/MSP, Davis creates pure sine tones whose frequency, rhythm, and spatialization are determined by the mathematical relationships between numbers in these sets. (read more)
THE WIRE (UK): Davis has turned pure, unwavering, and potentially endless tones into sound fields that quiver, throb and reverberate. The high frequencies feel like they’re projecting a cool light show in a newly discovered space in between your skull and your brain’s dura matter.
BANDCAMP BEST CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL (US): Mind-altering excursions that [bring] out the psychoacoustic possibilities of JI in technicolor splendor. (read more)
SEVEN DAYS (US): Strip away any of the math or technical concerns, and New Primes plays like the sound of universal creation, of stars colliding, of time and space and music occupying a single platform at once. (read more)
POPMATTERS (US): New Primes is the sound of an artist who is deeply curious about the world and the universe around him and is experiencing it with bravery and a sense of wonder. (read more)
THE ARTS DESK (UK): Painstakingly crafted, cutting-edge music. Transitions between the blocks of material are brilliantly engineered, the chords drifting in and out of focus. You can buy New Primes as a high-res download, but the vinyl edition is the one to have. (read more)
FREQ (UK): If nerding out over sonification mysteries is your thing, then you may very well fill your boots right god-damn here. The label has spared no effort in making a gorgeous sleeve. (read more)
DUSTED (US): All drone records are not made equal. Greg Davis’s latest release amply demonstrates this. Dissonant overtones shaping a richly evolving tapestry of verticals.
SOMETHING ELSE! (US): A deep harmonic bath that uses your ears to transport your mind. [Davis] has found his true calling in using technology in summoning sounds alien to human ears. (read more)
IGLOO (US): Greg Davis is exposing us to a work of simple tones made with prime numbers but with intention and purpose. Bravo for venturing into the small cracks of audio art that most don’t even see. (read more)
BRAINWASHED (US): This is music distilled to its barest essence of hums and oscillations, calling to mind mysterious deep space transmissions, time-lapsed blooms of otherworldly flora, or the amplified vibrational frequencies of the universe itself. An immersive and eerily lovely whole that is especially rewarding on headphones. (read more)
HARMONIC SERIES (US): From the narrow latitudes of sine tones’ ascetic textures & limited movements come complex polyrhythms with orchestral range, from corporeal lows to ethereal highs, that intertongue and interact in criss cross psychoacoustics, simultaneously in stasis and spiraling. (read more)
FLATLANDS FREQUENCIES (US): A sublime new record, ‘New Primes’ is based on a bespoke Max/MSP patch to translate prime number sequences into a web of pure microtonal sine waves. (read more)
THE ARTS DESK (UK): Painstakingly crafted, cutting-edge music. Transitions between the blocks of material are brilliantly engineered, the chords drifting in and out of focus. You can buy New Primes as a high-res download, but the vinyl edition is the one to have. (read more)
Á DÉCOUVRIR ABSOLUMENT (FR): Like a Bach writing mathematical enigmas, [Davis] continues his atypical trajectory as a sound laboratory worker in the form of a declaration of love for a synthetic abstraction rich in subconscious vibrations. (read more)
LOOP (CL): An immersive, and hypnotic experience. (read more)
INACTUELLES (FR): This music gives us an idea of the impalpable, the ineffable, so far does it seem from material and human contingencies. The music of Greg Davis imposes itself by its density thrown into the infinite night. (read more)
ENDAURAL (US): There is a phenomenal physical world within these waves. (read more)
TOUCHING EXTREMES (IT): With no indications of harmonic convention, we float in the strangely resonant clouds that the sine tones’ inherent nature elicits. (read more)
DATAWAVE (US): New Primes is clean and beautiful, meditative and deep, well-balanced and carefully compiled. It's an excellent album for deep listening, as well as for relaxation.
NOWHERE STREET (US): Best of 2022. For anyone looking for a quick-dip into the mind-expanding pleasures of just intonation I’d recommend this sine tone excursion through prime numbers. (read more)
AN EARFUL (US): An alien space of almost pure loneliness, as if engaged in a space-walk between ships. Davis is surely on to something here, and you don't need to know any math for it to grab you. (read more)
MUSICMAP (IT): The most visceral and instinctive form of drone music, made up of repeated atmospheres and sounds that change almost imperceptibly. An authoritative interpretation. (read more)
PAN M 360 (CA): Lovers of sounds in their purest form will delight discovering unsuspected subtleties. The use of headphones is ideal to really appreciate them. (read more)
AMBIENTBLOG (NL): The listener can approach this music on many different levels. ‘Drone’ simply does not cover what this music is about. (read more)
BORING LIKE A DRILL (US): Aside from the usual beatings & psychoacoustic phenomena, Davis lets different pitches overlap in complex ways that produce smoothly-shaped textures with a depth that makes you forget the building blocks from which they were created. (read more)
VITAL WEEKLY (NL): Every time I heard it, I thought I heard the same thing, and every time I seemed to be discovering something new. (read more)
greg davis
Greg Davis is an American electronic musician who has recorded albums drawing from a wide variety of sources, including guitar, field recording, various world/ethnic/traditional instruments, percussion, and voice, all processed through digital manipulation.
He has collaborated with Keith Fullerton Whitman, Ben Vida, Sebastien Roux, Chris Weisman, Steven Hess, Jeph Jerman, Akron/Family, Toby Aronson, and Zach Wallace and has released albums on labels such as Kranky, Ekhein, Room40, Install, Home Normal, Digitalis, Carpark Records, as well on his own Autumn Records.
