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Philip Dickau is a Canadian musician who explores the creative potential and limitations of computer software. His first album—
This City, and You—is the result of about a year-and-a-half of experimenting with the limits of Propellerheads' Reason 4.0 software. The goal with these tracks was to make electronic music that was atmospheric and affective, and to explore the possibilities of a wide range of sound creation techniques.
Sonically, the album explores the idea of sounds being processed and distorted until the line between organic and electronic becomes blurred. This process of degrading the natural harmonics of sound is reflected in the album's cover art: a decaying piano covered with debris. The album presents these sonic experiments under a structure reminiscent of western pop music—simple chord progressions and short track lengths—while referencing avant-garde compositional methods such as Reich’s phasing and Cage’s aleatoric techniques.
Inspired by the city of Edmonton, the album's narrative traces a non-linear account of the past two years of the musician’s life there, culminating in the fictionalized destruction of the city in a world-wide apocalyptic event
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