Berlin-based French-Irish multimedia artist Zoë Mc Pherson levels up on their third full-length ‘Pitch Blender’, mangling years of experience DJing and performing live into a tight set of cybernetic soundsystem experiments that flicker between the rave and the art space.
Cast your mind back to February 2020 for a moment, when Mc Pherson released their last album “States of Fugue”. The world seemed less tangled somehow, and yet Mc Pherson’s precision-engineered fusion of exploratory sound design and visceral club pressure seemed to hint at a cataclysmic event none of us were really expecting. Only a few weeks after its release the world changed forever, and the majority of us were grounded – forced to consider our lives and the movement (or lack thereof) surrounding us. The philosophy of this extended time period is welded into the bones of “Pitch Blender”, Mc Pherson’s supple third album. They have learned plenty in the last two years, and infuse all of that anxiety and spiky emotionality into a spread of tracks that sound as powerful in headphones as they do over a well-tweaked soundsystem, soldering vocals, environmental recordings and instrumental flourishes to unpredictably pneumatic, cybernetic beats.
Mc Pherson has performed at Berlin’s CTM, Jinja’s Nyege Nyege, Freerotation in the UK, Meakusma in Belgium, Madrid’s LEV and played live for Berghain Halle‘s first livestream ever, as well as presenting spatial sound installations at Berlin’s Monom and Graz’s Elevate festival amongst others. They also curate the ambitious A/V-focused imprint SFX with multimedia artist Alessandra Leone and maintain creative partnerships with Jessica Ekomane, DJ Diaki & Jay Mitta (as 3OK) and Ciarra Black (as Carbon 96).
Mc Pherson will premiere their album live show at Saüle/Berghain March 18th in Berlin and the A/V version of it in collaboration with Alessandra Leone will debut at Rewire festival in the Hague on April 7th.
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@sfx_space
Photo by @lucieroxxx
Pitch Blender is out now: https://sfx-space.bandcamp.com/album/pitch-blender-sf04
