New Signal: Stagnat – We Better Stop Here Because The Horses Are Dead

The final piece of DE/FRAGMENT’s third VA compilation will make it complete. Stagnat conjured an offbeat techno driver, depicting empty, dark, and, at times, disturbing sonic spaces for clubs.

“DE/FRAGMENT presents seemingly unrelated

fragments bound by a common theme :

complete artistic freedom.”

– Douchean, DE/FRAGMENT’s founder

Operating as a label and club night organizer in Ljubljana, DE/FRAGMENT enjoys the privilege of unparalleled creative control for producers to play their material in a space they rent. Put differently, DE/FRAGMENT understands that the only way without compromises is one without middlemen.

The collective is set to release its third VA compilation [DEFRAG009] on 8/12/2023. It will contain a respectable diversity of sound fragments from prolific Slovene underground talent. Put bluntly, individual statements of artistic intent are expressed as no-nonsense club material.

Yet, I wasn’t satisfied with any of the pictorial descriptions for the sound that I could come up with. They sounded right at first but would fall short of capturing the full essence of the release. None of these descriptions were far off, either, missing the target by a small margin. A margin, nonetheless.

The pattern/binding glue/common denominator of the release was evidently present, though evading any and all attempts on my behalf to give a name to the pattern I saw. I had an embarrassing amount of tip-of-the-tongue promises that sadly never left the tongue, forever lost to the ether of linguistic ambiguity. I have to admit that I found intriguing both the challenge of finding a satisfactory binding agent, as well as figuring out why is this a challenging read. What followed was an undisclosed amount of time getting stuck in thought loops.

First, I tried to find the pattern by looking at the cover photos of releases side by side. Surprisingly, it immediately became clear the pictures have something in common. However, as soon as I tried describing the common thread as a pattern with a name, the idea fell apart like a house of cards, tearing down tactful nuances with a strong wind a definition’s rigidity. Back to square one.

For example, I might see a clear color pattern arising in one of the photos corresponding to synergic color palettes, but I cannot transfer the pattern to another photo and its colors. Answering the “what is the color pattern” question correctly for a given photo would be a short-lived victory. The idea that a valid color pattern across releases would immediately collapse as soon as I looked at another release. Being a stubborn pattern searcher, I looped through this cycle many times before deciding to try the auditory route. Little did I know…

Onwards I marched to DJ listening through fragments to reach a whole. Paradoxically (or even expectedly at this point), I undoubtedly hear the tracks carry manifestations of a singular substance, yet I find it impossible to describe the underlying substance satisfactorily (now that’s a pattern). It seemed there was a more sublime explanation of why I saw cohesion in the way I approached the task at hand.

It’s frustrating, to say the least, to constantly experience a feeling you cannot name! I was getting tired of the thought loops that I would promise not to fall into again, only to be stuck in another 10s later, as I saw another pattern. At this point, repeated failures might mean I am using the right tool for the wrong purpose, or vice versa…? Maybe I was asking the wrong question?

The question itself wasn’t wrong, but the level of analysis definitely was, as the thought loops resulted from searching patterns in data, but that would be only one possible explanation. What if, say, the patterns are not identical, but the process that generates them is?

Turns out, assuming the aesthetic’s patterns are inspired by the process of defragmentation of hard disk drives (after which DE/FRAGMENT was named) was the first breakthrough. In essence, hard disk drives store digital data using physical space. However, sometimes data gets divided into “fragments”, which get stored at different physical locations. This is why two seemingly distant fragments might have originally been part of the same whole, while two seemingly close fragments could have nothing to do with each other.

To reduce physical distance as the inter-fragment similarity increases, we perform the process of defragmentation. It is conducted by moving fragments’ physical locations closer to other related fragments in a way that minimizes the number of remaining fragments.

Taking inspiration from progressive rock, DE/FRAGMENT’s releases place emphasis on a carefully curated order of tracks, making the track order a form of defragmentation. Suddenly, it is the ordering of the tracks that generate meaning through their very own defragmentation. What seemingly used to be composed of track fragments with nothing in common is now given meaning by a carefully chosen progression within a release. Not only that, but I can finally describe to myself what I hear by finding the static-generating process. Beautiful.

The mystery of cover photos resolves itself too. Assign each track a visual element, and then recreate visually the track order of the release. This means that there is no given visual pattern that persists between releases, but the process of generating an image to represent the release does. Ta-da!

In short, the releases’ visual aesthetic should represent a visual relationship of ideas conveyed through auditory experience. Defragmentation within and between sensory modalities.

DE/FRAGMENT.

DE/FRAGMENT’s V.A.3 (DEFRAG009) is almost complete.

Electronic Tesseract has been given the honor of premiering the final fragment, Stagnat’s – We Better Stop Here Because The Horses Are Dead. Edgy, driving peaktime for those who want their minds to be swept away into a rabbit hole.

Reminiscent of Slovak offbeat productions, such as the weighty DJ Boss, action starts immediately in form of a perfectly executed combat roll. Would it sound more tense if you combat rolled of your horse, which died mid-gallop, and immediately broke into a run for your life.

The heart is pounding to the percussion, periodically deafened by the background screeching of curses carried by the wind. As a long-term survivor of this land, the fast-paced kicks instill a killer resolve to keep moving forward no matter what, even if the horses are dead.

This track will turn any club into a massacre through a merciless groove that stops for nothing, especially not the horses.