Hypnotic Patches, by Will Klingenmeier—
Layered Textures of Our Time

Will Klingenmeier’s Hypnotic Patches is a series of soundscapes combining shimmering textures, gravelly distortion, and pulsing rhythms. Begun at the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, these sound art pieces grew from a simple desire, one shared by millions: to have a reprieve from digital, pixelated screens after the mass migration of social interaction, commerce, work, and even yoga classes to virtual representations on phone and computer screens. In June 2021, Will began making patches, or chains of sound-processing effects, in order to reconnect his music production with “physical knobs and buttons,” adjusting and improvising sounds in real time as he recorded them to analog cassettes.

The album is engaging and energetic, by turns contemplative, noisy, and boppily rhythmic. Listening to the pieces, I feel enveloped by a mélange of the dynamics of post-pandemic life, processed into unified textures of sound: the increasing imposition of centralized authority (which has extended far beyond public health measures), the acceleration of roboticization and virtualization in all aspects of communication and exchange, and the human spirit straining toward wholeness and self-determination, as integrity, rootedness, and the fundamental experience of corporeality and consciousness are eroded by capitalized digital machineries.

Hypnotic Patches captures viscerality within our increasingly virtualized age. Some of the patches sound like an electronic calliope undergirded by a beating heart. The pieces have an opalescent timbre even as they include a lo-fi aesthetic, both through the dubbing to tape and from the use of a bit-crusher, a form of distortion by means of conversion in and out of a low-resolution digital file format—which forms a parallel to our social and economic reality, in which life is narrowed and distorted by reduction to a flat binary projection on a screen.

A “patch” in this context is a series of sound processors, or effects, which may bend, alter, distort, or add qualities to a signal. The source sounds fed into these patches came from an oscillator, and from a sequencer to produce rhythms. While there are no actual drums on the album, one of the patches includes a sound like processed tom-toms, evoking firing weapons, the pumping of missiles into some target in a video game. This correspondence has particular relevance in our time, where life has increasingly taken on the quality of video games. We interact with the world through screens, on which war games and feature films are color-processed to an identical optical quality, so that it’s the same visual experience to watch a fictionalized battle in a movie or a fantasy massacre in Call of Duty or actual war footage on Youtube or the news.

You could collect millions of pages of statistics on a given phenomenon (as we have done with the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath) and still have no idea how it has affected your mind, heart, sense of self, vision for the future, or relationship to the past. Like all successful works of art, Hypnotic Patches does not offer fixed concrete answers to the questions and issues it engages, but rather offers a context of reflection to consider them.

The album ends with a slow, plangent wall of sound subsiding like a flow of released breath. Stepping away from screens and computerized music production, using physical knobs and buttons, Will Klingenmeier has processed audio signals into soundscapes like sketches of consciousness in our time. Listening to these sonic layers and textures, we sink into the terms of contemporary life with our senses, with our physical bodies, the touch of soundwaves on our ears and skin.