Stoch Press EPK – About Stoch

STOCH

Non-Square Music

Melbourne October 2019. Stoch bursts onto the live music scene at Brunswick’s famed Red Betty bar in front of nearly thirty people. He quickly follows up with a live and studio EP and now a new studio album, MAGICIAN.

“I’m just getting started!” he says, stating the obvious.

WHO or WTF is STOCH?

Stoch is a new musical project from filmmaker, visual artist and composer/producer David Nerlich, best known for the Australian survival-horror feature film Black Water (2007). In previous musical incarnations, David has performed in a range of Sydney music ensembles such as Mesh, Lingo Babel and The Tension Nuts, and at events such as Livid and What is Music and the NOW now festivals. He has shared the stage with artists such as Rik Rue, Oren Ambarchi, Robby Avenaim, Robert Iolini, Claire Cooper, Greg Kingston, Carl Dewhurst, Andrew Garton, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley, Roger Dean.

‘Stoch’ refers to stochastic processes the artist sometimes uses, improvising or generating chaotic forms and then selecting and refining what is magical from that chaos.

Eschew repetition, eschew even composition, embrace the endless unknown. Cause the accident. Make stuff new, different, non-uniform throughout. This is my quest, to follow that star. No matter how hopeless, no matter how far

About ‘Magician’

Everything in the this album by Stoch is gleaned from a vast revolving sheet of musical chaos and the random magical collisions taking place within it. Lyrics have been drawn by the same method from a scrawled palette of words, sung out of order and thrown into the whirling chaos of sound, into which the ladel is plunged again and again. The most golden nuggets thus extracted are arranged into a poem of sound , the chaos reduced and distilled into something familiar yet still complex and surprising..

Are the results obviously extraordinary? We’re not sure. For the most part we’ve remained within our jazz and fusion genre. What is achieved is complexity and an absence of repetition, invention of a kind greater than the mere imagination of its inventor might wreak gazing at a blank page armed with only a lifetime of training and habit. Let the chaos in. Let the universe in. We’re running out of time.

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About ‘Stoch and the VL-Tones’

Bold claim: This EP may represent the first published use of the full capability of the Casio VL-Tone (first released in 1979), featuring what Stoch refers to as the “organic sequencer”, an overlooked feature of the classic micro-synth responsible for the cascades of shred notes heard here.

Enjoy the vintage sound quality. Originally recorded on a Tascam 244 portastudio, the four studio tracks were rescued and remastered from ancient cassette dubs.

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Wots that symbol mean??

Well, you may have gathered by now that my Stoch schtick is chaos as a starting point and complex order as an end point. This symbol represents things intersecting, happy combinations, a circle marking a collision of interest. It is also echoing both the symbol for chaos and the legend of the crossroads. The title of MAGICIAN refers to a thing called chaos magic which has been described as a set of techniques for deliberately engineering synchronicities, or coincidences, which is exactly how I create music. It all fits! What a coincidence!

Need more words?

Stoch’s Journey

Order From Chaos. But First, Chaos.

I Went Down To The Crossroads

Stoch passed Robert Johnson on the way to the crossroads, stood next to Charles Ives as the marching bands crossed paths, asked the Devil how to possibly play all that in tune.

“I watched Zappa collide with King Crimson then get rear-eneded by Beefheart, went in to pick up souvenirs from the wreckage and even saw pieces of 70’s prog lying around. I didn’t know which was from what but found some pieces fitted together in curiously harmonious ways”.

“There you go.” said the Devil, “curious harmony. Just embrace the chaos, because it IS the crossroads.”

But where was Xenakis, father of Stochastic Music? Wasn’t he there? “He was.” said a bystander, “But who needs all that mathematics?” Stoch concurs and concludes, “We can summon chaos without a lot of effort, with purpose-built randomisers with probability settings”. The fire of chaos has been stolen for us by our promethean machines. Let chaos reign.