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Patrick Balthrop uses real-time processing applications and customized software to produce electronic music. Unlike many of his Chicago House counterparts, Patrick constructs and assembles sounds between ten and one hundred milliseconds into microbeats.
Balthrop's interactive, three-dimensional surround sound mixes and sound designs have been critically acclaimed. He just finished sound design on 2K Games hit BioShock and MTV Games Rock Band 2. His latest album release, Sundowner, was named one of the top five releases of 2007 by Phlow Magazine. His songs have been placed in films shown at The Sundance Film Festival and the New York International Independent Film Festival. Patrick has developed a set of performance based generative plug-ins, which through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and redefine the audio signals that produced them.
Along with his electronic music for micro-heads, Patrick formed The Holepunch Generation for post-rock/breakbeat enthusiasts.
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Autopoetic:.:.:.:.:.released on:.:.:.:.: Gears Of Sand :.:.:.:.:.:.:
Sundowner:.:.:.:.:released on:.:.:.:.: Xynthetic Netlabel :.:.:.:.
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MTV Games: Rock Band 2
2K Games: BioShock
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Re:automation plays tracks off of Sundowner in Episode 109
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"Intelligent, gorgeous, occasionally frightening...Anchored by its provocative, morality-based story line, sumptuous art direction and superb voice acting, BioShock can also hold its head high among the best games ever made."-- The New York Times
"BioShock looks and sounds better than any other game - and plays just as beautiful - is just the cherry on top. If our scale went to 11, BioShock would earn it. It is, in a word, rapturous.."-- The Village Voice
.:.:Autopoetic, by new kid on the synthetic block Patrick Balthrop, is an album located on the more harmonious clines of a notional Kranky/12k interface. Its title denotes a system whose boundaries, behaviors, and power relations are continually maintained and redefined through a ‘self-making’ circular process which produces its own components; these in turn structure the entire system as a unity, maintaining its integrity and identity despite the constant flux of its dynamically changing components. Which definitional discourse seems to neatly summarize Balthrop’s method/process, though leaving its precise musicality unilluminated. This resides more in microsound than IDM, eschewing overt trap drum sounds or sampled breakage, preferring more subtle allusion to rhythmicity fluttering and fibrillating lower-end sonics in the Raster-Noton tradition of Nicolai (Alva Noto) and Bretschneider (Komet). Over these percussive elements Balthrop weaves a gentle glitchwork tapestry, with tuneful keyboard textures, never overstating or overstaying (11 tracks covering barely 37 minutes, the longest track coming in at 4:02)....Best of all is the gorgeous end pair: ‘Bedbox,’ an object lesson in a small-is-beautiful approach to sonic architecture, whose textural delicacy somehow gets big on you without making any large gestures. Then an elegiac sad-happy closure with ‘Until We Meet Again.’ Autopoetics: microbeats, microsounds, and microsongs from under the new bedsit floorboards. -- Alan Lockett of e|i magazine
.:.:Patrick Balthrop's sound is one of software based manipulation. He constructs sounds using short samples and fragments and then arranges and structures these to form his rhythmic elements as well as musical moments. The end result is a friendly sound which ranges from classic electronica with crisp rhythms and elements of melody, right through to a beatless, ambient sound with lightly experimental tones and samples. Add to that subtle vocals on a couple of the tracks and you've got a comprehensively put together CD of classy electronic music that's as diverse as it is lovely. -- Smallfish Records
.:.:Balthrop crafts complex bits of sonic sculpture, with these tiny blurts of sound punctuating waking-dream keyboard washes to create percussive elements that feel half-imagined even as they impart an irresistible urge to groove, just slightly, with the sound. The effect is so subtle that giving in to it feels like an involuntary reflex. The tracks slip effortlessly one into the next, with just the slightest shift in intent and execution creating marked differences in tone and feel—the child’s-toy melody of “Throwaways,†the manipulated guitar samples in the elegant track, “The Night Rose,†the simple sine-wave roll of “Chasing Through the Cornfield.†Autopoetic is a perfect exercise in the art of subtlety and understatement. It’s engaging, thoroughly enjoyable, and a very likely candidate for endless repeat play. -- Hypnagogue
.:.:Released on the excellent Gears Of Sand label, Autopoetic really was the Sound of the Smoking Rooms when it came out - an album that works however hard you listen to it. The track Bedbox still is a particular fave. -- The Blue Lotus Smoking Rooms
.:.:Marvellous numbness..."Sundowner" is bright. Perfect. -- Thierry Massard of No Comment
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