Rashad Becker

[DE]

Over the years, Rashad Becker has accrued credits on over 1,200 albums as a mastering and cutting engineer at Berlin’s esteemed Dubplates and Mastering, as well as at his own Studio Clunk. As a producer, he has released Traditional Music of a Notional Species Vol. 1 and 2 on PAN, in 2013 and 2016 respectively.

Becker’s Traditional Music is an anthropology of an imagined cultural body, informed by innumerable tropes and tribes of sound that are free from a singular aesthetic idea. Individual tracks are protean and exploratory. They encompass material from field samples to modular synthesis, and elude easy identification. In Traditional Music, the producer explores the dynamics of an abstract, hypothetical ecosystem, cycling through abbreviated seasons of generation and decay. Reviews of Becker in performance note a “knack of giving sound its voice” (The Liminal) and a “rare, unmediated engagement… [h]e works with quiet confidence from a massively complex palette, avoiding clichés, imbuing the interactions with an acute fingerprint” (londonjazznews).

In 2017, Becker appeared at festivals such as Terraforma and Atonal, the latter of which saw him perform 8-channel work with Tokyo’s Ena. His critically lauded music presents a formidably intelligent and nuanced relationship to sound, and is immediately distinguishable for its high degree of technical mastery.

Dis Entangle

HAU2, Sat 01.02.2014, 20:00

Thomas Ankersmit, Sven-Åke Johansson, Rashad Becker