HEADBOGGLE

 

HEADBOGGLE NEWS AND UPDATES 

 

HEADBOGGLE DJ MIX FOR FOXY DIGITALIS 

For his second full-length and first on vinyl with Oakland-based Ratskin Records, Derek Gedalecia’s HEADBOGGLE project has taken the critically acclaimed hybrid one-minute electronic-stylings of 2019’s “Polyphonic Demo” (Ratskin) and expanded his ideas into 24 longer form pieces that pull from Parliament/Funkadelic as much as Raymond Scott. “Digital Digital Analog” could easily be undulating in the catacombs of label discographies from Editions Mego to Sub Pop or even Mute Records, but has landed in the bin of the Oakland esoteric imprint Ratskin Records. We couldn’t be more excited to present this on beautiful limited edition clear vinyl and digital download to the world, certainly Headboggle's most astute and developed work to date. 

The strange and alien worlds Headboggle opens up throughout the album are a complex mix of Gedalecia’s mischievous sense of humor, love of pure sound, and quirky melodic sensibility inspired by his studies of ragtime and classical music. Whereas previous LPs were more improv-based in their arrangements, “Digital Digital Analog” refines Gedalecia’s decades of research into synthesis through a highly focused and refined compositional lens. The album represents the culmination of 20 plus years of sonic experimentation spanning noise, new music, avant garde, collage, soundtrack oriented music, and so much more into a meticulously refined and generously melodic approach. “Digital Digital Analog” far eclipses the artist's previous works in a myriad of ways wholly rewarding for the listener. 

“Digital Digital Analog" is the first Headboggle album to feature MIDI and digital synths as well as Steinway grand piano. This is another subtext for the album that new Digital and Analog instruments were utilized. 

“While other releases were more conceptual, often featuring a single instrument, whereas ‘Digital Digital Analog’ is a full-fledged stops-out utilization of every instrument and every production technique at my disposal.“ - Headboggle 

"Digital Digital Analog" references in shorthand the old Compact Disc convention of noting how the album was recorded and issued. In this case, it was recorded digitally, mastered digitally, and prepared for analog release on vinyl with an appropriate sequence of tracks and artwork. 

With it’s compositionally adventurous spirit, and sonically cinematic presentations, “Digital Digital Analog" stands as Gedalecia’s most refined and articulate work to date. Most of the tracks for "Digital Digital Analog” came out of the continued exploration of the Dave Smith Prophet polyphonic synthesizer and was culled from many hours of rehearsals in preparation for Ratskin Records 2019 US Tour. 

Picture the undulating synth lines of mid-‘70s Parliament transplanted to a petri dish and allowed to grow, or maybe the soundtrack to the most baffling caper movie ever made, and you might have a fraction of what Digital Digital Analog contains. This 36-minute record finds Gedalecia working across a variety of rhythm and genre templates, the titles (“Ancient Trap,” “Skip Pop, ”Breakdance Music”) provoking many questions and fewer answers. The music can be at times both stark and grandiose, desolate and luxuriant, dead-serious and ridiculous, dirge-like and joyful; it’s all de rigueur for Headboggle. 

Gedalecia has taken the best and most developed parts of a myriad of sound synthesis and production techniques and coalesced it into a forty minute tour de force of forward-thinking, cinematic and whimsical music. To contextualize this album as anything short of his grand opus within the context of his vast 100+ release back catalog wouldn’t be giving “Digital Digital Analog” it’s due diligence.

BIOGRAPHY 

Derek Gedalecia, a.k.a. Headboggle, has been performing electronic keyboard-based soundscapes for several years in the Bay Area in over a hundred local performances at venues ranging from GTK to YBCA. Incorporating lowbrow with highbrow art, music, and comedy, Head Boggle’s intent is to fuse together a new ecstatic improvisational performance style with a carefully crafted musical underbed. In his formative years, Gedalecia studied classical and ragtime piano from noted ragtime composer/revivalist Dr. Brian Dykstra.

 

Digital Digital Analog

Headboggle

For his second full-length and first on vinyl with Oakland-based Ratskin Records, Derek Gedalecia’s HEADBOGGLE project has taken the critically acclaimed hybrid one-minute electronic-stylings of 2019’s “Polyphonic Demo” (Ratskin) and expanded his ideas into 24 longer form pieces that pull from Parliament/Funkadelic as much as Raymond Scott. “
For his second full-length and first on vinyl with Oakland-based Ratskin Records, Derek Gedalecia’s HEADBOGGLE project has taken the critically acclaimed hybrid one-minute electronic-stylings of 2019’s “Polyphonic Demo” (Ratskin) and expanded his ideas into 24 longer form pieces that pull from Parliament/Funkadelic as much as Raymond Scott. “Digital Digital Analog” could easily be undulating in the catacombs of label discographies from Editions Mego to Sub Pop or even Mute Records, but has landed in the bin of the Oakland esoteric imprint Ratskin Records. We couldn’t be more excited to present this on beautiful limited edition clear vinyl and digital download to the world, certainly Headboggle's most astute and developed work to date.

The strange and alien worlds Headboggle opens up throughout the album are a complex mix of Gedalecia’s mischievous sense of humor, love of pure sound, and quirky melodic sensibility inspired by his studies of ragtime and classical music. Whereas previous LPs were more improv-based in their arrangements, “Digital Digital Analog” refines Gedalecia’s decades of research into synthesis through a highly focused and refined compositional lens. The album represents the culmination of 20 plus years of sonic experimentation spanning noise, new music, avant garde, collage, soundtrack oriented music, and so much more into a meticulously refined and generously melodic approach. “Digital Digital Analog” far eclipses the artist's previous works in a myriad of ways wholly rewarding for the listener.

“Digital Digital Analog" is the first Headboggle album to feature MIDI and digital synths as well as Steinway grand piano. This is another subtext for the album that new Digital and Analog instruments were utilized.

“While other releases were more conceptual, often featuring a single instrument, whereas ‘Digital Digital Analog’ is a full-fledged stops-out utilization of every instrument and every production technique at my disposal.“ - Headboggle

"Digital Digital Analog" references in shorthand the old Compact Disc convention of noting how the album was recorded and issued. In this case, it was recorded digitally, mastered digitally, and prepared for analog release on vinyl with an appropriate sequence of tracks and artwork.

With it’s compositionally adventurous spirit, and sonically cinematic presentations, “Digital Digital Analog" stands as Gedalecia’s most refined and articulate work to date. Most of the tracks for "Digital Digital Analog” came out of the continued exploration of the Dave Smith Prophet polyphonic synthesizer and was culled from many hours of rehearsals in preparation for Ratskin Records 2019 US Tour.

Picture the undulating synth lines of mid-‘70s Parliament transplanted to a petri dish and allowed to grow, or maybe the soundtrack to the most baffling caper movie ever made, and you might have a fraction of what Digital Digital Analog contains. This 36-minute record finds Gedalecia working across a variety of rhythm and genre templates, the titles (“Ancient Trap,” “Skip Pop, ”Breakdance Music”) provoking many questions and fewer answers. The music can be at times both stark and grandiose, desolate and luxuriant, dead-serious and ridiculous, dirge-like and joyful; it’s all de rigueur for Headboggle.

Gedalecia has taken the best and most developed parts of a myriad of sound synthesis and production techniques and coalesced it into a forty minute tour de force of forward-thinking, cinematic and whimsical music. To contextualize this album as anything short of his grand opus within the context of his vast 100+ release back catalog wouldn’t be giving “Digital Digital Analog” it’s due diligence.
Read more…
0:00/???
  1. 1
    0:00/2:21
  2. 2
    0:00/0:42

Polyphonic demo (2019)

"Polyphonic Demo"

Headboggle

San Francisco's Derek Gedalecia's long-standing HEADBOGGLE moniker has boasted over 100 releases in his twenty plus years composing and releasing music that spans from dense layered noise, synthesizer based works, avant neo-classical, to giddy electronics to ragtime piano, but none of these 100 plus releases have fully purged the deepest depths of
San Francisco's Derek Gedalecia's long-standing HEADBOGGLE moniker has boasted over 100 releases in his twenty plus years composing and releasing music that spans from dense layered noise, synthesizer based works, avant neo-classical, to giddy electronics to ragtime piano, but none of these 100 plus releases have fully purged the deepest depths of unexplored sonic territories, with the inspired urgency and carefully honed strategic extraction of unheard sounds as his newest record, titled "Polyphonic Demo", to be released on CD and digital this November via Ratskin Records. On "Polyphonics Demo", Gedalecia abandons all notions of what experimental music is "supposed" to sound like to offer a exploding, tense, exuberant, yet refreshingly idiosyncratic take on synthesizer music. With forty-four one minute tracks, meant to be shuffled on CD or remain in their sequenced order, Gedalecia completely re imagines what is possible both compositionally and spatially within the confines of a sixty second track, or an electronic music album for that matter. "Polyphonics Demo" is the listening adventure of abstract, yet masterfully grounded take on electronic music we've all been waiting for.

“Headboggle splinters his typically all-encompassing style of synth composition into tiny one minute morsels & the results play out like fellow Bay Area legends The Residents on their Commercial Album: short and sweet, presenting each idea as a discrete miniature world and moving on. Derek presents a comprehensive taxonomy of the tones and strategies within his arsenal of synths and electronics, finding room for everything from glistening classical-informed harmonies to the bludgeoning rhythmic squelches that have become his signature. Across 44 tracks, Derek dilates time and sketches out some oblique narrative known only to him that seems to contain infinite details”.
- Max Allison, Hausu Mountain

“ HOLY SHIT Headboggle has gone “commercial” with (44) one-minute jingles of brain-damaged intent. I can’t get over this joker’s Modern Ballroom Dancing © sound - puts me super smiley in the headspace of Mort Garson or The Residents. My favorite release of his so far.”
- Bran (...) Pos

Derek Gedalecia, a.k.a. Headboggle, has been performing electronic keyboard-based soundscapes for several years in the Bay Area in over a hundred local performances at venues ranging from GTK to YBCA. Incorporating lowbrow with highbrow art, music, and comedy, Head Boggle’s intent is to fuse together a new ecstatic improvisational performance style with a carefully crafted musical underbed. In his formative years, Gedalecia studied classical and ragtime piano from noted ragtime composer/revivalist Dr. Brian Dykstra.



For Fans Of: The Residents, Bee Mask, Suzanne Ciani, Wendy Carlos.
.

For press inquiries, interviews, videos, hi res photos please email : ratskinsound@gmail.com or www.ratskin.org

https://www.ratskin.org/artists/headboggle.html
Read more…
0:00/???
  1. 1
    0:00/1:00
  2. 2
    0:00/1:00
  3. 3
    0:00/1:00
  4. 4
    0:00/1:00
  5. 5
    0:00/1:00
  6. 6
    0:00/1:00
  7. 7
    0:00/1:00
  8. 8
    0:00/1:00
  9. 9
    0:00/1:00
  10. 10
    0:00/1:00
  11. 11
    0:00/1:00
  12. 12
    0:00/1:00
  13. 13
    0:00/1:00
  14. 14
    0:00/1:00
  15. 15
    0:00/1:00
  16. 16
    0:00/1:00
  17. 17
    0:00/1:00
  18. 18
    0:00/1:00
  19. 19
    0:00/1:00
  20. 20
    0:00/1:00
  21. 21
    0:00/1:00
  22. 22
    0:00/1:00
  23. 23
    0:00/1:00
  24. 24
    0:00/1:00
  25. 25
    0:00/1:00
  26. 26
    0:00/1:00
  27. 27
    0:00/1:00
  28. 28
    0:00/1:00
  29. 29
    0:00/1:00
  30. 30
    0:00/1:00
  31. 31
    0:00/1:00
  32. 32
    0:00/1:00
  33. 33
    0:00/1:00
  34. 34
    0:00/1:00
  35. 35
    0:00/1:00
  36. 36
    0:00/1:00
  37. 37
    0:00/1:00
  38. 38
    0:00/1:00
  39. 39
    0:00/1:00
  40. 40
    0:00/1:00
  41. 41
    0:00/1:00
  42. 42
    0:00/1:00
  43. 43
    0:00/1:00
  44. 44
    0:00/1:00

PRESS

"Polyphonic Demo" Reviewed in The WIRE : Adventures In Modern Music. - Issue #425. June 2019 

"Blue Guitar" on The WIRE Tapper 

"Polyphonic Demo" in Tiny Mix Tapes  - May 2019 

"It doesn’t matter what you do. It works either way. Gedalecia is known for his far-out synthesizer work, and Polyphonic feels like an ADD mixer at the futuristic bus station, where Headboggle has somehow set up his modular gear in the midst of a crowded atrium and improvised the mood of each passerby. Quick shifts only serve to highlight the complexity of the composition, and one mood cannot be universally applied. While this lack of focused study might seem like a detriment to the career anthropologist, to the rapid-fire impressionist it’s a fascinating look at the quick take, the initial impression. Which is why it’s equally as fun to listen to these tracks on shuffle as it is to take in Polyphonic straight through."

"Polyphonic Demo" reviewed  in A Closr Listen 

"Polyphonic Demo" in We Need No Swords - May 2019 

"Polyphonic Demo" reviewed on KFJC 89.7 FM 

"Polyphonic Demo"  Reviewed in Counterzine 

"Polyphonic Demo"  Reviewed in Y.I.K.I.S. 

Interview with ROOD WOOF Magazine 

"Polyphonic Demo" Reviewed in Underscore Music Magazine - March 2019 

"Blue Guitar" Premiere on Houdini Mansions

“Songs like Blue Guitar … shape cavernous reverberations, not so much in a sense of interiors but looking outward toward the oceanic expanse observed from San Francisco, while “Ad Break” and “Buchla Club” showcase a penchant for more abstract compositions””

— THE WIRE: Adventures In Modern Music