Overflow Rival Consoles

• 1 Monster 10:11
• 2 I Like 02:08
• 3 Hands 05:19
• 4 Pulses of Information 04:07
• 5 Noise Call and Response I 04:21
• 6 Overflow 05:36
• 7 The Cloud Oracle 03:28
• 8 Tension in the Cloud 03:36
• 9 Noise Call and Response II 08:37
• 10 Scanning 04:27
• 11 Flow State 11:54
• 12 Touches Everything 05:04
• 13 Making Sense of It All 03:09
• Total Runtime 01:11:57

Info for Overflow

Rival Consoles returns with a new album — a resonant and explorative soundscape of original music, composed for renowned choreographer Alexander Whitley’s contemporary dance production Overflow, and shares bold opening track Monster.

Exploring themes of the human and emotional consequences of life surrounded by data, the piece echoes the concept of social media, advertising, marketing companies and political factions exploiting our data to gain wealth, political advantage and sow division. Key reading for the project was based around the contemporary philosophical work Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han.

"The piece opens with Monster which has a kind of drunken madness to it, highly repetitive to mirror the repetitive nature of how we as humans engage with technology such as social media. It’s sometimes edging towards chaos but yet always returning back to the same starting point, but eventually giving way to exhaustion. I wanted to create a bold opening piece for Overflow," states Ryan Lee West.

Even before the project started, the London-based producer created a lot of sketches in his home studio which acted as a starting point for Whitley to develop the choreography from. An equal amount of work was created in rehearsal, alongside the dancers, then refined at West's studio between sessions.

I Like features the mapping of data from dancer Tia Hockey's personal monologue, which controls the volume of the chords based on the activity of her voice — drawing attention to things happening behind the curtain, invisible systems, algorithms. The album also features the previously released standalone track and slice of euphoria, Pulses of Information, which UK magazine Clash described as "a riveting return. Typically entrancing, [it] seems to encourage a form of internal dialogue, between our inner and outer selves."

Overflow was premiered by the Alexander Whitley Dance Company in May 2021 at the Sadler’s Wells in London and is scheduled to tour through theatres in Europe in spring 2022. West will embark on a UK headline tour this month, followed by European and North American dates in the new year.

“During dry runs in theatres I was composing short works in the moment on my laptop that ended up being used, such as Scanning, which was made from an electromagnetic recording of the internal workings of an iPhone whilst using social media. In the big data world of social media and cookies everything is invisible, silent and hidden behind a pleasant, enticing aesthetic. I thought it would be interesting to do the opposite and have a very scratchy, mechanical, noisey scanning sound that sheds light on what is actually happening.” (Ryan Lee West)

Rival Consoles

Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles
Like many electronic artists, Ryan Lee West aka Rival Consoles spent his early years experimenting with IDM, glitch and dance, but one consistent element in his musical journey has been his desire to create a more organic, humanised sound. Through these experimentations he has found a process of producing electronic music that feels close to this urge. Restricting himself to a small selection of analogue equipment, West engages his hands directly with instruments and is very selective about what he then records into the computer. He reduces musical parts even further, leaving enough space around the sound for it to breath.

Some might be surprised that London based electronic producer Ryan Lee West, the man behind Rival Consoles, shares a home with contemporary classical composers such as Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Peter Broderick. And yet they have a lot more in common than expected. Fascinated by sound from an early age, Ryan chose to dedicate his time to studying, experimenting with and producing sound graduating from De Montfort University in Leicester. West often composes early ideas on piano, violin and guitar, although the end result is much more electronic-laden. As an accomplished sound designer he has repeatedly performed at the Tate, and recently created a bespoke audio-visual performance for Boiler Room at the V&A. Ryan has also produced remixes for New York based composer Nico Muhly and UK producer Jon Hopkins, and composes original music for dance, film and television.

This album contains no booklet.