Rival Consoles

Rival Consoles reminds me of the studio garage that I was working in as a design student. I was doing print making and screen print as well as CAD and 3D printing. The garage was full of my grandfathers antique belongings. A museum of his life, old tools, an antique work bench, an old record player and my aunts and grandfathers records. Old soda and beer cans from the 1950s, a steel deck chair with a cushion that I would sit back in and put my left leg on my knee while I smoked an old pipe that had belonged to him. I would sit for hours and wonder and investigate, listening to new music on Spotify and old volumes on record. I would work on prints and sketches, experiments with materials and plants. I would place the piece on the work bench or floor and sit back and look at it for hours reflecting, contemplating. The music I was listening to at the time had an amazing consistency through theory, technology, art, and logic.

Rival Consoles album Persona had album art featuring two abstracted characters, faces overlapping, an allusion to duality or the double ghost phenomena. Working in a paired mind can seem war like, the harmoniouness of equanimity and the suffering and release of detachment.

Articulation came out shortly after covid lockdowns. I had been sitting outside watching the garden grow and began to percieve an internal struggle, a battle with slashes cutting through thoughts, hateful aversion at every unwanted mental activity. I bailed with the internal violence while watching flowers grow. When I found articulation online a few weeks later, it’s art and music had an aire of awareness to it, like he to had been aware of the same battle. Perhaps a gigantic perspective clashed and exploded like spheres of thought seperating, a civil war, a concentration that could not resolve in wholeness without internal chaos.

The patterned cover art like code. In an interview he discussed stepping away from the equipment and drawing the patterns as a part of the process.

His music and art remind me of the power of this record keeping and how one can cover the entirity of a school of thought with an album cover and a few songs. A true composer of our generation capturing the zeitgeist as well as the more universal aspects of the human experience.