si begg: blueprints

Pioneering music producer Si Begg presents his sixth studio album Blueprints on Berlin's legendary label Shitkatapult. His first album in four years, Blueprints is a celebration of raw electronics welded to the "romance of engineering". The project was inspired by the discovery of an old diagrammatic notebook that belonged to Begg's grandfather, George, in his lifetime a cutting-edge engineer. Dubbed "visionary" by The Who's Pete Townshend and widely considered a producer's producer, Begg has been making genre-defying electronic music for more than two decades. He has carved a reputation as a recording artist, DJ, and sound designer, and in more recent years, as an award-winning composer for television and film. Blueprints sees Begg's passion for contemporary score collide with his love of electronic music. Since the release of his last album, 2013's Permission To Explode, Begg has written scores for four feature films as well as for the Netflix original series, Lovesick, and a battle rap documentary, War of Words (2016). The concept for the album sprang fully formed when Begg came across the notebook, a beautifully preserved leather-bound volume, annotated in his grandfather's precise hand. The book was filled with meticulous diagrams of compressors and parallel air ducts, graphs recording comparative noise levels at different factories, statistical information detailing the thermal efficiency of power stations, alongside blueprints for futuristic machines yet to be built. At the same time, Begg was reconnecting with his own back-to-basics studio machinery, the voltage-powered hardware instead of slick high-end software. The parallel discoveries felt like synchronicity and Begg began producing tracks using analog synthesizers recorded live in one take, augmented by circuit bending effects units and the electro-magnetic field noise created by mobile phones and hard drives. Begg decided to champion these idiosyncratic machines, putting them center stage with the aim to demonstrate that not only were these unique tools to create art, they were simultaneously works of art in their own right. The pieces on Blueprints evoke the beauty and romance of great engineering, often overlooked in a landscape of post-industrial gloom. From the hums and sparking pops of "Heat Resistant Alloys" to the relentless subsonic sine waves underpinning "Resistance Is Expensive", raw electrical signals pulse through the heart of the music. This is a work of complex, evolving mathematical patterns, circuitry bent out of shape. It is a hymn to the voltage-controlled oscillator.