Sound design studio Slate + Ash has released a new virtual guitar based on sounds designed by avant-garde guitarists including Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi, and David Torn. Each guitarist contributed fragmentary sounds—loops, textures, resonances, and mechanical failures—that Slate + Ash used its playback engine to deconstruct and turn into a number of recursive preset sounds for the Kontakt 8 sampling platform. Watch a showcase for the software instrument, which is titled Ruins, below.
Randall Dunn’s Williamsburg, Brooklyn, studio, Circular Ruin, co-created the instrument, and studio co-founders Ben Greenberg and Arjan Miranda—as well as prepared guitarist Bill Horist—contributed further source material. Slate + Ash and Circular Ruin describe the instrument as an “infinitely recursive sonic artefact” inspired by the short story that gave the latter studio its name, Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins.
