Brooklyn, NY’s Shape King has shared new track dumbingitdown. You can take a listen via Soundcloud below.
Shape King is the experimental music project of artist Raphael Peterson which has fierce self-reliance, drawing on explorations in music, technology, poetry, and sculpture. Raphael designs and fabricates instruments, electronics, speakers, microphones, and software. He records and performs live with these tools, inhabiting a role that shifts between musician, engineer, and artist. The music combines electronic synthesis, recorded live performance, stock sounds, and meticulously collected field samples to create rich sonic collages that reveal a sharp ear for “high” and “low” styles and revelry in their juxtaposition.
Shape King was created with the synthesis of skills acquired through an unusual collegiate trajectory. Raphael dropped out of an engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to build guitars at the apex of the craft under luthier Ervin Somogyi, and to play in bands. After a few years, he returned to college and completed a bachelors in music at Columbia University, where he studied composition under George Lewis, as well as orchestration, conducting, theory, and electronic music at the Columbia Computer Music Center.
Raphael is based in Brooklyn, NY, and has collaborated with numerous musicians as player, engineer, and arranger. He mixed two albums by Half Waif, including breakout album ‘Probable Depths’ and single Turn Me Around, which was awarded Pitchfork’s “Best New Track”. Other collaborators include twig twig, Hannah Epperson, Julia Easterlin, Max Jaffe, Nick Hakim, members of Renata Zeiguer’s band, and members of Zula.
Look out for the release of the double LP, ‘DADO Sketchbook,’ one week from today. ‘DADO Sketchbook’ is a series of electroacoustic sketches. Each piece was completed within 24 hours of its conception. Most were not premeditated.
