Craig Scott’s scrapheap improvisations make use of broken music technologies. Portable Walkmans, cassette players and loudspeakers – they’re all good by him, so long as they’ve been dumped in a skip first. Through these dated objects, Scott examines the rapid acceleration of industry and capitalism, creating stuttering loops and ambient accidents that tie a knot between human and machine: mistakes and errors, hand in hand, tumbling through decades shared together in factories and offices and homes.
Scott’s music can also be considered a history, drawing up a chronological timeline of music technologies and their never-ending march of progress. He uses ‘digital automation’ software of the now to fix hardware of the past, ‘exploiting the inherent instability of old devices with the precision that new technology affords’. The music is, in addition, really fun: at hcmf// 2019, he gave a late night performance on his broken machines, giving them rhythm and pulse – using old sounds to develop euphoric noise raves.