Kipple and Bits

You know Ian Simpson and Shaun Blezard better as Noise Research and Clutter respectively, who have both released many projects in experimental and improvisational electronics. Simpson and Blezard teamed up with Derke Saw and Herve Perez on horns, John Jasnoch on guitar, and Charile Collins on drums for an exceptional live recording of their set at Notes and Sounds music series in Sheffield which has been released on the netlabel Electronic Musik. They are collectively known as Kipple.

The band’s name comes from Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”

“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. ” ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple.’ Like Gersham’s law about bad money. In these apartments there’s been nobody to fight the kipple.”

“So it has taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.”

[snip]

“No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universle principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving twoard a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

No, these improvisations aren’t useless in the kipple way, rather the band Kipple creates environment that tends to build upon one another and create a sound that almost reproduces itself, “It always gets more and more.” Kipple is the hybrid of improvisational jazz and electronic music with Simpson and Blezard on substituting their electronic talents for the more standard piano.

Here is a Kipple track from the various artist album All Sensation Is Already Memory on the netlabel Open Source Group.