Album Notes

In a world full of musical clones, the DNA of guitarist and producer Andre LaFosse runs rampant with rare strains of cross-breeding and gene-splicing.

His debut album, Disruption Theory, charts a collision course between formalized instrumental musicianship and street-level DJ aesthetics, going deep inside the relationship between "live" and "sampled" music to uncover connections both familiar and bizarre.

Far from a contrived collage of generic beats underneath conventional instrumental playing, Disruption Theory functions as a natural extension of LaFosse's long-term musical eclecticism.

His musical background is both wide-ranging and in-depth; the scope of his experience encompasses live performance, studio production, sound engineering, and formal musical study in everything from classical to jazz to rock to avante-garde, and countless points between.

As a result, Disruption Theory is an album that eludes easy categorization, even as a quick examination reveals elements of modern dance music, compositional approaches from both Western and non-Western traditions, and an array of guitar-oriented styles.

But in the interest of oversimplifying matters and describing it in a basic sense, Disruption Theory could be said to function as a hybrid of rock and jungle.

There are obvious elements of drum & bass all over the album; most of the songs are built around jungle-derived rhythms, and the genre's distinctively chopped-up, nonlinear logic informs the material on several levels.

But Disruption Theory is also a guitar album; aside from his rhythm section programming (and a Mellotron sample on the title track), LaFosse produced every sound on the album with an electric guitar.

The textures that adorn the album cover a vast spectrum, from bare-boned traditional guitar tones to angular post-ambient sonics utterly unrecognizable from their six-string origins.

Of course, all of this comes at a point in time when simply putting guitar lines over drum & bass rhythms is hardly an innovative gesture in itself.

Disruption Theory paints its picture in wide, complex strokes: beyond simply placing contrasting musical colors of performance and programming next to each other, the album functions as a palette that blends those hues together until an altogether different shade emerges.

The result is music that both embraces and violates convention in equal measure.

Cut-and-paste digital textures and dancefloor sensibilities are infiltrated by traces of song-like compositional structure, while melodic and harmonic conventions are filtered and chopped through a non-linear post-DJ mentality.

Disruption Theory unfolds like a map of possible paths: filled with landmarks of familiar musical territory, but charting a course that bypasses any conventional routes, to arrive at an altogether different destination.