ISO is a Hannover-based collaborative project by two musicians whose express purpose is to

search for a sonic landscape that combines hauntological samples and original material with a
crystalline high-fidelity sound in a rigorous compositional structure. ISO seeks to create a
viable proposition for a new musical aesthetic.

All of the sampled material used by ISO originates from vintage documentaries. The
documentaries deal exclusively with the topics of the occult, mysticism, aliens, and future
technologies. This deliberate choice of sample material was made because society as a whole
has made extremely rapid and unceasing scientific and technological advances, all while
traditional forms of religion and belief have been increasingly pushed to the margins. At the
same time, as traditional belief wanes, there is an immense search for a new form of mythology
which the seeker believes could have the capacity to give meaning to everyday life. This is not
necessarily an affirmation of the existence of the spiritual, but rather the very existence of the
unrelenting search itself is what can be taken as evidence that humankind has an innate desire
to find something which is divine.

This pursuit of, rebuke of, and occasional discovery of the divine is a constant element in ISO’s
music, and can be understood and heard as the fundamental compositional method.

Although a significant emphasis is given to the meaning of the to the sampled material, ISO is
mainly concerned with creating a new aesthetic. Due to this search for a new aesthetic, the
sampled material is used in a way that is nearly unrecognizable when compared to the original.
The transformed material is further augmented by the use of electric guitar, which itself seems
almost outdated in the modern musical landscape, and synthesizers created using sampled
source material.

The diversity of structural organization of material reaches from exploring a single sample to
hyper-complex collage as can be heard in the two attached pieces. Thus, ISO’s music evokes
a wide range of listening experiences in which fragmentation, rupture, over-saturation and
focus appear like a complex broken mirror of an age that is simultaneously ever changing and
stuck, breaking and reconstructing itself.

As a solution to the new musical aesthetic ISO can offer what has been transformed from the
old and forgotten to the new and unheard.

For the Unsound Festival, ISO would propose performing a live set based in the style of the
two included tracks, “It lives on somehow cut off from time” and “A whole new noisy universe
emerged and man began to listen”.