The Shape
Of Memory

For the Feeling is Structure project / album this comes from, I’ve been looking for structures that trigger us, whether it’s architecture, music, visual arts, facial structures, dance etc.

But I’m also interested in the internal representations of our states of mind, using MRI scans and neural network-esc structures for the live shows. One of these sorts of angles that came up was the shape of memory, the idea to present our memories in visual form in collaboration with Factory Fifteen.

The starting point was to request images which represent important memories from those people on our mailers and socials. Factory Fifteen took these images and used a Gaussian splat technique to extrude them out from their native 2D into these beautiful paintlike 3D models. We leaned into the artifacts and lossy nature of the imagery as a way of representing our memories which are always incomplete and which are rewritten to some degree with each recall, making them fallible and abstracted away from their real life source. The technique represented those ideas, and also allowed for fusing memories into some sort of life story.

Musically I went for a classic retro synth timbre with lots of irregular detailing, but it’s all about the feeling of the chord progression really, that’s where the feeling of the idea comes though, if you can hear what I mean.

Factory Fifteen:

The Shape of Memory explores the fragile and often fragmented nature of how we remember. It delves into the visual language of memory, from the deeply cherished to the seemingly mundane, where certain moments remain sharply in focus while others linger just out of reach.

As memories overlap and bleed into one another, their boundaries begin to dissolve, giving rise to entirely imagined constructs of the mind, until it becomes impossible to tell where one memory ends and another begins.