Tomorrow, August 24, Rafaël Rozendaal & Danny Wolfers (Legowelt) are dropping Polychrome Music, their first collaborative project on Art Blocks.
Art Blocks is a platform for in-browser generative art NFTs. While other NFTs are often associated with links to external resources, Art Blocks NFTs run from code that is stored on the blockchain itself. Many Art Blocks drops are large series of works, all of which are unique, with characteristics that are derived from the associated token’s unique identifier. This means that each variant of a given work is revealed only when its associated token is minted, creating the unique identifier that determines the variant’s parameters.
This set of constraints has given rise to an active community of creators and collectors. Art Blocks now includes community drops as well as curated ones; Rhizome’s Artistic Director Michael Connor recently joined its all-volunteer selection committee—an acknowledgement of the platform’s ongoing importance, and of the need for curatorial perspectives in the NFT field. (Connor was recused from the selection process for this work).
Polychrome Music extends Rozendaal’s previous generative NFT work through the collaboration with Legowelt, who writes of the project:
For Polychrome Music I designed a generative music system that plays an infinite composition on 3 different audio channels, each with their own synthesizer. These randomly generate simple musical timbres inspired by early computer sound chips. The music itself is generated by randomly selecting 3 patterns out of a pool of 180. These patterns, which are little 8-bar music pieces, were written in the same C# Dorian scale so they always fit together. This is a pleasant sounding minor and colorful scale that I believe fits the general vibe of Rafaël’s work. Composition wise, channel 1 plays the bassline and channels 2 and 3 the melody, countermelody, arpeggios and harmonies. The system changes the patterns each time they are played, reversing, speeding up or slowing down the pattern or changing the synthesizer channel they are played on. In essence the system infinitely randomly remixes the source melodies to create ever new surprising pieces that harmonize with the colorful compositions.
The two artists are both from The Netherlands and met each other in Los Angeles nearly 20 years ago.
This is Rozendaal’s second time naming Rhizome as a beneficiary of a drop on the platform, following last year’s transformative Endless Nameless gift, which was the largest individual donation in Rhizome’s history. That gift helped to fund, among other things, a new Rhizome website that will launch this fall. 25% of proceeds above the resting price will be donated to Rhizome: we thank Rozendaal and Wolfers for this generous support!
Polychrome Music will go live on Wednesday August 24 at 1pm ET. In the meantime, you can explore the project on the staging site.