With Planeswalker

In collaboration with the Singaporean electronic music producer Planeswalker, the Entity Tee celebrates the release of his latest project, a four-track ambient experience that takes one on a journey through dark and light, immersing one in an experience that is both haunting and restorative.

The Entity Tee

The Entity tee marries the idea of fluidity in ambient music with the concept of endless time, transcending one into a timeless aether. The rings of water convey an ouroboric structure, depicting a loop of flow and the shine portrays an emergence of a bright star, glowing from within.

Ouroboros

We took inspiration from ouroboros, extracting common and obscure meanings for the design of the Entity tee.

In normative Egyptology, ouroboros are commonly interpreted as an endless cycle of life, death and rebirth, symbolising "creation out of destruction, life out of death" (Token Rock, n.d.). This is represented by tail-devouring serpents arranged in perfect circles or sometimes in lemniscate shapes (figure eight). The ouroboros consume their tails to sustain their lives in an eternal cyclical trap, submitting to never-ending autopoiesis that is out of their control – a self-sustaining system that creates and recreates to maintain itself (Maturana & Varela, 1972).

Another meaning of ouroboros is lesser known: the serpents represent the ability for divine powers to permeate and protect the universe (Reemes, 2015). The tails of the ouroboros may or may not be seen in their mouths; however, they are illustrated as enclosures, shielding the cosmos, the sun, the dead, and the individuals from all evil (Reemes, 2015).

We sought to capture the protective ouroboros in endless cycles of birth and rebirth in the Entity tee, but also the concept of fluidity present in ambient music like William Basinski's Watermusic.

William Basinski

One of the godfathers of ambient music, William Basinski, acts as a heavy inspiration to the creation of Entity. Born in 1958, William Basinski is an American avant-garde composer who is best known for his four-volume album The Disintegration Loops (2002-2003). Of which was arranged and composed from the decaying tapes of his earlier compositions.

Basinski always had a very fluid like structure to his musical compositions where layers would slowly morph into another over time, such that the listener will never recognise the change in state. His music allows one to travel in stillness, flying through vast soundscapes beyond ones' physical world.

For instance, in Water Music which is a result of a 9 month generative ambient experiment conducted over the turn of the century (Ricci, 2018). (talk about how the music elements convey a very fluid like imagery)

The album was composed entirely on the Voyetra synth, a polyphonic analog synthesizer released in 1982 and was one of the first analog programmable synths to be rack-mountable and remains one of the more flexible, digitally controlled analog synthesizers.

Discover Planeswalker

If you’ve missed it, we sat down with the producer himself to find out more about his inspirations behind Entity here

He has also kindly contributed a mix of ambient tunes to our ongoing monthly Dead Inside Podcasts