Slice of Life, Paradise Complete’s debut album, is equal parts curation, composition, improvisation, and memoir - a sound collage of sound collages. It all started when bandmates Bryn Davis and Nick Meryhew exchanged a few brief texts and a real weird Snapchat video in 2019. This interaction established a simple practice that the improvisational sound collage duo followed over the course of the next two years:
Guidelines:
Mutual trust
Do what feels right
Take as long as you need
Don’t overthink it
Process:
Person A sends Person B audio of anything
Person B could do anything they want with that audio
Person B sends the result to Person A
Person A could do anything they want with that audio
Person A sends the result to Person B
Repeat steps 2-5 until it feels finished
Slice of Life is the result of this collaboration. The work is a conversation between Nick and Bryn teeming with daydreams, free associations, and non-sequiturs. The duo assembled, synthesized, scavenged, and denatured gobs of sonic scraps and sculpted the album out of their detritus. Their asynchronous method allowed for destruction, alteration, and addition in the time domain, radically transforming their linear creative process. The result belies the process used to create itself: it is a singular experience shaped by the specter of its past lives.
