Richard Devine

Once a daring skater kid from Atlanta, now a computer music pioneer, Devine found electronic music and has reinvented it in his own way. In the latter part of his 26 years, he learned to build, manipulate, and master the machines of modern music. In the process, he has refined himself with the affiliation of some of today's more respected musical establishments. This year he worked with director Kyle Cooper on a Disney film project, remixed Aphex Twin, Matthew Herbert, Slicker, and Phoenecia to only name a few. He masterfully orchestrates a titanic array of rapidly moving information, cleverly channeling it into an organized stream of sound. There are seemingly endless layers of rhythms, spanning every notch of frequency, spiraling around one another like complex DNA strands hinged together in a grid-like lattice. Never competing, never repeating the same phrase. The result is amazement, awe. The human mind can only process so much information at one time. Devine knows this well, it is one of his sonic weapons. It is a lot like optic art, when the eyes are fed too much data and the overload produces a prismatic, entrancing effect. "Entrancing" is not the word you would think to apply towards music whose elements rarely repeat themselves, but the groove is there, like a strange, mechanical funk music, and everything else revolves around it. Like a million minuscule sounds, obediently marching to the cadence of a heavy step. The music is in the beat itself. It is "funk for robots", a broken and restructured music. Mathematically reconstructed with futuristic tools, conceived by a highly evolved mind. For this, Richard Devine has become something of a hero to the overqualified working underclass, because he shows us a glimpse of a world where those with technological skills rule. "Richard Devine is generating the same kind of excitement that Slayer did in the early 1980's" - Spex Magazine, Germany