Andrew Black is one of the most fascinating and interesting individuals I’ve encountered so far in my life. I’d like to think I’ve met some cool people in my 3 decades; I’m hard pressed to think of anyone quite like him. That uniqueness, that singularity, was apparent from our first conversation. Which then turned into a second. And then a third. And countless emails back and forth.
I think the best artists are curious, maybe even dangerously so. And the best art is birthed out of its creator’s curiosities, interests and desires. So when an artist has an entirely different life before creating art, you now have all the parts to make something truly one of one. While the sum of the parts is always interesting, I also care deeply about the parts themselves. What are their stories if they could share? The journey of Mr. Black is just as fascinating as the man himself.
THE EARLY DAYS
Andrew comes from more humble beginnings, growing up in a ‘milltown’ on the UK’s Northwest landscape. There was an early fascination with art and the idea of taking things apart and putting them back together. Drawing was a deep interest that would lead to Art School and find its use through Product Design as a career. But something happened early on that would become foundational to creating an ethos or philosophy on life: he saw Kate Bush on TV.
“I remember I had a tape recorder from my mom, I believe. And I would just record the TV, you know. I was just a kid who liked to take things apart and see how they worked, see if I could put them back together. One time, I’m watching and recording an old UK show called ‘Top of the Pops’. And I see a woman come on and start performing and it’s Kate Bush. I just remember being absolutely floored; like, ‘Who is she? This is so weird!’. But it really piqued my interest.”
Everyone has a moment like this I feel, where they can point to a memory, an act, something, that really influenced them. Yet, this wasn’t important in the traditional sense of ‘see artist → become artist’. The significance came from the recording. Andrew would revisit that recording and become aware of what was really going on; that the act of recording fundamentally changed these notions of location and place that we hold onto. This recognition at an early age, would lead to a deeper interest and passion for Acoustics in general, specifically around Psycho-acoustics and Acousmatics. A root had taken hold and over the course of Andrew’s lifetime, would begin to grow and blossom in unexpected ways.
By the time Andrew was entering his teen years, music was already one of the more important things in his life. The UK in the 90s as we know, was one of the most interesting places to be musically and artistically. Andrew was exposed to everything under the sonic sun, from American Hip Hop to Rave cassettes and Indie Guitar acts. Mechanically interested and inclined, in particular the duped cassettes of hardcore, jungle and house were of particular importance, because of the sheer ‘human’ element; these were not Hi-Fi tapes, they were shitty. And that was beautiful.
People like Madlib and J Dilla, whom we both share a deep sense of reverence for, further instilled a DIY attitude when it came to music and creating. These two pioneers also showcased music as more of a collage of sound than the more traditional music that was out, certainly in contrast from the ‘Top of the Pops’ acts. Yet, Andrew was still just a fan, not creating for himself.
That came while finishing up in college. Exposed to the vibrant DJ scene, Andrew started collecting his own sounds. This evolved to buying a proper recorder and wanting to record the world around him.
“It started with just my everyday life. The mundane of the everyday. A little time later, I was shooting with a Cine-camera and working on this short film project with a friend. The idea was, you get to make your film and project it into a proper London theater.
But what was so unique about the whole experience was using this little piece of technology. Each filmmaker received one Super 8 film reel. Cine-cameras have the film inside; so you set up what you want to shoot, then shoot it. There is no second chance because the film reel continues from the last moment you released the trigger, basically a strangely juxtaposed real-time condition. But you have no idea what it’s going to look like because the film remained in the camera. The reel was then sent to the organisers who chemically developed it. It wasn’t until the filmmakers got to the cinema that everyone would see the final result. We were just hoping that something got caught!
It taught me a valuable lesson: in life, you just don’t know what’s going to come out the other side. You can’t keep still, hoping for something. You have to plan, have a structure and improvise to keep moving, keep going.”
When moving into music, it was a natural extension of his interests to explore field recordings and their manipulations, inversions and effects. Having focused on Product Design while in Art School, the constant motifs of location and place continued to evolve and take on a different context, giving birth to a sound palette and audio-aesthetic that would form the backbone for his future work.
FAITICHE
Andrew, who creates under the moniker, blackbody_radiation, is the latest artist to join the renowned and celebrated Faitiche label, the brain child of acclaimed artist, musician and sound designer, Jan Jelinek.
Faitiche started in 2008, mainly as a platform for Jelinek’s own releases and musings that have since added joint projects and works done by friends. Quoting Bruno Latour, a French philosopher of the late 20th century, Faitiche (the German) is “a combination of facts and fetishes, and makes it obvious that the two have a common element of fabrication.”
I was a philosophy major and really enjoyed trying to make sense of this idea. To dive a little deeper on what Latour is getting at:
- Facts are not “discovered” in a vacuum: they are constructed through scientific and social practices.
- Fetishes are not mere illusions: they are real in the sense that they actively shape people’s behaviors and beliefs.
At a high level, Latour is pushing against the rigid divide between science (objective truth) and belief systems (subjective or irrational). He argues that all knowledge—whether scientific or cultural—relies on networks of actors, materials, and practices that shape what we call “truth.”
So, in essence, a factish is a fact that acknowledges its own constructed nature, without dismissing its reality or importance. It’s a way of understanding knowledge as something that is both objectively real and subjectively created.
It then makes lots of sense to see what the Faitiche platform is all about when you look at the catalogue and the focus/themes of the works created. Multiple identities for an artist, entirely fictional identities, the manipulation of field recordings, sound collage and copyright, to name a few. Even more sense then why blackbody_radiation joins the party.
Blackbody_radiation is an extension of the philosophy that Andrew had been fine-tuning throughout his life as a professional. The name carries a quiet poetry when considered against the backdrop of both physics and artistic process.
In science, a blackbody is an idealized object that absorbs all incoming radiation: nothing is reflected, nothing escapes. But what makes it even more profound is that, over time, this absorbed energy isn’t lost or static. It transforms.
It re-emerges, radiating outward in a spectrum uniquely shaped by the object’s temperature, its internal state. In much the same way, Andrew allowed old, unfinished works to sit untouched for years, not discarded, just dormant. They weren’t being consciously reflected on, but they were still absorbing: the shifting context of time, new experiences, emotional evolution, and the slow sediment of memory.
When Andrew returned to those works later, it wasn’t a mere act of recovery, it was radiation. What came out was not exactly what had gone in. It had changed. Refracted through years of growth, what he was working on was something warmer, more nuanced — shadows of the original ideas, but now shaped by the accumulated heat of living. Just as blackbody radiation emits a full spectrum born from total absorption, Andrew’s creative output became a testament to the power of sitting with silence, of trusting that even in stillness, transformation is happening. These ‘shadows’ would ultimately become Andrew’s debut with Faitiche, Ultra-Materials.
“Over all that time that passed, I would come back to my field recordings and it would get me reflecting on that moment and context surrounding them. But also, just thinking about the concepts of reflection and absorption generally.
And then I connected reflection and absorption to the physical phenomenon of blackbody radiation, where there’s an interesting dynamic between the two.”
On Ultra-Materials, Andrew introduces sound masking into his recordings, as an act of manipulation, both in a literal and audible sense. The audible stems from the act of masking, which is to superimpose artificial sound into the equation in order to drown out (‘mask’) certain aspects of his recordings.
The literal is that the listener will never have access to the ‘pure’ recording, the pure sound, and so we’re going on a journey that is predefined by the parameters of Mr. Black. What we get is an artist who wants you to focus and meditate on the art of listening. Just like our eyes can fail us at times, our ears, when not attentive or attuned to what we are audibly consuming, can deceive us.
One can only wonder what other possible worlds exist underneath those sonic masks that Andrew creates, and yet, it is in the world he has shared that we find a lovely union of his creativity and perspective as an artist.
AI, CREATION and THE FUTURE
I find most people to be pretty set in their ways, their beliefs. And they seem to become more entrenched in said beliefs as time passes. While not rare, I do see openmindedness less frequently than I do its opposite. What does that say about the human condition?
In my opinion, this stems from fear. Fear of a lack of understanding of the opposition or the unknown. If you trace our lineage as a species back far enough, this fear of the unknown or opposition could almost be seen as a biological imperative; certainly as a means of survival. But in this day and age, I don’t think that argument carries too much weight; half-glass empty, I see it as just sheer laziness or passivity.
I try to live my life without fear. Being free of judgment, of what others might think or say about me, of opinions from people that don’t know me. It’s really hard. This is where my nihilism actually helps! While traversing the slippery slope of ‘complete and utter meaninglessness’, and ironically as time has passed in my life, I’ve found myself more open to the world than ever before. And I found a kindred spirit in Andrew around being open as well.
For Andrew, openmindedness was something he picked up, in part, due to his occupation as a designer.
“I’m probably a bit unlike most artists or other creatives given my background in design. There were times when my work was centered around complete unknowns, creating and designing things that have never been thought of before, potentially to never be replicated again. I’m surrounded by true specialists from all these different backgrounds to bring this unique project to life. So you become extremely comfortable with the unknown and it starts to permeate into other aspects of your life.
Naturally, when I decided I wanted to create audio/music, that comfort with the unknowns of it, helped me focus on the process and exploration aspects of making.”
I can’t tell you how happy and excited I was to hear this sentiment expressed. So many of the greats, so many creatives that I revere and hold in the highest esteem, so many that have given me countless lessons and moments of happiness in my life, feel the exact same way. It is for the love of the process, the joy of exploring, that we create.
“But what about AI? Isn’t it going to take all our jobs and create things we can’t replicate as humans? Why would I try to create? Why would I embrace something that is going to replace us?” – untitled human who fears the unknown
“Why Do Anything?”
- Justin Ruiz, Senior Dissertation title, Philosophy, Oberlin College 2016
—o—
I got a B- on my final dissertation by the way. Not because I couldn’t elucidate or illustrate my thesis within the confines of a philosophical structure on Nihilism, but because I went rogue. I was supposed to write about a class reading and didn’t. I’m lucky the professor didn’t fail me, to be honest.
But I felt I had something to say. And I think this question of why we do anything is worth exploring, especially in the age of AI. Andrew and I have spoken on the field at length over the course of our multiple calls and every time we would get started, it felt like the proverbial snowball rolling down a hill; we just went deeper and deeper until we lost track of time and one of us had to go. My biggest takeaway is to fall in love with exploration. Instead of focusing so much on the negatives of this technology, which is that fear coming up again, find if it has meaning in your own life and explore:
“Music and sound artists can be ‘agents of change’, as grandiose as that might sound. AI is an expansion of human-computer interaction in some ways. I see it as a tool. I see it as a part of the creative process in sonification. The point is to explore and explore things quite deeply. What’s really the most interesting and exciting thing for me, is exploring the tool and finding use-cases in ways that maybe most others won’t.
The joy in music is in the exploration and discovery process. You might have an idea or outline for what you want to convey. But if the tool is artificial intelligence, or audio models or AI-based tools, there’s still the process of exploration. I don’t find that problematic at all, I actually find it quite liberating. For what I do, I don’t work with traditional equipment (instruments, synthesizers, samplers for example). So something like Morpho is truly fascinating to me. I love seeing how I can break it apart and use it in ways it’s not supposed to be used.”
Andrew brought up a good point during another time in our chats, a point that gets overlooked in the general conversations around AI; while AI might be a newer field in terms of its applications (chatGPT, language models, etc.) the underlying technologies (markov chains, monte carlo series, neural nets) have been around for some time. A really interesting analogy I think around creativity and process. That is, there’s always going to be underlying and established grounds or principles. But the beauty lies in finding new and unique ways to apply them. Record scratching, sampling, drum machines all come to mind within the music-realm.
What Andrew is accomplishing as blackbody_radiation, along with his Faitiche labelmates, is a shining example. The intricacies in his work, the intention and focus required, the openmindedness to explore, the complexities in the compositions; they all reflect aspects and traits of their creator. That is who Mr. Black is. And I’m happy now to call him a friend.
—o—
Andrew Black has a lot of stuff happening right now. His debut on Faitiche, Ultra_Materials, is out now. He will be performing at Silent Green on 26th April in Berlin as well. Andrew is not on any social media. You can follow along and get everything in the links below. He is human and will respond 🙂
words by w0rmw00d
Photo/Video Credits:
- Ariane G
- Phutawan Snepekdee