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Nathan Ho - Haywire Frontier

Album cover for Haywire Frontier. Digital drawing of an androgynous figure, mid-leap, brandishing two swords above their head.

My first full-length solo album, Haywire Frontier, is releasing on Saturday, September 9th on the Japanese label Tokinogake. It is available for preorder now, and you can listen to the opening track “Trickster Deity.”

Here are the liner notes:

In 2008, at the age of 11, I created Googology Wiki on my parents’ computer. “Googology” is word for the study of large numbers and fast-growing functions, deriving from the 9-year-old Milton Sirotta’s coinage of the term “googol.” The website was never meant to go beyond my personal use, and I gradually drifted away from it. Fifteen years later, it has grown to tens of thousands of articles and a community of hundreds of active users.

Haywire Frontier is a 40-minute musical tribute to a strange corner of amateur mathematics whose growth I somewhat-inadvertently catalyzed, with rhythmic and formal material deriving from Georg Cantor’s “ordinal number” system, integral to the study of large numbers.

The album was sequenced and synthesized entirely in SuperCollider with no samples, external hardware, or third-party plugins.

Credits:

  • John Tejada, mastering

  • Isa Hanssen (Instagram), cover art

  • Special thanks to a0n0, Charlie Burgin (Sahy Uhns), William Fields, RM Francis, Joonas Siren (Forces), Ben Tillotson, Nathan Turczan.

I expect to write about this project in the near future. Thank you for listening, and for all your support.