Logickal is Nashville-based musician/engineer/producer Jeremy Dickens’ particular brand of improvisational left-field electronic music. He has long been one of the few electronic artists performing and recording in “Music City USA”, and one of the genre’s champions in that town dominated by twang.
Logickal traces its roots back to childhood experiments with cassette recorders, an obsession with The Beatles, teenage years spent in recording studios (”wishing I was Floyd or Eno or Peter Gabriel,” he says) and an early adulthood of pause-button remixes and 8-bit sampling (mostly of Throbbing Gristle, Coil and Skinny Puppy) in Los Angeles. Back in Nashville, he organized Nashville’s first music events dedicated to noise and extreme performance art while being part of the city’s only noise-industrial duo (the impossibly-named 9R3RO23). This confluence of experience and influences brought him through the ambient/”electronic listening music” movement of the 1990’s into the progressive electronic music he creates today.
He still shows his noisy roots in his composition and performance - he prefers to limit the number of instruments or tracks he has at his fingertips while improvising his pieces completely live. As a result, his live shows are usually electric with energy not usually seen in a genre that can so easily rely on pre-recorded elements. “I always felt electronic music needed to be brought to a point to where it could be like jazz,” he says abut his own process. “When I work in the studio, I’m doing improvisation that I can go back and edit at a later date. I much prefer performing live - it’s all there, when one is just in the moment - but always conscious of the whole piece. Bringing improvisation into the realm of programmed machines is a beautiful thing.”
This commitment to the “improvisational studio” has helped Logickal bring more attention to electronic music in Nashville. He organized and released Area615 - a CD compilation that focused on the city’s underground electronic music scene. That release spawned the annual Buzz and Click showcase, Nashville’s only evening dedicated to locally produced electronic music. He has released 3 full length CDs and 2 EPs on his own Discrepancy Recordings imprint, as well as a CD-ROM of raw sample material called Sounds Logickal, released by M-Audio. He performs and records in and around Nashville, while curating a weekly podcast of independent electronic music on his website (http://www.offnominal.com/blog).
In 2006, Logickal’s latest full-length, entitled Krushjob, was released on dPulse Recordings, and is available from dPulse or the major music download services. Logickal has also recently been seen performing as part of 3kStatic, the politically-charged techno project overseen by dPulse label head Dean Capone.
