Peripheral dots is something you see when you get whacked in the head, strong enough to feel dizzy, but not too fatal to make you see the light at the end of the tunnel. Peripheral Dots is also a one-man project of Joshua Steele, an American-born Istanbulite with an incurable music bug, a pair of turntables and Ableton Live.
The sound of Peripheral Dots originates from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Washington D.C., and has been raised on the streets of Istanbul for the past couple of years. As it happens, once upon a time there was a teenage band that experimented with sounds and rhythms in somebody’s basement. “I wouldn’t really call it a band. It was more my friends Ryan and Trevor and I with a 4-track recorder, a bass, a guitar and a drum machine with a whole bunch of effects pedals. I probably should dig up some recordings from those times. Maybe it’s just a bunch of unfinished stuff that sounded good at the time,” Josh explains. “But for a long while the name Peripheral Dots kind of vanished in time, until I rediscovered my creative side again here, in Istanbul.” Josh nowadays is also a part of creative collective EZ Lisnin, in Istanbul.
Self-taught and in collaboration with friends, Josh picked up his first musical instrument at the age of 10, and his first pair of turntables at 18, coupled with a copy of Sony ACID Pro and FL Studio. The passion for sound mixing grew from there, and later came Reason and Logic (as in software, not philosophical concepts). DJ’ing in D.C. with hip hop and drum&bass beats was a big step towards what Peripheral Dots sounds like now. But during his first years in Istanbul, Josh admittedly disconnected from his creative past – quite the opposite from what most musicians experience in this inspiring city. But those were hard times, during which he waited for a change in the air.
Peripheral Dots doesn’t fit in a solid genre definition. Among his main influences, Josh lists Underworld, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Everything But The Girl, Boards of Canada, Squarepusher, Brian Eno, King Crimson, The Beatles, Trent Reznor, David Bowie, and anything from the mid-to-late 90s’ rave scene. However, the music Josh composes here, in Istanbul, is usually born from the street cacophony, bits of conversations caught in the crowd, traffic noise, occasional Turkish tunes, and fleeting ideas passing through his own head. It’s no wonder, then, that Peripheral Dots expands upon all of these influences and interlaces them with the various musical experiments, findings and trends in the electronic scene.
You can hear Peripheral Dots at Yabangee’s second installation of We Are All Refugees on Saturday, 30 May.
