The Archipelago folks have been great companions through the Foundry's musical journey. Some of them I've known for decades, others I met through my Foundry projects, and all of us have gathered to talk and share ideas over a steaming bowl of bibimbap. This CD arose out of those meetings, the result of a long conversation, an ongoing collaboration between local Bay Area musicians. - M. Bentley
From the press release:
The Archipelago is a loose association of Bay Area musicians/composers, a forum in which artists working the disparate sub-genres of electronic music come together in different collaborative ways or even just to share a meal. In fact it is this tradition of dinner gatherings that led to the Bibimbap compilation. Joshua Maremont (Thermal) explains...
"Perhaps it seems odd for the musicians of the Archipelago to initiate a project named after a Korean meal, but perhaps not. For the meetings of our various islands have occurred over the steaming stone pots holding this delight, and it is in homage to this meal that we entitle our project - and specifically this project - with its name. Bibimbap simply means "mixing rice": rice is placed in a stone or ceramic bowl and actively mixed with whatever other ingredients are available or desired, the mixing process adding a dynamism in which the meal takes shape over the course of its eating, especially when the stone bowl is used to continue the cooking process until the eating is at an end. To state then that our Bibimbap is a simple remix project is insufficient, for we mean to reflect more of the nature of this dish in our tribute and to focus specifically on the availability of ingredients, ingredients, as it were, found already in our refrigerators: leftover tracks, unfinished pieces, forgotten fragments, music omitted from other releases as out of place, orphaned sound in need of fostering. Starting with a tableful of such ingredients, we assemble from them new pieces, each of us mixing them into contexts unconsidered by their creators and making out of these apparent scraps what we hope will be a feast. By this we mean not to imply an unloading of castoffs but instead to suggest that in some cases that which cannot be finished by one might well come to fruition through the care of others, perhaps in the warm steam rising from a stone bowl."
And so the various artists involved contributed material to a pool of samples and then used something from this shared source (in addition to whatever new work they might provide) to create a new piece. The list of contributors includes Forrest Fang, Saul Stokes, Chris de Giere, M. Bentley/eM, Thermal, Ben Swire, Dean Santomieri, and Earwicker (Seofon and C. Rolls).
