sugar sk*-*lls × Coupler
The Great Oxidation Event
Released: Aug 20th, 2025
- I 9:08
- II 11:48
- III 8:18
Recorded & engineered by Billy Campbell at Second Floor Recording
Mixed and mastered by Ryan Norris
Artwork by Ben Marcantel
©2025 Sounding Brass Music (ASCAP), False Hand Music (BMI)
Administered by Pacific Electric Music Publishing/Gilda Music + False Hand Music (BMI)
yk Records - YK-144
“The Great Oxidation Event” was an environmental event caused by the development of early unicellular life releasing a mass amount of oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans, killing nearly everything but, eventually, resulting in life as we know it.
In an ode to this cataclysmic event, sugar sk*-*lls and Coupler have teamed up to create a three part composition traversing the stages of early life evolving, its planetary destruction and eventual oxygenic rebirth. The creation process was inspired by Teo Macero’s work on the seminal Bitches Brew. sugar sk*-*lls (Ben Marcantel) would perform improvisationally and hand off the results to Coupler (Ryan Norris) to mix, edit and finalize the piece through a series of variations, always choosing to disassemble and warp the recordings rather than add to them with overdubs. The final mutation is both a destruction of the original and evolution into a newer form; a resurrection if you will.
Collaborations between Marcantel and Norris go back as far as 2000; when the two discovered a Venn diagram of overlapping interest in generative, progressive, electronic music. The Great Oxidation Event exemplifies this decades long friendship with a seamless melding of their contributions.
The thirty minute journey conjures an impending sense of dread, a desolate quiet and a dominating unease. The arrival of modern life on terra firma comes at a price. This could be as atomic as learning to synthesize sunlight into oxygen or may manifest as a mechanical self-supervised machine traversing one’s and zero’s.
