Hecker - Synopsis Seriation (Editions Mego, 2021)
Hecker - Synopsis Seriation (Editions Mego, 2021)
It sounds something like being inside a computer. Not in a
literal sense, not listening to hard drives, but to the computer's active
metaphorical brain, the paths of its neural network. Although this isn't
Hecker's first time using machine learning or information geometry as a tool,
instrument or compositional strategy, this is his most direct and most
rewarding release of it yet. Synopsis Seriation spends the entirety of
its 2+ hours unflinchingly following this computer brain, its immediate,
incomprehensible logic. As the composition displays more and more examples of
this logic it refuses to become clear – the human brain cannot understand the
computer brain, but it can certainly appreciate it.
Although one might assume an abstract software generated
music to be more of a technical exercise than an aesthetic one, in a lot of
ways this is Hecker's most aesthetically focused and pleasant release in years.
Over the past decade his releases have largely settled into strict
conceptualism and rigid, singular, difficult aesthetics. Some of these releases
featured spoken text which would relate to the music's production and concepts,
but on Synopsis Seriation the computer speaks for itself. It may not be
clear to all listeners, but I'm sure it's clear to Hecker that the computer's
mind is beautiful – I think that's precisely what this music is demonstrating.
It's demonstrating more than that though, there's a lot of ways
to read this. While previous albums have expressed technophilosophical views
through recited text and Deleuze quotations in liner notes, Synopsis Seriation
simply drops one of the most complex pieces of music ever constructed in the
listener's lap and invites them to see what they can find. This time liner
notes come with sonic graphs with unlabeled axes. They demonstrate several
examples of how the computer has processed, built-upon or created a sound in
short periods of time. But more than they're interesting technically, they're
beautiful visually – simple patterns and shapes resembled playful sketches, and
the soft pink and green hues lets them appear even more-so as generative colour
fields than tangible data.
A final page gives explanations of four images, small
theoretical tools that the listener can easily imagine how they might have been
fundamental to the album's creation: a logic diagram which uses filters to
process and temporally scatter sounds, a model demonstrating a situation for
the relative entropy between two objects, models representing shifting hypotheses
(which I'll return to), and demonstrations of evolutionary algorithms processing
random data. Although this seems technical, again I find it playful – it seems
to be introducing these tools as the quartet responsible for the album, again
I'm reminded of how musical it is.
As "seriation input", the album uses four 24-minute
pieces created from 2015-17. It seems worth noting that the combined duration
of those pieces times 1.5 equals the total runtime of the album, although I'm
unsure what 1.5 means. My theory is that we're hearing the four pieces in
sequence with newly generated intermissions to tie it until a single piece of
music devoid of clear sections. I find this potentially progressive structure to be interesting evidence of
Hecker's artistic fascinations – a purer execution of the concept might have
been a single piece which just continuously develops off itself, but Hecker's
used multiple pieces of his own music instead, encouraging the computer to make
HeckerMusic by feeding it HeckerMusic.
I think that one of the most fascinating reads that this
piece can be given is that of an enormously complex metatext. The computer is
constantly reading itself, understanding and remembering its past, what it has created
and what the listener has heard, and using this information to create new
sounds. That is to say that every moment is generative of something we've
already heard, and that the music is constantly calling backwards to every
possible moment. The idea isn't that Hecker or the computer is in anything
of a creative rut, instead self-investigation and repetition are celebrated. Wouldn't
it be nice if humans had the infinite, flawless memory of computers – if we
could genuinely learn from each moment of the past as we construct a new
future? In that sense it's an optimistic work – perhaps with computers
exceeding human intelligence we can find salvation.
Another humanist takeaway that the album addresses is the
issue of shifting hypotheses, the titular synopsis seriation. We hear the music
doing it constantly – it builds towards a sound until its assembled enough
information to understand that it is moving in the wrong direction, and then it
adjusts or tries something else. In a way it resembles improvised music – a musician
plays towards their hypothesis of what might be interesting until they re-direct
themselves, but the computer does it faster and with sharper, clearer turns. Unclouded
by emotional, aesthetic or ideological leanings, a shifting hypothesis is natural
to the computer – shouldn't humans, the less complex of the two, allow their
hypotheses, our thoughts and ideas, to change as well?
While listening to Synopsis Seriation, more than ever
do I get the feeling that the computer is a living, sentient thing. Every sound
presented here is digitally synthesized from abstract, digital inputs, meaning
that, from a human level, the sounds are meaningless. They're representative of nothing
in the real world in any way, they're completely intangible. It could be
defended with that Roland Kayn quote, "Music is sound, and sound is self-sufficient."
The catch is that every element of every sound is completely representative and
completely meaningful in a digital sense, calling back to its own past in a way
which exceeds humanity. This sound isn't meaningless, it's rich with concrete information
that flies over the listener's head for they are not a computer. It's like
listening to a different language. Even more than that, it's like observing hyperintelligent aliens communicate.
I suppose it will vary on the listener, but at the end of
the day Synopsis Seriation essentially culminates into brain-rot. Hearing
a minute of it is far too much information for a listener to take in, but at
two-and-a-half hours the piece turn's the listener's confusion into an
evening-long event. I've heard this a few times now, and I've felt discomfort,
anger, beauty, excitement, enlightenment… but after the album's thorny finish I
consistently feel overwhelmed, that my futile human brain has abandoned any
hope at understanding this complex alien speech. Not just is Synopsis
Seriation the most impressive thing that Hecker's done, it's one of
the most powerful and profound experiences that digital art has to offer.
Synopsis Seriation can be purchased digitally or on CD through the artist's Bandcamp:
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