Pretty tough listen from Canadian composer Jason Doell – his Becoming In Shadows-Of Being Touched (WHITED SEPULCHRE RECORDS WSR043) uses piano and software to produce very disjunctive, hard-to-follow music. One has the sense of being continually deflected, even as one tries to follow the logic underpinning these weird twists and turns, and we’re led ever further down the labyrinth of cold abstraction.
The story of it is that he improvised “free-form” piano parts while doing a residency at the Banff Centre, accumulating thereby a set of recordings to take home in his suitcase. He enjoyed the task so much that he even went and rescued a piano that had apparently been buried outside in the snow – which may be a common occurrence in Canada for all I know, hence the “frozen piano” credit for musician Mauro Zannoli. What we hear on the record (also released on vinyl) is not these improvisations, but treatment of same after they’ve been fed through an “algorithmic compositional tool”, a form of software which allowed him to generate music automatically, using his source materials and in line with his ideas about customised settings. Doell had no interest, we’re informed, about computers, software, or learning how to develop the tool, and what he likes here is the way the algorithm was making its decisions. This may account for why the results are so hard (for me at any rate) to process as music. Some interesting sounds may surface now and again, and even an intriguing melodic phrase may appear, but the overall drift of this album is pretty much insufferable; whatever musical inspiration there may have been emerging from the hands and brain of Doell when performing at Banff has now been removed, overwritten by a string of ones and noughts.
At a time when many creators are murmuring increasingly about the implications of AI in visual and sound art, here’s one musician who seems to embrace it – or at least one aspect of it – as a force for good. (18/04/2023)