Years ago, as young graphic designer, I was working on a catalogue that contained a huge bank of images. As well as being used in print, the client also needed web versions for their online store. I used the actions tool in Photoshop and hit record as I went through the process of resizing, compressing, and changing the colour set up of a single image… I then selected a folder filled with hundreds of images and hit run. A process that would have taken a day, was completed in a brief momentary flurry.
Whilst my computer simply retraced a process, this broad ability to do ‘our work’ has become much more visible and nuanced in the years since. We are now at a stage where, there is a degree of nervousness about how much our digital servants have actual autonomy. Cybernetic advantages, and the embedding of AI in all sorts of places has some aspects of society concerned that our initial innovation, has rendered humans as surplus or perhaps no longer in control.
Whilst there is no doubt that machine learning has potential to work both for and against us, there is an opportunity somewhere in the middle of these extremes. If AI is considered a creative tool more than a productivity one, it poses interesting questions for creatives and artists alike. Does art generated by AI have merit as actual art?
This apex is the point of origin that The Organizing Committee’s new album Communication in the Absence of Noise rises from.
Eryk Salvaggio, the man behind The Organizing Committee, points his software at ‘cybernetics, situationist, and feminist texts’ and building musical samples by generative means. Whatever the process, the overall results gather into music that’s significantly arrived at, via AI.
Clearly there is a huge conceptual framework which risks dominating the entire project, what comes out the speakers is where the real test ultimately lies. What emerges is an album that bounces along like Stereolab in full motorik mode fronted by multi-dimensional droids. It’s the future pop music Bruce Haack or Raymond Scott might have dreamt of in some parallel flying car, silver suited futurescape.
Taken purely as music, Communication in the Absence of Noise is an album that we’ve looped effortlessly. Tracks like Beyond Response and The Noise Is You seem to push things the furthest. Tracks we’ve caught ourselves daydreaming about the 20 minute versions when played live… and then you remember.
Communication in the Absence of Noise is an album that should effortlessly slip into far more mainstream arenas. This music deserves whatever modern radio play is, and an audience that’s way less concerned by the details because as a proof of concept, and as music – it works. That it’s not always our thing somehow misses the point, but it’s music that’s certain to appeal to a much bigger audience.
In some ways, traditional ways of making art seem to relate to how much effort has been spent achieving the results. Somewhere is the notion that some sort of substance comes from toil. Does it matter than Salvaggio potentially set up the elements and hit ‘run’ and then went to bed? Did he wake up to 20 albums worth of material, and these were the best bits? What did the tracks sound like that didn’t work? All these questions pick at the unease that the results somehow perhaps came easily. Do any of these concerns actually matter? No.
Communication in the Absence of Noise makes you think beyond the music and only really becomes fully understandable when you contrast it to other music. It’s a hermetically sealed 41-minute capsule that offers a unique slither of a reality that you know is illusion. It’s like visiting VR Machu Picchu whilst sitting at home in Scotland, it’s believable and viable but also a completely artificial construction.
It’s an experiment in ‘what if’ and it’s something that tangibly transmits all sorts of things the electronics that made it wouldn’t possibly understand. It somehow ticks all the boxes whilst having no pen…
Given this is the first music we’ve heard from Salvaggio since his wonderfully abstract mushroom synapse album Worlding, it’s clear he’s operating out with any genres or stylistic limitations.
Perplexing, odd, mainstream, fearless, weird and essential.
Communication in the Absence of Noise is out now – available digitally and on CD
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