As part of his ongoing Late Bush project, Belgian composer Pierre Dozin recently released this dazzling piece as the second single from his upcoming album Hoarses. The album is based on the idea that baroque music no longer exists—at least not as actual sound—because the experience of hearing it is pure historical relic. Any performance of the music is only a reconstruction, an attempt to envision the music’s form based on historical documentation alone, since all that’s left with us is its notation. Hoarses incorporates traditional instrumentation with contemporary sound design and embraces artificially generated voices as instruments, the use of which is treated as consistent with the speculative quality of historically reimagined work. Why couldn’t a disembodied artificial intelligence contribute meaningfully to this kind of reconstruction if our own interpretations of sounds lost to history are essentially also just artifice? If the assumption that it’s our physical impression that gives our appraisal of history its value is in fact unreliable, then the relevance of our judgment of our past (and maybe current) realities itself become destabilized.
The album’s themes of treating the bodily experience as simulacrum and AI as a tangible instrument are reflected in its artwork, which was created in collaboration with Aline Bouvy. Bouvy produced a resin cast of Dozin’s head, setting it as the subject in a photo that initially feels like CGI but actually reflects a purely material object. The project’s website further explores these themes, allowing the visitor to lend their face (via webcam) to the development of an evolving collective portrait distributed across social networks.
Hoarses is out April 24th, on VLEK; you can pre-order it on bandcamp–including in a gorgeous vinyl package–or find its two prerelease singles for streaming now.
Late Bush – “Fluxstrata”