Algorithms for a music of a future that is already present

Description

Archon: Music for Violin, Percussion, and Machine Learning Envirnoment

Subject

After in the last issue of Sul Ponticello we had delved into the musical results created by the Demiurge Synthesis Engine platform, a tripartite neural network developed jointly at the Hong Kong Baptist University by Spanish violinist Roberto Alonso (Vigo, 1983) and by American composer of Polish origin Marek Poliks (New York, 1989), today we return to enjoy their very interesting and current work through Archon, a compact from the Munich label NEOS which is a perfect complement to the edition of the Vigo label Creotz Music that last July visited our magazine.

Again, synthesis and hybridization of acoustic and electronic media are at the center of the musical work developed by Alonso and Poliks, and if for decades we have talked about an imprint of electroacoustics in the instrumental sound tarred through extended techniques, reaching this third decade of the 21st century what we hear in Archon is, perhaps, a 'return' path, in which that palette of acoustic-instrumental sounds informs the electronic, achieving a high level and voltage symbiosis in two pieces, Crossing the Iron Ocean and Mist-Crawler, created in 2022 and in which much of the best instrumental composition of our time reverberates, as well as how much both creators have refined throughout their careers.

Within them, the work with Vertixe Sonora has a specific weight in the case of Roberto Alonso, and from the most saturated and powerful sounds in the orbit of the composer (also from Vigo) Ramón Souto seem to arrive echoes (almost explicit, as far as certain rebounding motifs are concerned) in the busy Crossing the Iron Ocean, a piece in which the visual has great importance, with its dense landscape, worthy of an Anselm Kiefer. The open interface Archon is the one in charge, in connection with the Demiurge Synthesis Engine system, of creating the music we hear here. It is a new example of the faith expressed by Roberto Alonso and Marek Poliks that in the future algorithms will replace (as they believe they are already doing) traditional instruments, assuming a database that includes the history of music itself, as a source to recombine it based on macro-categories.

This would result, according to the creators of this project, in a music that would continually reinvent itself, with an immense capacity to adapt to the highest levels of effectiveness and efficiency, both technical and musical. In fact, not only the music of this album has been generated through Archon (written in Python and Supercollider) and Demiurge (Python), but the disturbing images that are inserted in the booklet of this edition, as well as the texts themselves; so that Archon itself tries to describe what Archon is.

It is curious that, in said text, the questions are constant: a reformulation of the usual compositional codes, as well as the own capacities and contextualization of the creator, so that the system evidences, in some way, its own doubts and questioning of its limits, humanizing it. But Archon also expresses a powerful belief in the capabilities of a system that works in different models but that here does not stop mobilizing cycles and procedures that we could relate to variation, within a more traditional language, which compacts and historically references this endless number of novelties, conferring structure(s) to what, at first listen, might seem like a feast of bruitist, rough and extended sonorities.

In this sense, one of the most interesting questions is the balance between the instrumental and the electroacoustic (although, ultimately, the production of both Crossing the Iron Ocean and Mist-Crawler is entirely electronic). The successive appearances of violin (in both works) and percussion (in Mist-Crawler) confer those points of support and insertion in an instrumental tradition that, in this way, emerges in both pieces and gives us an idea of that way of feeding back the electronic from the own imprint of electroacoustics in the instrumental techniques to which we referred earlier, strengthening what is heard here as a substantive and truly quality step in the rhizome of artistic-musical evolution (again, therefore, far from banalities of such low quality and bad taste as those proclaimed and composed by authors who so poorly understand the use and technological-musical development as those attached to the New Conceptualism).

Roberto Alonso and Marek Poliks, through their two editions on NEOS and Creotz; respectively, Archon and Debris, are located in other fortunately very different coordinates, in which the musical matter has a truly solid weight and work, and we can talk about pieces that owe as much to the aforementioned Ramón Souto as to French Saturated Music and the roots that, from them, lead to Helmut Lachenmann, Luigi Nono and a long etcetera; as, in parallel and interactively, to Edgard Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, Pierre Schaeffer and a whole protean line of dialogue between acoustic instruments and electronics, whether explicitly (as a physical process) or conceptually.

Mist-Crawler is a perfect example of this, with its Tibetan bell sounds, so loved by Stockhausen, next to abrasions and frictions of electronic materials that result in a rougher landscape, a kind of inextricable fog (like the Pollockian ones) among which percussion and violin emerge. Roberto Alonso's irruptions, in this sense, seem to emanate from a landscape of time and memory, like

 a subterranean river that would have begun to flow in 1948 (with, precisely, the Déserts of Varèse) and has been flowing ever since, through different sounds and forms. The vertiginous, and almost dizzying, elements of Mist-Crawler even seem to evoke, again, Varèse's Poème électronique or the Epomeo of Nono, in its most expanded version, that of his Como una ola de fuerza y luz.

It is, therefore, of extraordinary interest to follow the activity of these two creators, who from a rational approach and technological commitment to our time, find not only the avant-garde of the 20th century but also and above all the essential roots of all contemporary music, which they perfectly interpret and bring up to date, configuring their own imprint, which cannot be cataloged. Archon, therefore, is a creation of great importance and depth that will delight anyone with a minimal capacity for reflection and attention. Not only the musical but also the visual aspect, with those photographs of electronic circuits, seems to guide us towards a path of complexity and richness that well deserves our deep listening and careful contemplation.