Archon: Esoteros

Description

Esoteros

Subject

At first it might have seemed like a mere curiosity, a pastime destined like so many others to rapid oblivion, but instead it was a sinister prophecy. Barely a couple of years have passed since artificial intelligence apps were put into the public domain, offering the Internet community the opportunity to mix verbal inputs through which to “inspire” images then generated autonomously via software. Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are, in some ways, the most original and talented visual “artists” currently in circulation, whereas the human avant-garde seems to have depleted its resources and instead resorted to the safe second-hand, often a mannerism of provocation that only gratifies the stakeholders of a degenerate market of taste.

It is not exactly a novelty to find oneself discussing generative music, although so far it has mostly been about placid atmospheric suites (Brian Eno), raw data sonification (Alva Noto, Hecker) and mutant post-techno deconstructions (Autechre). Many others, in different ways, have indulged de-humanising instincts, experimented with exercises in authorial disappearance, tried, in short, to discover what kind of music resides beyond the boundaries of intention and consciousness. These preparatory stages, however, still fail to dampen the sense of unease – but also morbid excitement – provoked by listening to the Demiurge synthesis software at work, at the instigation of its creators Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso.

The diabolical, albeit guiltless, generative engine referring to the open source platform Archonemblematizes the triumph and tragedy of a technological progress that could not – and would not – stop within reasonable limits, twisting the knife in the wound of a forthcoming supplanting of machines at the expense of the same (and ironically the only) species that was able to design them.
On the other hand, one can easily imagine with what smug amazement the two experimenters, before anyone else, have lent themselves to this game of deforming mirrors, letting their concrete sonic gestures kickstart an agitated phantom orchestra whose counterpoint, elaborated in real time, is so whimsical and overabundant as to almost completely obscure its matrix.

Of course, it is not by feeding it Mozart that Archon gives vent to such surreal and elusive sound figures: It is Roberto Alonso’s violin – subsequently in duo with percussionist Christian Smith – that guides him towards sheer atonalism through extended techniques reminiscent of the iconoclast Lachenmann; a vocabulary of whistlings and rough screechings to which the artificial intelligence responds at times with sudden electroacoustic lashings, other times with nebulae of deconstructed harmonies bound to assemble and dissolve seamlessly, in and out of the imaginary curtains of the stereo channels. A sample of style that is anything but coherent and “polished”, to the point that its schizoid textures incidentally echo certain drifts of new electronic sound design, with particular reference to the digital nightmare LEXACHAST by Amnesia Scanner and Bill Kouligas – a post-everything magma that will likely retain its alarming topicality for a long time to come.

In our place, a skeptical and sufficiently malicious critic would argue that Archon still has a lot to learn about how music is made. The point is that for this sort of machine, learning is, in fact, the only possible modus operandi, the only conduct that allows it to move forward rather than move in circles, updating its deviant relational practice at every step. On the other hand, technically, it doesn’t even know it is producing music, but rather interprets and returns every input in the form of endless binary sequences, by their very nature devoid of any signification; and with this, perhaps, it gets even closer to the essence of Music than our expressive intentions pretend to do.

Many other questions are raised by the project itself as by listening to the first of its countless possible “rewritings”. Restricting oneself to the philosophical implications, one cannot help but notice an accelerationist tendency, that cupio dissolvi that compels the two experimenters to ideally anticipate their succumbing, without depriving themselves of the grand-guignolesque spectacle that preludes it. However, the process has now been triggered and a turnaround is unlikely, at least until the bottom of the tunnel is reached. It is these same, unripe aesthetic outcomes that invoke further efforts in the direction of an as-yet unrevealed potential music: a dystopian and foolish mission, perhaps destined for resounding failure, and one that may therefore end up instilling new confidence in the creative abilities of the human factor.