Pentiments’ first CD release is appropriately one with a radical focus on digital media both physical and disembodied, an aesthetic purview that should come as no surprise to followers of LA-based sound researcher Connor Camburn, whose sparse discography under his own name and as Litüus on Careful Catalog, Chained Library, and other imprints comprises some of the most forward-thinking computer music of the past few decades. It would be difficult to say anything about 00U0U_akhnQkunEcw_0CI0pI_600x450 that hasn’t already been covered in the evocative (if a bit verbose) liner notes, so I’ll aim to build on them instead, especially the excellent phrase “the incidental grandeur of malfunction.” Here Camburn codes, composes, and cointegrates an entirely new musical language based in data output both intentional and erroneous, uncovering obscure alien logics in the interactions between unpredictable systems of tones and textures. The ensuing musical works manifest in a variety of forms; some are kinetic (the seething, hyperactive noise arrays of “01082016”), others lethargic (“08112020” / “08292021” and their slow-paced flow of decaying pulses that ring both inquisitive and sorrowful in turn), but all display a disconcerting amount of emotional sentience. Whether that’s simply the result of nothingness mirroring the preoccupations of the observer or the subtle agency of some sort of ghost in the machine is up for debate, but the latter possibility is difficult to ignore when confronted with something as profoundly arresting as the penultimate “08242021,” a piece that just seems too sensible, too organic to have been produced by a passive algorithm. To return to the introductory words, 00U0U_akhnQkunEcw_0CI0pI_600x450 is billed as “a stark and laconic argument against the oncoming ‘technological singularity’,” and it succeeds—these are the sounds of humanity being boxed up in modular caskets by silicon caretakers of our own making.
Noise Not Music 