From the earliest developments in digital synthesis to the advent of the laptop and beyond, those who operate within the tradition of “computer music” have always confronted its uniquely symbiotic balance of manual and automatic soundmaking. Vancouver’s Stefan Maier is an artist who refuses to restrict his methodology to one or the other, instead electing to “[walk] the thin line between barely controlling a sound and accepting that it has its own inner life.” As a listener I tend to prefer extremity in this genre, a quality that is more often than not associated with direct artistic input; Maier’s work, however, utilizes the aleatoric dimension as a fertile space for his pure electronic topologies to interact and complexify—letting out some slack in the leash, so to speak—without sacrificing any intensity. The appropriately titled Nervous Systems presents a succinct example of this schema, its twenty-two minutes charting an organic evolution of inorganic substance: thick tendrils of humming glitch textures are unwound by flickering tonal photons; sonorous dissonance dissolves into a sparse yet spacious environment that could be natural, artificial, or both (the release text dubs the observational aspect of Maier’s approach “expanded field recording,” a descriptor that captures this delicate dance of intention and indeterminacy well). Though audibly more composed than the most unruly generative Party Perfect!!! material (Ryu Hankil’s Envelope Demon and Hunter Brown’s Stoppages Vol. 1 [∞]), Nervous Systems is an exciting and fitting new addition to the label’s gleefully posthuman purview.
Noise Not Music 