If there’s anything we humans are good at, it’s finding meaning in the meaningless. Some would say it’s what defines us. Is it a worthy pastime? Does it bring us joy, reduce our misery? Sometimes. The jury is definitely still out in the case of H E L L O After-Person. RM Francis’s extensive release notes place the work in context with Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s provocative essay “Against Theory”, which challenges the usefulness and validity of the act of interpretation itself. Neither Francis and Tagen nor Knapp and Michaels are presenting completely novel ideas, but this particular line of thought draws relevance (and efficacy) from the specific form it takes. Here, in one of two new entries in the ETAT catalog, the framework is a computer algorithm: “The script […] was generated by speech-to-text software listening to pulsar synthesis files processed to approximate the formant structure of the human voice.” Any actual words (or, god forbid, sentences) uttered by the program are incidental, merely chance resemblances of random sound waves to tattered fragments of the English language. Though it is “semantically null to human ears,” we cannot help but perceive some secret agenda in the aleatoric sputter, some forbidden yarn that can only be spun by a neutral third party. When I saw Francis perform last year he used a very similar setup, and the results were both hilarious and horrific. That continues in H E L L O, although for me it leans toward the latter side of the spectrum, especially when heard alone in the dark. The plasticine voices we hear are urgent, frantic, scared… until we remind ourselves that they aren’t. “And he had a brother / on / the inside of a boat / who was a shadow puppet,” one confides; “And all I can clearly see to do / is write it down / but then you’ll just haaang it in the back / of your head,” another warns. The language that manifests legibly seems to actively convey the same truth as its “objective” lack of meaning passively does (no, sorry, just popped the last ibuprofen I had). The irony, of course, is that this 31-minute album is probably not the unedited output of the algorithm, but rather choice selections to boost the rhetorical heft of the argument that there is no argument. Everything is futile, especially futility. “Have you ever gotten into trouble for being curious?” “It exists.”
Noise Not Music 