patten

Deep Blue

Genre: ELECTRONIC

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Boomkat Product Review:

patten's second album of the year applies the text-to-audio AI-generated approach of 'Mirage FM' to jazz, feeling out just how human a computer can possibly sound. Fuzzy and illogical, it's uncanny beat music that twists when it should turn.

If 'Mirage FM' was the first album made entirely from text-to-audio AI-generated sound sources, then 'Deep Blue' is the second. patten's named this one after the IBM supercomputer that notoriously beat a reigning human world champion at chess, and his motivation this time isn't to show just how hazy AI-generated sounds can be, but how naturalistic. The raw material was coughed out by customized AI notebooks, then spliced, layered, edited and effected by patten until it sounded human enough to make the cut. And he's done a pretty startling job of it; unlike its predecessor, 'Deep Blue' is less of a collage and more of a continuous thought.

Opener 'Tarrasch' starts on the left foot, coming across like Vladislav Delay with voided stutters and cathedral-strength reverb, but before we've had a chance to catch our breath, it blossoms into dreamworld broken beat. It's hard to believe the music isn't made up of live samples at this point; the tempo fluctuates and bumps, but it sounds fluid and completely intentional. You have to really tune your attention to catch the unusual stitching - something sounds wrong, but you just can't put your finger on it.

The most astonishing creation is the eight-and-a-half-minute 'Burn Variation', a continuously fluctuating cosmic slop that successfully absorbs jazz's wildest eccentricities. It's here where patten's concept reveals itself fully; he's not trying to copy jazz, but test the limits of the process. Can a computer really DO jazz? Here, the answer is complicated - we've been listening to sample-based jazz variations for decades at this point, and 'Burn Variation' is more adventurous than most forays into the genre. patten shuttles us from transcendent, meditative ambience to twitchy swing, into freeform experimentation, and everything's struck through with blood curdling oddness. Drums don't so much beat as flicker, and textures transform from chunky horn-like blasts into searing white noise in an instant. When you think you've got a handle on it, the composition inevitably skews sideways: trip-hop mutates into dubstep, and loungey exotica dances into concrète noise.

If AI-generated music seems terrifying at the moment, 'Deep Blue' should at least provide some comfort. Using the latest technology, patten has made a genuinely hypnotic album that doesn't follow the expected script. The inconsistencies belched out by the system provide the most intriguing facets, and patten wields his tools with noticeable benevolence.

Impressive.

MP3 Release (9)