Men, maths, and machines: Stochastic by Carbon Based Lifeforms

 

Stochastic music, as an actual term and method, really has its origins in Yannis Xenakis's seminal work from the 1960s, entitled Formalized Music (Musiques Formelles). 

Essentially, random processes not only produce musical events in stochastic compositions, but they can be directed and/or constrained such that they can even create musical pieces of a certain style or genre. Creating a systematic mathematical treatise on this topic was an utterly groundbreaking move. 

Of course, in 2021, we have the luxury of looking back at decades of genuine computer music - i.e. musical works that were created not just on, but by computers. With the advent of personal computers, one could create such works at home, tinkering with stochastic processes or elaborate mathematical algorithms (for example, in the case of fractal music).

Computer compositions reliant on random elements were no longer confined to the laboratories with huge and terrifying looking computer monsters. Once upon a time, the stunningly human and mesmerising Illiac Suite could only be created on such a monstrosity, the ILLIAC computer at the University of Illinois.

Many have ventured into the realm of computer music, after all, even the ambient music luminary Brian Eno has built bridges between ambient and generative music.

We are almost at the end of 2021 now, and the ambient/psybient duo Carbon Based Lifeforms surprised fans by the release of an album called Stochastic. 

The album returns to the sonic world of their earlier ambiental albums like VLA and Twentythree.

The way in which this album was created is eminently different, though. Well, you may have guessed it, stochastic processes were applied in order to generate the sound sequences and textures. 

As the authors describe it, the tracks were born from exploiting the random features of some of their synths, and they were left alone to do their things... creating evolving textures, layers, and motifs. 

The track titles are firmly rooted in the world of maths and algorithms, apart from some poetic ones like Hello From The Children Of Planet Earth. Titles like Eigenvector, Finite State Space, Sphere Eversion are straight out of the world of vector algebra, control theory, and topology. 

One key aspect to highlight here is that the album does not contain what some may fear: these are not academic unlistenable experimentation, alien and alienating random sounds, or products of some purely theoretical adventure in areas of mathematics that nobody may understand. 

The album does sound remarkably identifiable as a CBL album. It has dreamy textures, floating layers of sonic bliss, and memorable evolving motifs. 

What is often forgotten when some discuss computer-generated music is that ultimately, it is still the human producing the end result. 

That human input may be merely a selection process of picking out pieces or entire tracks from the randomly generated output. It may be human involvement in the constraints imposed on the pseudo-random processes. It may be human control of numerous parameters, algorithms, stochastic processes. It may be human choices in the processing of the resulting sounds, e.g. via choices of effects.

Where the machine ends and where the human begins in computer-generated music is often a futile debate. 

We, as listeners are hearing the end result of a 'collaboration' between man and machine, where the machine was given more freedom than in normally composed and performed electronic music. 

When listening to Stochastic, at least this reviewer would recommend something perhaps scandalous to the listener: let's forget analysing where that delimitation line between the human crew of CBL and the synths may be. Let's not treat it as a highly technological record...

It is ethereal, pleasant, non-intrusive music but by no means for passive listening. There are endless details and myriad changes of subtle or tidal nature, there are tiny evolutions of sounds and there are vast swells of sounds. There are passages that are genuinely uplifting, expansive, and infused with what seems to be human emotions.

It comes across as a wholly enjoyable, varied, and quite human album. 

As Bill Laswell once wrote, Computers and electronic music are not the opposite of the warm human music. It's exactly the same...

The quarantine waves...

Although one tries to resist the temptation for days and weeks, as the lockdown continues one eventually caves in... and posts a "quarantine playlist" of albums that seem to have originated from some other dimension, or have reached us via some electromagnetic waves emitted in some distant galaxy... or emerged from the habitat of previously not noticed tiny organisms.

Thus, on a personal note, a choice of a few albums that might just take someone else, too into the waves and vibrations of vast or infinitesimally small worlds.

The playlist is perhaps manageable in a single sitting (or, actually, lying...), but it needs a very quiet day with quite a few hours to just... be...

1. Tangerine Dream - Zeit 

Among the early, nowadays we would call it ambiental, albums by the veritable electronic music institution that Tangerine Dream has been since the 1960s, we have this double LP dating back almost fifty years...

The reason why I keep returning to this double album is that it is perhaps the most convincing example of 'space ambient'. What I understand and expect under that over-used label is music that simply seems to exist, without feeling that it is being performed by human beings, that there are instruments of any kinds involved in the process.

Zeit simply exists. It fills every available space in the room, in the house, it flows, it changes, it has currents and undulations. There are no shapes to hold on to, there are no structures to be self-conscious about.

It just is...

Yet, unlike many ambient drone music albums, it is constantly changing below its sometimes static-looking surface.

It is almost as if something, someone has managed to transpose into audible frequency range some radio telescope recording of the various electromagnetic activities spotted in distant galaxies.

2. Vangelis - Soil Festivities

On a quiet day, after a lengthy introduction via the sound waves and undercurrents of Zeit, the Greek grand master's mid-1980s concept album is immersing us into a very different world.

We go from the immense and the eminently "macro" to the delicate "micro" world, albeit latter is a very definitely terrestrial one.

Despite occasional sounds of summer storms and rain, this remains a phenomenal combination of minimalism and ambient music.

The delicate, obstinately repeating tiny motifs develop, constantly evolve, and get embellished by a discourse, sometimes a whole multi-party conversation, of other musical elements.

It could be the musical expression of the life of myriad tiny creatures in a rainforest on Earth, but it could equally be anywhere on some exotic other planet teeming with life. The pace of the musical evolution is hypnotising, the whole album has a dream-like quality whilst it seduces the mind with myriad, infinitesimal or large-scale, changes in the musical textures.

Speaking of textures, it is worth paying attention to just how every single synthesized timbre is chosen from the infinite possibilities of Vangelis's sonic laboratory - and how each timbre blends perfectly into the ever-evolving delicate textures.

Sublime, passionate at time, and precise in its dosing of musical energies... an album that is a very unusual and, to this day, unique interlude in the synth master's astoundingly varied output.

3. Michael Stearns - Encounter

The superlative American maestro of space ambient and world music-infused ambiental music has created something that is a rare example of thematic space music.

However, theme and track titles aside, one scandalous way to listen to this album is to not care about the intended narrative that wants to describe an encounter with an advanced alien civilisation.

We return to the world of Zeit, but here we have sometimes vast and thundering forces unleashed... the walls may wobble and neighbours in the street could wonder whether a UFO is actually in the process of landing somewhere.

There are many trademark elements in the compositional and sound design thinking that went into this Stearns album - characteristics that later we recognise in his masterpieces like the soundtracks to Ron Fricke's spellbinding Baraka or Samsara.

There are textures that shimmer and oscillate in mid-air in the room, there are huge floods of cosmic energies that storm through the room and fly off into the distance, leaving us stunned and mesmerised.

During this sonic voyage, we don't travel to distant galaxies, the Cosmos drops by for a visit...

4. Tangerine Dream - Rubycon

Just after their seminal Phaedra album, this one can leave one wondering whether it is the music of intricate inner or outer spaces.

It is, in its two tracks, a hypnotic voyage into some otherworldly spaces that seem to be at the same time cosmic and microscopic.

Maybe this is quantum music, that the late mastermind Edgar Froese talked about many decades later.

There is structure, there are tightly timed pulsations of impossible to grasp physical forces between particles, there are myriad infinitesimally tiny details and shifts in the forces at work... and there is, at the same time, complete fluidity and a sense of timelessness.

Like Soil Festivities, this seems to deep dive into a microworld - but this is not at the level of tiny living creatures, it is way, way below that.

We are listening to subatomic particles shaping up the vast constructs we see through telescopes...

5. Carbon Based Lifeforms - Twentythree

Unlike their pure ambient drone album VLA, this multi-part album has a rare combination of highly cerebral and emotive space ambient music.

It is a very rare experience, after having gone through many decades' output in aforementioned genre, to find something that is so abstract, so devoid of any tangible shape, but at the same time so emotionally charged.

The subtle melancholy of tracks like Held Together By Gravity is sublime and simply beautiful...

Although the creative duo, as we all know, is capable of thundering beats and trendy psy-trance vibes, too, this album is a phenomenally delicate affair.

Despite some of the track titles, which may be pointing us toward Earthly mysteries, we are in outer space... or, at best, in some caves nobody else has yet discovered.

The music gives us something to hold onto, there are tiny shapes we can see in the gaseous clouds, but it gives enough space for imagination to wonder. We can imagine whatever we want, especially if we do not look at the track titles.

6. John Serrie - The Stargazer's Journey

A relatively tiny journey to the American continent can keep us firmly in the sphere of utterly cosmic, but delicately emotive, space ambient.

One of the masters of space electronica from the other side of the Atlantic has this quite exquisite constellation hiding in his discography. It is recent, it is from the new Millennium, but, in a good sense, it sounds like the most stellar 1970s-1980s achievements of space music.

The entire sonic landscape has some intangible gentle melancholy, a sense of one dreaming to be somewhere else in some distant corner of the Cosmos, but at the same time feeling nostalgic about one's own home world.

To sculpt every sound and every transition between what seem to be undulations of gentle clouds of particles, but to make it all feel so fluid, effortless, and without tangible human intervention... well, we are back to the world of Zeit.

If Zeit started us off with the hidden vibrations and currents of indescribable cosmic interactions that exist and will continue to exist independently from us, The Stargazer's Journey is a slow flight among gas nebulae that trigger emotions in us by their, dare we say, otherworldly beauty.

In today's world, where music has been increasingly put into utilitarian pigeonholes (i.e. music meant to relax us, to heal us, to entertain us etc.), we ended up being extremely distant from the Pythagorean ideal of what the 'music of the spheres' is supposed to be.

Serrie's album is a good counterpoint. Yes, it can instantly relax us from it first few seconds, but it is something that defies expectations on what a 'space music' composer sets out to do and why...

Carbon Based Lifeforms...far from Derelicts

After a prolonged break (with the exception of some notable remastered versions of earlier albums), the categorisation-defying Swedish duo Carbon Based Lifeforms is back in full force.

Indeed, with their discography rooted in the more "ambient" side of the electronic music spectrum, but nevertheless often offering eminently head-bobbing-inducing tracks, too, one could wonder what the announced album Derelicts would sound like.

Instead of a departure into some stereotypical electronica, Derelicts is a 12-track album of quite some integrity and instantly recognisable as a CBL creation.

While Accede opens the album with that characteristic sound and patient development of hypnotically repetitive textures and sequences, CBL fans will be glad to encounter later on quite a variety of moods and tones...

Parts of Clouds or Nattväsen have references to, and echoes of, sound worlds first heard on World of Sleepers and Twentythree.

Equilibrium has that slow and rather irresistibly hypnotising rhythm one may have heard on the album Hydroponic Gardens.

The title track is really a stand-out piece, CBL at their most majestic and flowing at the same time, with deceptively simple, but anthemic, melodic progression lifting the track after its ambiental beginnings.

For a more abstract and eminently ambient sonic trip, Path of Least Resistance is a keeper - with a vast sonic landscape that reminds one of VLA and Twentythree.

One does not stop being amazed by the sense of melancholy mixed with majestic electronic soundscapes that CBL can infuse tracks with: ~42° is a perfect example of how the by now characteristic sonic elements are blended seamlessly by the electronic duo.

The structure of the album is also quite noteworthy, the soaring, uplifting tracks frame very nicely the quieter ambient works, plotting quite well a sonic journey through different states.

For example, 780 Days returns to the energetic opening sections of the album and lifts us out of the reverie, but there are no harsh edges and no sudden transitions - everything, as any CBL fan would rightly expect, flows very nicely.

Similarly, Rayleigh Scatterers and Dodecahedron provide melodic laid-back repose between more introspective tracks.

The mastering job done on the album is of a quality one would expect, the thunderous bass and percussion in tracks like 780 Days sit very well with the subtle and very refined ambient sonic elements.

This makes the album feel quite dreamy and light in places, even when the actual electronic sound palette is darker and more ominous.

CBL have found a very rare and specific register, like an elusive and mythical register on a mighty organ: Derelicts is, again, an eminently electronic album where technology does not take over, but from shaping subtle quasi-transparent constructs to processing sounds of thundering echoes of vast spaces, technology serves the artistic intent.

The result is, once again, a sonic world with a very personal touch and without the faintest sign of wanting to get lost in any commercial trend of electronica, whichever has been raging out there, outside the CBL sonic Universe, during the years that passed since the Refuge soundtrack album.

As the duo have reported in the recent past, the album would have been shorter but in its last creative stages suddenly a new track was born that simply had to be included on what has become a 12-track album in the end.

Overall, zero shortage of imagination again, and while keeping eminently characteristic CBL sound going through the entire album, there are no direct self-references - hence Derelicts feels thoroughly fresh.

It is a huge relief, that with the so-called "revolutions" (i.e. regurgitations of decades-old electronic music genres and style) like synthwave and such, some names keep looking forward instead of backward - and look at technology as a tool for creating new sonic visions (as contradictory as the term may sound).