{"product_id":"natural-selection-756029613225","title":"Natural Selection","description":"Unlike much of Florian Hecker's recent work, such as 2021's 'Synopsis Seriation' or 'Hecker Leckey Sound Voice  Chimera', his acclaimed PAN-released collaboration with Mark Leckey, there's no single overarching narrative that binds  'Natural Selection'. Hecker describes the sprawling, nine-track album as a \"constellation of pieces originating from related  investigations\", and the clue's in the title. Ranging from under a minute to over half an hour, these works have been  grouped together because they share very specific properties, using correlated modes of synthesis and approaching  timbral metamorphosis in a similar way. Pieces that might seem incongruous at first are united not by one concept, but  by a cluster of queries that Hecker has been probing diligently for the last few years, ideas related to automated file  selection, database-generating sequencing systems and the prospect of synthetic cognition.  They were written in parallel with a range of Hecker's recent multi-disciplinary inquiries: 2022's Galerie Neu exhibition  TEMPLEXTURES, that examined machine listening and charted uncategorizable auditory sensations; 2021's diffusion of  olfactory sonics and evaluation of the perception of space 'RESYNTHESIZSERS'; and 'INSPECTION', an algorithmic  reconstruction of sounds that uses human hearing to parse their vital timbral characteristics. But 'Natural Selection'  doesn't require any rigorous background study. In fact, it's one of Hecker's most playful and approachable sets in years,  exhibiting the same balance of intensity, mischief and brain-twisting theory that made albums like 'Sun Pandämonium'  and 'Acid in the Style of David Tudor' so enduringly influential.  Beginning with the brief 'f92ex0.03', 40 seconds of heaving synthesized textures and disorienting frozen reverb trails, the  album immediately hits a different pace with the lengthy 'Syn 21845 8 J15 Q12', a piece Hecker wrote with the help of his  friend Vincent Lostanlen, an applied mathematician who is one of the leading voices in the field of computational auditory  analysis. The track takes microscopic glissandi fragments from a database of source material for Lostanlen's timefrequency scattering process and spatiotemporally reverses them, creating an unsettling, utterly beguiling audio illusion.  What sounds like a barrage of whooshing, perpetually reversing acoustic impressions is actually a progressive  metamorphosis of both forward and backward time - no audio is actually reversed.  Hecker's more succinct diversions are just as energizing and, inserted between his durational experiments, necessarily  palate cleansing. On the jackhammer 'm syn 260e 2402', he turns an analysis tool into a synthesizer, rooting out spectral  phantasms from runaway code, and on 'Layer', coaxes a digital reverb unit into shaping it's \"infinite space\" into crisscrossing synthetic whirrs. There's even a move towards technoid cohesion on the hallucinatory 'm syn bold heuristic  driver', that uses a revised and extended model of Lostanlen's time-frequency scattering process developed by members  of the mathematician's team. Hecker transforms harsh digital noise into an emergent rhythm, scanning the detritus until it  turns into a an unintentionally dubwise sequence of undulating pulses.  A variation of this process is also used to drive the album's extended closer 'm 35\/36', a symphonic 35-minute blur of  ghost frequencies and nebulous textures that's accented with kaleidoscopic xenharmonic iridescence.","brand":"Pan","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46371732226131,"sku":"2764910X","price":17.08,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0732\/1937\/5187\/files\/4472469.jpg?v=1792781650","url":"https:\/\/www.deepdiscount.com\/products\/natural-selection-756029613225","provider":"Deep Discount","version":"1.0","type":"link"}