A 2048 Album Review

 

A fictional album review from my book Reset 2046, written in 2014 (with a few edits). It's an interesting way to prototype music you might want to write yourself as a scenario. In 2046 a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is an instrument. That probably will be a reality a lot sooner than 2046.

These can be written as a roman a clef, for example, a real review, say, from 1971 which uses all fictitious band member names and song titles, with new nomenclatures, such as "assembler" rather than producer.

Peter Himmelman recently did one on his Substack https://peterhimmelman.substack.com/p/the-mindset-of-irans-useful-idiots

9/26/2048

Album Review: Zonz: Scenarii

Just a few years ago, Zonz were in the vanguard of the "Droom" movement, with a pair of promising singles (Generica and Technology Ticket) and their hugely interesting debut Edge of the Clock. Sinead Byrne, (vocals and BCI) displayed a minor talent for generating music as well as generating effects code. As much as Zonz relies on gimmickry, Byrne at least does it with a keen ear for the most compelling elements borrowed from the 1960s era, described then as a kind of "psychedelic chamber music", or "acid-Baroque", which now has set off a revival of actual chamber music going back to the Baroque in the 17th century, albeit bereft of musical ability and creativity, and overly reliant on canned code in OpenAI.

Scenarii, is not as interesting. Byrne seems either to have left the group or to have given up actively participating in it. Only one of her generated tracks is on the new album (Blind to the Dark Side), and it hardly showcases her abilities as an assembler.

With Byrne missing, we are left with the work of bassist Wilhelm Burns and organist Paul Smith a/k/a Yuthe. Burns (who generated a couple of insipid tracks on the first album) is an interesting writer (generator), vocalist, and bass player. I believe he shows some promise. He reminds me a bit of Pink Floyd's Roger Waters.

The production work is not as polished compared to the first album. This may be the approach of new producer/coder Yuthe, who has been known for reckless strategies, simply to try something different. The coding work is shoddy and routine; and some tracks loop for some 50 minutes, prime examples of unnecessary length in pop music.

Burns' Saturnshine is overly gauzy and diffuse, yet is just an homage to the post-Pepper Beatles sound, as well as ambient music.

Winters has also coded and assembled several songs with a "jazz" algorithm. Remember A Day is unremarkable and features some rather miserable Markov outputs. Here, as throughout, Larsch's drum code is incoherent and ineffective. Winters' The Present Then is a ballad scored vocally in a style incongruously reminiscent of Ronnie and The Daytonas.

The album's title track is eleven minutes of psychedelic code. There's a lot of interesting noise, and at times one almost is tempted to take the whole conglomeration as a significant experimental probe.

But as the chaos settles reassuringly into a banal organ-cum-religious chorus finale, one realizes that Zonz is anchored in the diatonic world with any deviations from that norm a matter of effect rather than musical conviction. Unfortunately, a music of just effects is a weak base for a rock group to rest its reputation on, but this is what Zonz has done.

The wisdom in pop music is and probably always will be that it isn't until a band's third album do they get any legs. There is hope and promise. It took 7 albums for Pink Floyd.