Late Bush – Fluxtrata

As part of his ongoing Late Bush project, Belgian composer Pierre Dozin recently released this dazzling piece as the second single from his upcoming album Hoarses. The album is based on the idea that baroque music no longer exists—at least not as actual sound—because the experience of hearing it is pure historical relic. Any performance of the music is only a reconstruction, an attempt to envision the music’s form based on historical documentation alone, since all that’s left with us is its notation. Hoarses incorporates traditional instrumentation with contemporary sound design and embraces artificially generated voices as instruments, the use of which is treated as consistent with the speculative quality of historically reimagined work. Why couldn’t a disembodied artificial intelligence contribute meaningfully to this kind of reconstruction if our own interpretations of sounds lost to history are essentially also just artifice? If the assumption that it’s our physical impression…