With its new album of kraut-pop protest songs, The Organizing Committee imagines a world where the weirdness of cybernetics never gave way to corporate AI research, where art school dropouts got their hands on 1968 IBM mainframes, and where humans designed software through loose collectives. It is utopian pop, tailor made for our dystopian time.

For Communication in the Presence of Noise, chief architect Eryk Salvaggio crafted eleven brazenly intellectual pop songs that point outward at the world’s problems and lost solutions. This is a record equally informed by Gilles Deleuze and Os Mutantes, Bruno Latour and Gary Numan, Soviet No-Wave Punk and Soviet Cybernetics.

Salvaggio is fascinated by lost trajectories of technology. The first AI art exhibition, for instance, happened in 1968, the same year as the Paris uprisings and the first Silver Apples record. But AI got sequestered away from the politics and consciousness conversations of that era. With The Organizing Committee, Salvaggio is trying to imagine these things coming together, instead of moving apart.

A surprisingly grittier and dancier follow-up to the self-released 2020 debut The Central Memory or 2021’s No Type release, The Day Computers Became Obsolete, Communication in the Presence of Noise sees Salvaggio putting more of his human side after trying to push the AI forward for so long. If past albums were collaborations with the constraints of the tools he was working with, this new release tilts the balance towards the artist’s own agency. A similar approach informed Salvaggio’s solo album Worlding, which saw him collaborate with mushrooms to exquisite effect.

Traces of synthetic media and algorithmically generated melodies and lyrics remain from earlier Organizing Committee releases. “But as always, I’ve kind of gotten myself lost between what came from me and what came from the tools. So it’s still proper cyborg-pop.” As for the harmonies (performed by the group’s fictional singer, cunningly nicknamed Françoise Hardisk) continue to be created by a proudly outdated copy of Vocaloid, feeling warmer thanks to its transfer to warbling analog tape or otherwise pushed to their synthetic limits.

• Disponible le:
  2023-10-19