What happens when the divide between electronic and acoustic music is shortened? Blurred? Erased entirely? That’s the question Irish composer/musician Alex Dowling seeks to answer on his debut Reality Rounds, released on Carrier Records. Dowling, a student of vocal manipulation, has put his years of experimentation to the test with this effort, a cycle centered on his “AutoTune Choir” (featuring himself, Emma O’Halloran, Annika Socolofsky, and Chris Douthitt). The album was recorded live in Princeton, New Jersey, and each vocalist was given a Bluetooth device to manipulate their voice via AutoTune. If all that sounds like a recipe for chaos and confusion, then the results may surprise you.
The choir sounds like a buncha friggin’ angels, dude. Friggin’ angels singing in the clouds.
Sort of hilariously a ceremonial concept for newfangled “religion” “Dataism” (that’s good, you gotta admit), Reality Rounds does in fact sound almost exactly like a series of hymns aimed at elevating the worship of “the eternal flow of data.” And there it is – not only is that eternal flow of data the most important and therefore worship-able thing there probably is (take that, Jesus!), but the concept of humanity somehow melding into that data flow, or at least merging with the apparatuses that sustain it, is less weird now than it was half a century ago, when sci-fi authors let their imaginations run wild with the possibilities of technology. Here, Dowling tries to literally force that to happen, and at least allow us to hear what it sounds like.
Again, the choir is simply amazing, ethereal to the point of transcendence. By “digitally extending [the performers’ voices] beyond their physical boundaries,” Dowling and crew are able to de-humanize the singers to a point – but not all the way – where it can be impossible to tell where the vocal intonations begin and the synthesis ends. The result is uncanny, an effortless virtuosic performance that blends the best of cold digitization with the comfort of heavenly progressions. When Carrier Records calls it “a rare feat – truly live, human, electronic music,” they’re selling Dowling and co. short. They’ve actually – actually – broken the boundary between the organic and the synthetic, resetting and redefining the philosophical concepts behind data and human interaction and music in a single album. Both you and your robot can get lost in this thing.
criticalmassesmedia1.wordpress.com 