Soundwalk Collective is an experimental sound collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki in New York City. According to their bio, the collective currently operates in a continuously rotating constellation of sound artists and musicians. The Collective’s approach to composition combines anthropology, ethnography, non-linear narrative, psycho-geography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis
Lovotic is the new album which will be out on April 1st via Analogue Foundation. It was composed in collaboration with lauded actress and singer/songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg and features veteran techno stalwart Atom™, rising singer/composer/performance artist Lyra Pramuk, celebrated actor Willem Dafoe, and writer/philosopher Paul B. Preciado.
Check the new track “Empower and Enhance“.
According to the press release, Inspired by a relatively new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships – and even love – between people and robots, ‘LOVOTIC’ interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this phenomenon. The project ventures into a future where sex, intimacy and desire are reformulated through the connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
In an age of such hybrid entanglement with the machine, human identity requires the construction of new forms of intimacy, gender, and sexuality. At present, however, such technologies are primarily used to produce programs of limited sexual iterations that do not question the preformatted categories of gender and sexual orientation. In contrast, on ‘LOVOTIC’, Soundwalk Collective ask whether the future of sex and sexuality could instead be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope. “Where does the impulse of preference come from? What sets of words from our vocabulary can be communicated to the AI mind to generate a new identity for desire? Could the machine be another technology that brings us closer together?”, they ask.
Sonically ‘LOVOTIC’ is unidentifiable, artificial, and genuinely futuristic, occupying an amorphous androgynous netherworld at the borderlands between biotic and android. Traditional musical signposts are virtually non-existent, instead offering a mercurial, formless sound which mirrors the flourishing of gender fluidity it suggests could be on the horizon.
The production tangibly evokes the odd, rubbery textures of faux flesh, the slick virtual glide or glitchy mishaps of software, and the sleek shine of hardware. Gleaming sound design creates shard-like surfaces redolent of Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s ‘Glass’, the slippery stretched sonics of Gabor Lazar, and the unsettling dark ambience of TOWERS and Hallmark ‘87.
