Arash Akbari — Amnestic Continuum

Here’s a lavish package from Arash Akbari on Farpoint Recordings: a small book containing a CD of tracks by Akbari, accompanied by poems by Christopher Doherty-Ingram. Each track has a corresponding poem, displayed opposite a visualisation of data pertaining to the same theme, for example: ‘Economic inequality - Gini index, 1946-2016’; so it’s an ambitious project which, if not all-encompassing, certainly works to cover a lot of ground and material. 

The bandcamp spiel says, and I’m quoting this at length so I can return to it later, Amnestic Continuum:
‘is a concept album and a multidisciplinary project that utilizes data sonification, data visualisation, and literature to critique the hidden external effects of the increasing hegemony of computation and automation on life on earth. In order for intelligent machines to function, we need to reduce the world into sets of numerical data that sustain the databases and algorithmic operations: what is being forgotten in the process is the world itself. We simply become quantitative values in a specific time and place, the forgotten stories and lives that are being added to the datasets as inert numbers. This process repeats itself again and again until no sense, no meaning, and no life is left behind, like continuous amnesia…
Amnestic Continuum aims at creating sensitivity to the context and subjects behind these sequences of numbers. Using data-sonification to create musical compositions and soundscapes; data-visualization techniques to generate data sculpture; and poetic interpretations in written word by Chris Doherty-Ingram, a multi-sensory experience is created to explore how we relate and respond to the context and subjects behind datasets when filtered through the human experience.’

So, in terms of the sounds, Akbari uses data sonification and electroacoustic processes to create shimmering, eerie drones, low-end bass pulses, looping electricity, and reverberated melodies; all of the pieces are refreshingly short, for this territory at least, with the longest nearly reaching four and a half minutes. The first track, ‘The Lower Tail’, combines all these in a short, glistening track, complete with organ-like drones, whilst the second, ‘No One Who Remembered’, treads a darker path of circling, stuttering machine buzzes, like a very noisy piece of electroacoustic music. ‘Colourless’ has nice synthetic sounding loops that rise throughout the track, punctuated by reverbed lines that almost remind me of Cosi’s trumpet in Throbbing Gristle; ‘Departure’, the fourth piece, is more ethereal, with slight, shimmering, trebly drones hovering, and electronic clicks stuttering, over a distant bass churn. ’To Forget’, the fifth work here, again builds on looping electro pulses, whilst sonorous sounds rise up in the background, leading into ‘Fire Over Our Heads’ which has a more choral, relaxed tone - though again, a low-end drone lurks, underpinning the whole thing. ‘Drowned’ does indeed feature watery sounds, which loop through the track over background lines that sound like strangulated woodwinds or animal cries; ‘Call Of The Void’, the eighth work, is dominated by a thick, snaking drone sounding like a distant aircraft overhead, submerging smaller blips and ringing noises beneath it, whilst ‘No Life Worse Lived’ is a slow ebbing of waves, with slight pitch slurring like Boards of Canada, in the middle of echoing ticks and thuds. The final piece, ‘That Was Our Shelter’, features a guitar - the first clearly recognisable traditional instrument since the organ in the first track; this echoes away whilst field recordings of waves, and what sounds like guitar feedback, swirl around in the background. There’s a good sense of space and dynamics here, and it’s probably the best work on Amnestic Continuum.

Sonically, the album is nothing overly special, though my judgement here is unavoidably clouded by the surrounding ‘data sculptures’, poems, and mission statements: as a stand-alone CD Amnestic Continuum would be interesting enough, but laden with the lofty promises I quoted earlier it’s really set up for a fall. The tracks are indeed refreshingly short, but sometimes they also feel unfinished or under-developed; they pitch an awkward line where they’re too busy for minimalism but not busy enough to be deep, layered pieces. Unfortunately, given the project’s surrounding spiel, the tracks also perhaps predictably lean heavily on reverb and often attempt to summon the majestic and epic; this post-rock adjacent tone feels like a somewhat predictable response to the datasets and project aims. Nor, unless I’m missing something very obvious, are these datasets addressed as the project promised; in the long spiel I quoted Amnestic Continuum is initially described as an attempt to ‘critique the hidden external effects of the increasing hegemony of computation and automation on life on earth,’ however, by the end of the spiel this aim has transformed into ‘creating sensitivity to the context and subjects behind these sequences of numbers.’ Not remotely the same thing, with the latter aim much better represented than the former. However, ‘Drowned’ and ‘That Was Our Shelter’ both have their moments. On a final note, the poems are largely ‘meh’ at best but the text accompanying ‘No Life Worse Lived’ presents a bizarrely reductive, moralistic view of terrorism, despite stating that: ‘Terrorism is a complicated word’; it is indeed a complicated subject which deserves a nuance missing here, Scott Atran’s Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What it Means to Be Human would be a good starting point to redress this.