Death lingers amongst the living. We mourn and grieve loved ones and friends lost yesterday and long ago, remember them on birthdays (theirs and ours), during the holidays and casual moments. The heart aches, memories quake like colliding tectonic plates, and warmth slowly subsumes the cold, with cross words erased and replaced with sweet exchanges.
Amsterdam-based musician and composer Asa Horvitz sought to turn his private grief into a public memorial after his father, jazz guitarist Bill Horvitz, passed away in 2017. He turned to the written word and, with help from Alejandro Calcaño, gathered 151 works—ranging from notes and letters to classic books and science fiction novels—that dealt with death, and fed the texts into a custom AI language model created by Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant that then mixed and matched them.
Joined by bassist Carmen Quill as well as Ariadne Randall and Bryan West on processing, synthesizers and viola da gamba, and incorporating music by his uncle, pianist Wayne Horvitz, he then set out to create the soundtrack for the non-sequitur sentiments. Sessions began in 2019, not long after Quill had lost her own father, and ran through 2023, with the principles taking their time to craft a collective expression of the singular.
Initially, Horvitz took the result on the road as a multidisciplinary performance piece, later adding another layer: a GHOST website that includes an option to play with the custom AI language model itself. The album, I imagine, is the culmination of the journey. Far-fetched as the concept sounds, the result is mesmerizing. Much as the AI component creates meaning from jumbled syntax, the music resonates. It’s an avant-garde opera that glides from spoken word bits to a solo piano piece to jazz-like orchestrations and back again, demanding one’s attention throughout. Background noise, it’s not.
Outsourcing the articulation of grief to AI is a meta move in the modern age. As I noted the other day, however, the concept initially gave me pause—and not just because of the use of AI itself. Here are lyrics of “Great Bird”: “Your love is a wood rabbit/And yet you are a great bird/like the wolf of a cat/And people like that talk about holes in the sky/And the humans can shake your heart/But you have no eyes.” How does one discern meaning from that?! And yet, somehow, over time the jumbled words resonate, on a symbolic level, deep in the psyche and the soul.
That said, the album is not for everyone; those who enjoy thick beats and sick rhymes should look elsewhere. It’s a challenging song cycle that upends convention, conjuring everyone from Philip Glass to the Velvet Underground along the way. It’s a compelling listen.
The Old Grey Cat 