Those who read this site regularly will know something of the backstory and sci-fi mythology behind Millie Sievert and the Radioactive Five. They will also know something about the patron artists, eNuminous & Archimedes and their sonic experiements to find the creative collision point between human artistry and artifical intelligence. There is no point in going over such explanations again. Still, I suggest you read up on both Fissionable Mass for an understanding of Millie and her time travelling posse and February 30th 1912: eNuminous and Archimedes LIVE! At the Hippodrome, London, to discover how the two bands fit together in terms of the music that they make.
But all of those, albeit unique and imaginative, narratives aside, the most fantastic thing about the music found here is not the Moorcockian stories and alternative sonic realities that are found wrapped around the album but what it means to the actual, real world and the future of music in general. Science fiction has always been very good at talking about the here and now.
Firstly, the part that many people will take immediate issue with until they have a greater understanding of what is going on here. All the music found in these 13 songs is AI-generated. Before you use such a statement as a reason to stop reading now, remember we have been here before. Frequently. Even in my lifetime, I have seen Beatles records being burned on moral grounds. Disco being cast out just because it is not rock music. Synths derided for not being guitars. Samples, the key ingredient of those fantastic early hip-hop records, attacked for not being physically played and digital techniques questioned simply for having the audacity not to be analogue. Wasn’t that all just the changing of the musical landscape and the evolution of music? Well, so is this.
The other fantastic realization is just how satisfying the results are. If you think that music-making with AI is just a matter of telling an algorithm what to do and letting it produce its own results, then Nothing, Nothing, No Thing, Nothing Nothing will surprise you.
Take the opener, Drawing the Moon Silent, impressively cutting a swathe of drama and anthemics that in an earlier age would have been the sonic bastion of bands like Led Zepellin, a song that wanders between lulling lows and massive crescendoes before fading out in a dispersing cloud of zeros and ones, disembodied vocals and drifting programming.
Cosmic Knitters [I Am Yarncore] essentially drifts along like an ancient Eastern European choral folk song before being shored up with digital beats. Amy Goes To The Ballet is the sound of country pop gone glitch-core. Rain on Battlefield takes on symphonic rock and wins. Scattered Ants is the sound of 50s chamber pop as delivered by 2001’s Hal, in turn having been programmed by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And Mona Lisa is pure futuristic folktronica.
If you think that the sound of some deluded mumble rapper creating derivative beats and boring bars to puff up his ego is where the meeting point of man and machine, musician and software, artist and algorithm is, then you are very music mistaken. That, my friend, is the sound of creative cul-du-sacs and musical dead ends being reached. No one can really be sure how AI and music will interface in the future but Nothing Nothing No Thing Nothing Nothing is definitely a vision of that future and an essential bridge to it.
Full playlist HERE
