O Captain – eNuminous & Archimedes (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Until now, my view of eNuminous & Archimedes was as someone searching for, exploring and shaping the possibilities and potential of the future of music. This is something that he did by manipulating the effects of AI involvement with regard to the music he makes. The reasoning is that if technologies such as AI will eventually encroach on every aspect of everyday life, even art and music, then we should turn them to our will rather than let them just run riot and have all the fun. It is a worthy quest.

But sometimes, music-making is done for more intimate and personal reasons. And O Captain, an album he made in 2020, is one of those times. It is an album born of grief; having lost his partner, it was music that he turned to as an outlet to express the feelings that arose inside us at those times.

Grief is perhaps the most personal of experiences, something that can only be understood and expressed by a sentient being, a living, breathing, feeling, emotive thing, and as such, the resulting album is free of any AI involvement; this is a music maker in the most traditional of settings, using the medium to express those most intimate thoughts and feeling, letting the music do the talking when mere words don’t seem enough.

That said, there are tracks here that cover other ideas and subject matters, so the album ebbs and flows between understated pathos and more beat-driven sounds, between the heart and the head, between personal experience and universal ideas. However, it would be too easy, and indeed presumptuous, to assign the more understated songs to those feelings of loss and assume that the more energetic numbers talk about other emotions. I’m sure the truth lies somewhere between the two, and not knowing makes you feel like you are not infringing on someone’s personal space.

And so it is an album of ever-shifting moods and moments, ever-changing sonic forms and musical styles, but that, in a way, makes the album fit perfectly with eNuminous & Archimedes’ usual offerings. There are drifting folktronica pieces such as the opener The Docks [12 Percent Cut], which does feel like a sonic elegy, but there are also more groove-orientated songs such as Flash of Light Dancers – Brain Teasers, a beguiling, robotic set of rhythms melding dance bass pulses, skittering snares and glitchy percussion which gently fade away into melted soundscapes as the song travels forward.

From a technical point of view, what is most interesting is what is revealed about how the artist and AI combine on other albums. This is a collection of songs with no AI manipulations, so it gives us a baseline for eNuminous & Archimedes music. On other albums, the AI’s controlled interference and evolution seem to make the end product so offbeat, out there and avant-garde. Listen to O Captain; you realize that those factors are present when he is left to his own devices, meaning you have to rethink the tipping point between man and machine, musical creation, and after-the-event manipulation.

O Captain does a lot of things. It is the sound of an artist expressing himself through music in the most traditional ways, even if the music is far from conventional. It continues to push musical boundaries into places where the light of the mainstream will never shine. But mostly, it gives an interesting insight into the music eNuminous & Archimedes makes when unaided and unabetted by available technologies. And that is something that will prove to be a massively important insight when I listen to his work in the future.