Natural Selection [CD] (ONLINE ORDER ONLY)

Unlike much of Florian Hecker's recent work, such as 2021's 'Synopsis Seriation' or 'Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera', his acclaimed PAN-released collaboration with Mark Leckey, there's no single overarching narrative that binds 'Natural Selection'. Hecker describes the sprawling, nine-track album as a "constellation of pieces originating from related investigations", and the clue's in the title. Ranging from under a minute to over half an hour, these works have been grouped together because they share very specific properties, using correlated modes of synthesis and approaching timbral metamorphosis in a similar way. Pieces that might seem incongruous at first are united not by one concept, but by a cluster of queries that Hecker has been probing diligently for the last few years, ideas related to automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems and the prospect of synthetic cognition. They were written in parallel with a range of Hecker's recent multi-disciplinary inquiries: 2022's Galerie Neu exhibition TEMPLEXTURES, that examined machine listening and charted uncategorizable auditory sensations; 2021's diffusion of olfactory sonics and evaluation of the perception of space 'RESYNTHESIZSERS'; and 'INSPECTION', an algorithmic reconstruction of sounds that uses human hearing to parse their vital timbral characteristics. But 'Natural Selection' doesn't require any rigorous background study. In fact, it's one of Hecker's most playful and approachable sets in years, exhibiting the same balance of intensity, mischief and brain-twisting theory that made albums like 'Sun Pandämonium' and 'Acid in the Style of David Tudor' so enduringly influential. Beginning with the brief 'f92ex0.03', 40 seconds of heaving synthesized textures and disorienting frozen reverb trails, the album immediately hits a different pace with the lengthy 'Syn 21845 8 J15 Q12', a piece Hecker wrote with the help of his friend Vincent Lostanlen, an applied mathematician who is one of the leading voices in the field of computational auditory analysis. The track takes microscopic glissandi fragments from a database of source material for Lostanlen's timefrequency scattering process and spatiotemporally reverses them, creating an unsettling, utterly beguiling audio illusion. What sounds like a barrage of whooshing, perpetually reversing acoustic impressions is actually a progressive metamorphosis of both forward and backward time - no audio is actually reversed. Hecker's more succinct diversions are just as energizing and, inserted between his durational experiments, necessarily palate cleansing. On the jackhammer 'm syn 260e 2402', he turns an analysis tool into a synthesizer, rooting out spectral phantasms from runaway code, and on 'Layer', coaxes a digital reverb unit into shaping it's "infinite space" into crisscrossing synthetic whirrs. There's even a move towards technoid cohesion on the hallucinatory 'm syn bold heuristic driver', that uses a revised and extended model of Lostanlen's time-frequency scattering process developed by members of the mathematician's team. Hecker transforms harsh digital noise into an emergent rhythm, scanning the detritus until it turns into a an unintentionally dubwise sequence of undulating pulses. A variation of this process is also used to drive the album's extended closer 'm 35/36', a symphonic 35-minute blur of ghost frequencies and nebulous textures that's accented with kaleidoscopic xenharmonic iridescence.