Thank You for Your Feedback (i) is a transformative affair, in many senses of the word. Even the title is a great example: such a well-known, throwaway phrase takes on broader, deeper, and more personal connotations as the album repositions words that seem part of an automated, commercial, and digital world as something profoundly and decidedly human.
The music itself is also a wonderfully fluid process, drawing on everything from ambient music and pop infectiousness, dream-pop ethereality and gentle dance grooves, taking the familiar and transforming it into something fresh and forward-thinking. You recognise the sounds this album is forged from, but you still dazzle at the eloquent, elegant sonic architecture built with them.
Take ‘Signal Received (i)’, a bubbling blend of electronic beats and human emotion, atmosphere and anticipation. But it is the title track that really gets to the heart of this merging of human creativity and digital dexterity, a place where the beautiful and the binary dance deftly together. Lyrically, it is profound, talking of human interactions in terms akin to software functions or internet language and, in doing so, exposing the way we treat each other in starkly revealing and clinical terms. A conversation about humanity unburdened by the ambiguity of emotion, and in doing so, creating something poignant, powerful and palpable.
‘The Response Loop (You’re Still Talking)’ continues such dialogue as it spins the listener across an early-80s meets futurist dance floor, and ‘Always (i) [Sevahem]’ ends the album with gorgeous grace, not a phrase often associated with digital music. This track blends ancient understanding with the most modern of sounds.
The final layer of transformation comes with the understanding that AI voices and textures are woven through a more humanly curated digi-scape to create this wonderfully delicate sound. And why not? Electric guitars, rock and roll, digital recording, synths, sampling, CDs and autotuning were all going to destroy music; even the piano and saxophone were considered too expressive and too vulgar in their day, yet here we are in the most musically diverse and creative…and transformative of times ever. In short, live with it.
All new advancements are feared until they prove themselves; amongst its many other brilliant moments, Thank You for Your Feedback (i) proves that in the right hands, AI certainly has its place in the creative world. Key phrase there: in the right hands, and Cognitive Constellation Corps is definitely the right hands.
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