Joseph Nechvatal
Viral symphOny

LA RECENSIONE

Many, perhaps too many musical groups have tried to break down the musical barriers that confine music within a series of rules and laws, written or otherwise, such as tempos, durations, keys, and modes.

However, so far no band has ever reversed the natural order of things: until now, it has always been humans creating, using real musical instruments or with the help of the computer.

 In this case, we have a radical upheaval, comparable to the Kantian revolution of the relationship between reality and the mind; no longer did reality shape the mind itself, but the mind shaped reality.

In this concept, it is not the human who creates music through a computer, but a computer that expresses itself musically through the human.

 Joseph Nechvatal is the one who made all this possible, and the result is the "Viral Symph0ny", a unique work whose primary goal is to give voice to the computer universe.

And so here is a sequence of 4 movements+1, generated using the C++ programming language that emanates directly from the machine, making us participants in its cold, rational, and inhuman world like the languages and automatisms of a processor.

Impossible to attribute to any pre-existing musical current, the entire CD with a total duration of 1 hour and 40 minutes turns out to be a haunting journey into a world unknown to us, and impossible to fully know...the feeling that arises from listening is just one: unease, pure unease caused a bit by the unnatural purity and precision of the symphonies, a bit by the idea itself of the work, a bit by the sense of alienation that soon begins to make its way into the mind of the unsuspecting listener.

As impossible to appreciate as it is shocking and interesting.