lavomatyc — what this is

A general overview of the project, for anyone arriving without context. Short version: experimental electronic music made by feeding ideas into machines and seeing what comes back. Generative, in the older sense — rule-based systems, stochastic processes, modular routing, probability gates, hardware in feedback. The composer designs the system. The system writes the piece. Not AI, at least not yet. The distinction matters to me because it changes what kind of artefact the music is: it’s the output of a process I built, not a sample of a model that ate everyone else’s processes. The aesthetic guideline I keep returning to: predictable enough that the brain hears music; unpredictable enough that it stays interesting. Most generative work falls off one cliff or the other. It either becomes wallpaper that the ear stops attending to after thirty seconds, or it becomes so chaotic that the listener gives up trying to find structure and walks away. The interesting zone between the two is narrow. Most of the work in this project is about staying in it. The toolkit is mixed on purpose. DIY analog synths, some I built, some I modified. Hardware sequencers when I want a specific physical interface. VCV Rack as a brain when I want to do things hardware can’t easily do. Guitar and bass played the old-fashioned way, with hands. Field recordings, including a fairly unreasonable amount of bird material. Loop pedals when a piece wants to grow that way. And jazz harmony — Barry Harris’s 6th-diminished system in particular, which I find satisfying for generating chord motion that doesn’t sound like anyone in particular and lets a generative sequencer make decisions that are still musical. Rhythmically, the project lives outside 4/4 most of the time. Polyrhythm, Afro-Caribbean rhythmic grammars, cross-meters — not as decoration but as the actual structural skeleton of a piece. When the music is danceable, that’s where the danceability comes from. When it isn’t danceable, it’s usually because the polyrhythm is operating on a long enough timescale that the body can’t catch up. Influences, in the order they matter to me on a given day: Steve Reich for phasing, patient repetition, and the willingness to let a process run; Moondog for proving that you can be unrelentingly weird and unrelentingly tuneful at the same time; Brian Eno for systems thinking, Music for Airports still being right after fifty years; Squarepusher for permission to make rhythmic music that’s allowed to be aggressive and stupidly clever simultaneously; Siriusmo, especially his later work, for the exact ratio of melody to mess. There are others — afrobeat, gqom, French Caribbean dancehall lineages — that show up rhythmically without me trying to make them show up. The project is danceable when it wants to be and not when it doesn’t. I’m not interested in choosing one. Headphones and dancefloors are both fine endpoints. If you’ve read this and are deciding whether to listen, the practical entry points: The Bus if you want something that holds a groove. self-help for robots if you want the moodier structural stuff. Hasard et Nécessité when it’s out, if you want to see what happens when the system is allowed to run with as little intervention as possible.