Show of hands: how many of you found the best music you heard this year because a friend recommended it to you, and how many got their best recs from an algorithm? I know for me, it was computers out there, putting two and two together and finding the music that made it the furthest into my heart. A few artists new to me come to mind, the fractured and vulnerable hymns of Lomelda, the air-tight desert disco rhythms of Glass Beams, the bitter nostalgia of Zach Bryan, and the pure rock power of Slift among them–mostly found (no, make that offered up) on YouTube.
This is no small thing. We’ve been leaning into the algorithm since the Pandora days, but 2023 is the year AI broke, and the implications have been on my mind like a kind of dread all year. Whether he meant to or not, the album that cut right to the heart of that dread is James Blake’s newest, Playing Robots into Heaven—an album that feels like poems to and from the learned machines that are fast becoming our best friends.
Today we nervously laugh at the attempts of machines to make music—AI musicians like the hilariously named Anna Indiana and her attempt at pop-country in “Betrayed by this Town.” But even this faltering attempt evokes some pathos. For our part, we’ve embraced the uncomplicated—Taylor Swift pretty much took the world over this year. In another year’s time, maybe two, a song will take over our charts and hearts, and only later it will be revealed a human didn’t write it at all. Maybe it’s already happened.
This is the essence of why Robots often feels so queasily prescient. Its best tracks suggest the emotional co-dependence we’re cultivating with our machines. Blake shifts and distorts the pitch and range of his voice just as he’s done on previous releases (like 2019’s brilliant Assume Form), stuttering the rhythms and melodies of his songs as if they were glitched or warped on their way out of a processor heart. Robots’ standout track “Loading” is a digital duet of pitch-altered voices sharing a few repeated lines—”Wherever I go I’m only as good as my mind, which is only good if you’re mine/I hope I’m making sense to you” and ”Where are my wings? They’re loading.”—expressions of devotion coming up against limitations of language and processing.
In fact, Robots’ tremendous opening three-song-run (“Asking to Break”→“Loading”→“Tell Me”) reads like infatuation taking place in the human-machine-interface—a messy mix of emotional need that culminates in a phrase that could be read just as easily as a lovesick plea or a voice command—“tell me that you love me over and over”—over a panicked modular synth groove perhaps best described as what it might sound like if a modem had butterflies in its stomach. Taken together, it’s a suite of songs that distills my nebulous AI dread to a more tangible terror—If the human need for emotional engagement has always made us vulnerable to exploitation, just what states of desperation will advanced language models be capable of invoking?
Setting aside the heavy critical baggage I’m bringing in here, the album is, in large part, a culmination of Blake’s fondness for modular synthesizers alongside his fatigue with more traditional songwriting. Much of the album is built out of modular synth loops he’s been archiving over a period of several years—choosing his most promising bits to create the metal skeleton on which Robots hangs. Much more than other electronic instruments, the modular synthesizer, with its buildable nodes, programmable loops, and capacity for knob-tweaked serendipity, is an instrument you collaborate with, not simply author music by—more often editing the output of the machine rather than simply composing.
And production is where some of Blake’s greatest strengths lie. Robots’ more abstract middle third in particular showcases his knack for collaging sound and incorporating samples, and takes Robots firmly outside the popular realm where his work as composer and producer often makes its home—and, instead puts it along an alternate lineage of (one of the project’s admirers) Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, and the danceworthy collage work of his contemporary Nicolas Jaar on his Against All Logic releases—especially on the sinister jam “Big Hammer” which somehow feels like a spiritual sequel to the classic “Chill” theme from Dr. Mario, before being taken over by a wildly catchy dancehall vocal sample. Blake’s trick has often been to tread between the popular and experimental. Here we witness him going far afield for some of his most compelling sounds yet.
Robots’ final tracks are somber and funereal, ending in an extended lighter-than-air drone that gives the album its evocative title. Even in these final tracks as Blake sings about fighting off some persistent voice of doubt, “He’s trying to save me/ But I’ve already failed/ Cuz I let him in” on “Fire the Editor,” I catch myself thinking he’s speaking to or from some nascent digital demon in duet, not just an internal one.
It must be admitted that Blake may simply be waxing autobiographical here and throughout the album as a whole—pairing many of his most vulnerable lyrics with his most mechanical music, merely stumbling upon an album that only reads as an uncanny wakeup call from the future. If so, I may just be taking it on the terms I need—attempting to gain a foothold as the landscape shifts between the authority of humans and our thinking machines.
Personalized algorithms have helped us find our favorite music, and we’ve been happy to oblige. If they can make better music, wouldn’t we let them? If they can find a way to make us feel all the feels we yearn for, would we stop them? Robots is my go-to album this year, and a career high for Blake. It’s also the piece of art that makes me realize we are getting in well over our heads. | Mike McCubbins
