Press play. Listen to the first track. Pause. Reread the album description. Okay, it did say that, but I just didn’t take it literally enough.

I don’t think this is the first time I’ve had this experience with a Jennifer Walshe release. No matter what, the manner of the opening will surprise you. In the case of her most recent album, that’s by way of synthwave leading into German(ic) techno.

Most succinctly described, URSONATE%24 is Walshe’s AI-generated setting of Ursonate, a 40-minute Dadaist sound poem by Kurt Schwitters. Ursonate was first performed in 1925 and last revised in publication in 1932, though Schwitters continued to develop it in performance until his death a decade later. It’s been a subject of fascination for Walshe, who presented a documentary on it in for BBC Radio 4 in 2022, and who is photographed in the liner notes performing it through a megaphone while leaning out of a window in Darmstadt. The musical setting hops freely from genre to genre, with each section having a distinct sound, but sometimes morphing within sections as well.

AI mimicry has come a long way even since Walshe’s 2020 A Late Anthology of Western Music, Vol. 1. Unlike that release, Walshe has not provided a lot of detail on the nature of the artificial processes used, nor of the sources of the inputs used for the musical output, beyond Ursonate itself. But you can hear – or feel like you hear – hints of training data here and there. Maybe some Nick Drake, some John Williams, something that could be The Corrs. There are fourteen tracks in all, running the gamut of genres. The second, for instance, feels like early twentieth-century art song for female vocalist and piano, complete with sprechstimme, but enters the uncanny valley when a trumpet joins, becomes a second vocalist, and then morphs back into a trumpet. The ninth feels like early 90s punk or grunge, with jangly guitar and drums backing the trilling female vocal sounds. 

Weird turns
Zooming in on specific musical details almost seems beside the point. The genres may be chosen to reflect the sounds of the poetry, for effect in the overall shape of the album, or for some other reason. I honestly couldn’t say. And everywhere it takes weird turns, like a chess algorithm reaching its goal via moves no human would ever make: a vocal part disappearing mid-phrase, an inexplicably nauseating key change. There is, however, a sense of authorial and editorial intent, marking the categorical distinction between something like URSONATE%24 and the zettabytes of AI slop on the internet. Having speed metal slam into placid Renaissance vocal counterpoint, as at the junction between ‘Teil H’ and ‘Teil I und Schluss’, is a distinctly Jennifer Walshe move, regardless of whether she wrote any of the actual notes.

The musical format of the work allows Walshe to explore and create variation within the poetry, for example presenting ‘Vierter Teil R und S’, normally a repeat of earlier material (in the copy of Ursonate I was following as I reviewed this, R and S are marked ‘repetir la cuarta parte desde el principio hasta aquí’ – ‘repeat the fourth part until here’), in a completely different genre than their first occurrence: the first something adjacent to new age; the second hip hop. The second-last track, ‘Kadenz’ (Schwitters named the sections in the manner of a classical work, including ‘Largo’ and ‘Scherzo’), is a wild ride, telescoping the genre-hopping of the preceding work into two minutes of jingles, metal, football chants, and a consistent sense of radio retuning. And the closing ‘Vierter Teil Schluss’, which sounds like it’s sung by a female vocal group, suggests the feeling of a closing catharsis without actually providing one. It builds for three minutes, then stops.

The sensation of the music sticks with you more than the music itself, with AI offering as always a pulpous average of whichever genre it happens to be copying, and I’ll admit I found myself reluctant to go back for repeated listens. The overall effect is a little like sitting in the back of a taxi in a country where you don’t speak the language, with a driver using Spotify shuffle without really caring what’s playing. You’ll forget the music as soon as you get out of the cab, but you’ll remember the journey.

Ursonate doesn’t have language, but it sounds like language. It feels almost mean-spirited, but not necessarily inaccurate, to say that the album sounds like music: it replicates the styles extremely well, but the tracks are such a generic average that they would prove uninteresting to a fan of that style. And crucially – looking at the tracks specifically, rather than the ideas of the work overall – the deeper you look, the less there is. But the absence of meaning in the tracks here, like the lack of meaning in Ursonate, is a choice. Walshe presents the output of the AI as facets of what she’s making, with a larger conceptual whole – one which makes the argument for AI as a tool. The work and concept certainly stimulate sensation in the listener, but as an argument for the broader utility of the tool – even leaving aside important conversations about the ethics of compensating artists for use of their work as training data, and of the extremely high environmental cost – I remain sceptical.

URSONATE​%​24 by Jennifer Walshe is available from Bandcamp. Visit https://jenniferwalshe.bandcamp.com/album/ursonate-24. 

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