(2022-07-25) Sloan Visions

Robin Sloan: Visions. This newsletter is a fun one, with lots to explore and think about. First, I’ll review my upcoming releases, then share some interesting work from other people. I’ll also describe a recent encounter that I found both alluring and unnerving.

August 2: digital release of The Suitcase Clone: "This is, at last, the story that definitively bridges the world of Sourdough to that of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It’s all one Penumbraverse."

Robin Rendle’s new essay is so cleverly constructed! Here, he gives us an argument about photography … in which the text occludes all the photographs. I would call this a “tappable essay”, like Fish. Note the careful structuring of the text — its allocation to different “cards”—and the rhythm, which is almost oral. Terrific.

Here’s my tale of an odd discovery online, which offers
a puzzle,
a naturally-occuring Borges story, and/or perhaps
a preview of media ecology in the decade to come.

an interesting track came on. Its whompy brass reminded me faintly of Too Many Zooz. That’s cool, I thought. I wonder what else this artist has produced …  The answer was: virtually nothing. “Danni Richardson” appeared to be one of those artists with just a handful of tracks available on Spotify

the next track was the same. I don’t mean that it was Romilda Gebbia again. This one was nominally different: Veneranda Caputa, by Brett Byrne.

Except: the next track was the same. And the next! And the next!

There are far more versions than the ten I’ve pinned here — definitely dozens, possibly hundreds

Some mystery producer developed a scrap of a song that sounded appealing, and rather than put all their wood behind a single arrow, they decided to make dozens — hundreds? — of variations and inject them all into the system, all in different places.

How did our mystery producer make these variations? Was it a long afternoon with Ableton Live, swapping out instruments, fiddling with the piano roll? Or is this an automated, industrial process? Do they have the ability to run a command

One presumes our mystery producer would not just do this once. So, have they dispatched a whole fleet of these hazy “song clouds”?

I wonder, at last, about the relationship of this particular “prime” to Spotify’s algorithm. I’ve never seen the recommendations settle so quickly into such a deep groove

They found a sound that is perfectly seductive, not to humans, necessarily, but to the one listener who counts most: the algorithm

I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying

I hate it, because of course it troubles every intuition I have about what it means to be an artist

It’s the media version of a phenomenon that’s common across the food delivery services

A single kitchen operating under many names to increase its algorithmic “surface area”; another shape of things to come

A new voyage

My band The Cotton Modules, formed with the composer Jesse Solomon Clark, also goes with the grain of the 21st century: our process combines AI tools with human skill and imagination

Currently, Jesse and I are working on our second album.

Gabrielle’s novel made me think often of the eucatastrophe. That’s a term invented by Tolkien: the crash of good fortune. He called it "the consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous "turn"".

I would say that both Penumbra and Sourdough resolve into eucatastrophes, and my new novel is, in some ways, about what lies beyond eucatastrophe