BT Release New Single 'k-means clustering'

Today, June 6, GRAMMY-nominated composer, producer, technologist, and songwriter BT has released his new single "k-means clustering" on Monstercat Silk. This instrumental piece follows in the footsteps of his critically acclaimed album, This Binary Universe, and showcases his innovative use of cutting-edge synthesis, digital signal processing, and orchestral instrumentation.

The song features live cello quintet colliding with hyper-futuristic, splintering rhythmic figures, to create a beautifully visceral harmonic and melodic narrative in long form. In a world obsessed with instant gratification, "k-means clustering" offers a refreshing departure.

"’K-means clustering’ is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that aims to partition a dataset into distinct, non-overlapping clusters,” as BT explains about the song’s title. “It is a way of making nodes in a data grouping that are hard to ascertain as a human due to our limited senses. This idea of finding interstitial relationships in data that are hard for the human mind to ascertain inspired the unusual instrumentation in this piece.”

The song will appear on The Secret Language of Trees, BT's 15th studio album set for release on July 11. It represents past and present experiments with pushing the boundaries of electronic composition with classical musical structural underpinnings against more academic rhythmic precepts.

The collision of simple harmonic structure with complex rhythmic structures, inspired by Steve Reich, Alva Noto, Ian Xenakis, and John Cage, has captivated BT since he discovered this sound on his fifth studio album, This Binary Universe (2006), which was called "The most important electronic work of the new millennium” by Keyboard Magazine.

BT is known for his award-winning software like Stutter Edit and Break Tweaker. He has been in stealth mode creating a new series of AI music-making tools in 22-23, many of which he drew inspiration from in his latest work in the heralded This Binary Universe series.

BT is a GRAMMY-nominated electronic music pioneer (In 2010, he was nominated for a GRAMMY Award for “Best Electronic/Dance Album” for These Hopeful Machines), composer, producer, and software designer. He is credited with creating trance and blazing highly influential trails in IDM, breakbeat, and modern cinematic work that have earned him numerous accolades. A 2022 NFTNow NFT100 winner, he is also noted for his groundbreaking live-coded work in web3.

Listen to the new single here: