Emptyset Announces New Album 'Blossoms'

Emptyset, the innovative duo of James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, have announced their new album Blossoms, out October 11th. Blossoms focuses on ideas of evolution and adaptation, bringing together Emptyset's body of exploratory sound production with emerging methods of machine learning through neural networks and raw audio synthesis. Showcasing the album's entirely unique sonic palette, the duo has released the track "Petal," a piece that blurs the lines between the organic and the mechanical with dense, bristling, shimmery textures.

The machine learning system for Blossoms was developed through extensive audio training, a process of seeding a software model with a sonic knowledge base of material to learn and predict from. This was supplied from a collection of their existing material as well as 10 hours of improvised recordings using wood, metal and drum skins. This collection of electronic and acoustic sounds formed unexpected outcomes as the system sought out coherence from within this vastly diverse source material, attempting to form a logic from within the contradictions of the sonic data set. The system demonstrates obscure mechanisms of relational reasoning and pattern recognition, finding correlations and connections between seemingly unrelated sounds and manifesting an emergent non-human musicality.

Since the release of their 2017 album Borders, the duo has been collaborating with highly specialized programmers and engaging with emerging theoretical research to devise a system architecture that would be evolved enough to establish the foundations for their album. Emptyset have continued to evolve the project into performative frameworks as well, which will culminate in a series of live performances including first performative realization at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Poland this fall.

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