jennifer walshe: A LATE ANTHOLOGY OF EARLY MUSIC, VOL. 1: ANCIENT TO RENAISSANCE

Released by Tetbind, February 21 2020. First and second limited editions of 50 cassettes both SOLD OUT; digital download available on Bandcamp.

Jennifer Walshe uses AI to imagine an alternative early history of Western music.

Dadabots, the duo of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, trained their neural network on Walshe’s voice, producing 841 files over 40 generations of training. In A Late Anthology of Early Music, Walshe maps these files - examples of how a machine learning system learned to listen to and replicate her voice - onto key works from the Western music repertoire, the system’s understanding of her voice evolving in tandem with the evolution of a newly-constructed music history.

Features new versions of canonical works by composers including Hildegard von Bingen, Adam De La Halle, Perotinus, Machaut, Dunstable, Ockeghem, Dowland, Gesualdo and many more.

Featured in album of the year lists in The Quietus, The Wire and The Irish Times.

“Don’t, for even the slightest moment, think that Jennifer Walshe’s anthology of early music sounds at all like what the title would lead you to expect.” (5 star review)

Michael Dervan, The Irish Times, July 2020

“ … the sacred monophony of Hildegard von Bingen’s In Principio Omnes turns delirious, possessed by burbling, humming, and giggling noises. On Adam De La Halle’s motet Robins M’Aime and Pérotin’s Organum Triplum, polyphonic voices are given a percussive quality of an alien xylophone dragged through centuries until it sounded like the digital chirp of a dial-up modem. Throughout the album, Walshe’s articulation continues inhabiting impossible forms: from disorienting tonking bells, through uncertain murmurs, to Merzbow-like harsh noise … the same sense of experimentation and aesthetic direction [as Walshe’s earlier works], but with a new, lovely twist.”

Antonio Poscic, The Quietus, April 2020

“ … Walshe’s idiosyncratic, critically futuristic humour and application of Artificial Intelligence (both real and imagined) bring pre-baroque musical material to contexts previously unfathomed”

George Haggett, Tempo, January 2021

“Crashing into the classical canon with a cassette release rejoicing in the most misleading title since Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats comes Jennifer Walshe and her purposefully wayward approach to history. It’s a delirious combination … by setting two programs – musical convention and computer science – to interrogate each other, in a spirit of playful seriousness, Walshe suggests new traditions that are closer than one might think.”

Louise Gray, The Wire, May 2020