For our third 2020MG guest issue, we’re thrilled to share a guest recommendation from our friend Aaron David Ross (ADR). Please enjoy.
Aaron David Ross (ADR) is a composer, producer, and artist we've been listening to for over a decade now. Often maneuvering between multiple genres and contexts, either through his duo project Gatekeeper, or his expansive matrix of collaborative work which includes Oneohtrix Point Never, Ryan Trecartin, Ashland Mines, Telfar, and many others. You can read our recommendation of Gatekeeper's most recent album Wrong Planet here.
On Cosine
I remember buying my first CDs as an adolescent at a record store in a strip mall in Tucson, AZ. A mix of my raver babysitter’s cassette collection, my peers’ oversized t-shirts, and the hard auras of band names and album covers guided my choices, leading to a bewildering spread of early selections. KoЯn - Follow the Leader, Phantom of the Opera double-disc cast recording, Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park. Most of us have a core memory of early music acquisition and how the senses we deployed guided choices that would shape our identities forever.
Music discovery is obviously difficult now, as the mainstream, the underground, and the geographic scene have collapsed into the feed and been optimized for impressions. Music recommendation algorithms are generally terrible… relying on genre and mood, prioritizing a suggested track’s popularity and stickiness. Like other online media, these systems produce a homogenizing, flattening, disconnecting non-space swarm consensus that compresses culture rather than expanding it. While some other online routes still work, like browsing Soulseek user libraries, scanning artists’ liked tracks on SoundCloud, or online radio like NTS, they only allow us to follow the visible traces of someone else’s taste… and while this is a lifeline in the abyss of the tasteless feed, I’ve been craving something different. Something that allows me to trace a music’s ineffable sonic affect that metadata can’t approximate: musical atmosphere, aura, essence, texture, terrain…
Enter cosine.club: a “music similarity search engine,” where a song’s “embedding” (a point in a massive multidimensional matrix of possible ways an audio file could exist) guides users towards similar embeddings from other songs, assembling an infinite playlist of related music, based on the way the music actually feels to listen to. Compared to recommendation algorithms, the relation is deeper, stranger, and less prescribed, comparing data points beyond our comprehension, and using them to “find the others”.
The first song I tried was Mark Isham’s “On the Threshold of Liberty,” a post-minimalist patriotic hallucination of nocturnal, solemn, gleaming, purposeful nostalgia. Think ECM meets Windham Hill meets Reagan-era political thriller… The kind of niche, singular music that makes me think, “I wish more music sounded like this.” Instantly, Cosine’s playlist filled up with songs from composers I’d never heard of… a cue from a long-forgotten Titanic documentary miniseries, a suite of synthesizer pieces about the Grand Canyon, a compilation of early Hungarian library music from the ’70s... All with the same proto-prestige new-acoustic restrained romanticism; steel-blue horizons at dusk, standard def early-digital futurism, suspended, modal, incremental. Wow.
My second Cosine search was “Aubade” by the obscure French sibling duo UMAN. It shares many genre and mood tags with the Isham piece, but it produces an entirely different feeling. This time, Cosine brought back tiny, sun-struck Franco-Occitan imaginary cabaret songs, flamenco-adjacent proto-hauntological vignettes, puppet theatre pastoral neo-medieval Euro-fantasia pastiche exotica. While both tracks could easily be reduced to the same tags, the results were nothing alike.
What has always made music recommendation so difficult is that tag clouds, in this case “ambient,” “cinematic,” “neoclassical,” “new age,” “electronic,” or “soundtrack,” are not descriptions of what we are actually talking about when we love a piece of music. Genre categories like these contain millions of songs that share very little, and come nowhere close to specifying the sonic feelings or images that move us, like... the sound of a melody climbing a staircase inside a municipal building at dusk... or the sound of a 2D moon-faced clown conducting a miniature toy fanfare, or the sound of someone spending a lot of money in 1986 imagining the year 2004.
Cosine’s suggestions sidestep popularity and optimization for repeat listening. Instead, it locates deep cuts with a shared internal embodiment, a matching formal and emotional sense of shape and scale, the actual particular relationship between timbre, pacing, harmony, and recording technology that adds up to a music’s personality.
Of course, music transcends an audio file... Its mythology, cultural moment, accident and circumstance and context evade a waveform or spectrogram. Cosine can’t recreate the physical, subliminal, and social weirdness of IRL scene discovery. But it recovers something that has been conspicuously missing... a strange series of pattern-matched machine intuitions connecting distant cultural artifacts to their neighboring vectors. It suggests that the thing we love in a piece of music is a subtle and unnameable configuration of choices, untethered from metadata and attribute-matched behavioral targeting, unpredictable and wild, but traceable.
For anyone who has spent years hearing a record and thinking, “I wish more music sounded like this,” Cosine can help.
Cosine playlist: Mark Isham - On the Threshold of Liberty
Cosine playlist: UMAN - Aubade
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ADR / LEGENDARIUM