Duration: 15 minutes

An uncertain number of human improvisers, in uncertain locations, with uncertain connections, mediated by opinionated machine learning algorithms.

Program note: Regulatory Capture

In a number of important ways, our schtick is very much about cultivating a degree of deliberate unpreparedness and being caught perpetually on the hop, or so we tell ourselves. However, enforced separation has underscored how much we were able to take for granted our regular co-presence as an ongoing preparation that allows us to wallow in all our mess and wonkiness (whilst making hifalutin claims about it). At the same time, though, there’s been a space to re-listen and imagine certain kinds of preparation that might push us towards exciting new wonk and new mess. 

We’ve introduced stupid-yet-opininated machine listeners as mediating agents on the audio streams we share between ourselves, which will mess with the timing and character of our continual co-sampling, thus driving and being driven by our playing. Regulatory Capture happens when a monitoring agent is co-opted by the thing it monitors, and seems to be a feature of our current institutional ecology, rather than a bug. In such a spirit, these listeners come up with performance indicators and moving goalposts, based on wholly inappropriate principles, that slither around unpredictably as we try to collectively make sense of them. That’s an allegory, that is.

Raw Green Rust biography

Raw Green Rust is a laptop trio that makes gnarly glitch-dub by exploiting the interconnectedness of its constituent members & technical ecosystems. A founding principle of the trio when it formed in 2008 was to try and make a virtue of the confusion of agency that collective laptop music can exhibit. To this end, an important aspect of our improvising approach is to be constantly sampling and transforming each other, in pursuit of an organic, shifting sound mass. We can embellish this basic approach with various technical mediations that, for instance, (mis)use machine listening technologies to promote or disrupt the continual co-tuning of the three humans. Those humans are Jules Rawlinson, Owen Green and Dave Murray-Rust.