Music To Annoy The Algorithm
Jeff Parker, Angine de Poitrine, and the smartening of music
Obviously, I’m on board with the whole booing rich people who talk up AI in their commencement speeches thing. Whenever I hear another CEO or celebrity telling us to bow to our robot overlords, I wonder to myself if they’re being paid to do it, they want to sound smart, or if AI just told them what to say. It also reminds me of just how uninspired some people are. If you want to talk about AI, at least add something new to the conversation, tell me something I don’t know, talk about good it can do in advancing humanity instead of pushing the same don’t get left behind sort of talk. I know I shouldn’t be so annoyed since nine out of ten people don’t know what they’re talking about, and yet…
I’ve been thinking a lot about how all this flatness and slop will eventually lead to some sort of cultural rebellion, and also admitting that it might be taking place but I’m too preoccupied with being old and raising a child that I’m unable to appreciate in real time. I’m not really “out there” much these days, and I know I’m part of the problem because I’m constantly talking about how much info I get from “the algo,” but my mental bucket has filled up with the drips and drops I’ve been collecting, and something hit me recently about how the state of underground music is weird again, and that’s a good sign.
By “weird,” I mean a video of the Canadian duo Angine de Poitrine getting over 14 million views on YouTube. By “weird,” I also mean “smart,” because Jeff Parker is finally being seen as a music visionary after years of making some of the best sounds in various groups and as a solo artist. I also mean that the label some of his discography can be found on, International Anthem, is also home to SML and I learned about them from a cool 16-year-old before the Times wrote about them up last year. By weird, I mean good. I also mean challenging. And, yes, I mean Let’s see AI do that!
There isn’t some big united movement to Make Music Great Again, and I’m not trying desperately to lump artists on International Anthem with Angine de Poitrine so I can put a clever little name on it and say I was the guy who coined a phrase. It’s more that these things that could seem isolated or just products of our overstimulated times, but I think it points to how there are people out there desperate to experience new things that might seem strange to them at first, and we will never run out of humans who feel the need to push and make things that doesn’t take into account metrics or trends.
Admittingly, the Angine de Poitrine thing did have me scratching my head at first. I was immediately intrigued since something about it had me thinking about bands and artists like Melt Banana or Lightning Bolt, with the wild costumes and even wilder time changes. Maybe the comparisons were off, or had something to do with the fact that I recently watched the wonderful documentary, Secret Mall Apartment, and started thinking about how obsessed I used to be with the whole Providence Fort Thunder art scene. Melt-Banana, similarly, occupy this place in my mind that is dedicated to the sort of Japanese music from the last 30ish years that I’ve loved so much that I think you need to be a specific sort of person to appreciate. The whole psychedelic grindcore pop in a blender thing they’ve been doing since the ‘90s is still as hard for me to actually describe as it is for most people to hear for more than a few seconds without asking if I’m joking by playing it.
Parker, SML, and the dozens of musicians and other artists that are separated by a degree or two from them, on the other hand, make me think, damn, the kids are getting into jazz. That’s cool.
If I’m generalizing and comparing a lot, it’s because I think something is going on that makes me think that more people are longing for new art. I started seeing traces of it in 2023, when André 3000 put out his new age flute album, New Blue Sun, and when people finally moved passed the he doesn’t rap on it kvetching, some folks were really into what he’d made. This was around when more people were starting to also mention the work of Laraaji and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, so I wondered if maybe we’re all just looking to try and bliss out a little more, and that’s why stuff that could go under the “new age” tag that labels like Numero Group or Light in the Attic would kill to put out if they heard it was a private press recorded by some guy who lived in a hut back in 1987. I still think that has something to do with it, but I think that thinking has coalesced with the need for stuff that sounds and—more importantly—feels like it was made by humans, that there’s love, passion, and even minor imperfections in whatever art we’re engaging with.
That’s also why I think the whole “Geese is a psyop” thing has had such long legs. I’m a middle-aged guy who grew up in the punk scene, so it’s no surprise that some of my friends had thoughts and feelings about the band that ranged from “They suck” to “There’s nothing real about their sound.” I think a lot of people already wanted to believe there was something dubious about the band’s name suddenly being everywhere, and attached to all these Rock and roll is back, baby! stories, so seeing “psyop” in a headline just confirmed their suspicions. Rock and roll is cool again thanks to a bunch of good looking white kids from Brooklyn? In this economy? I think the way the story was packaged just gave haters all the ammo that needed, and I will admit that the backlash felt very Gen. X “You sellouts” to me, but the story is the band works with an agency that knows how to do marketing in the year of our lord 2026, and the writer and editor at Wired were really smart with the way they published that.
It’s been funny to watch people try to participate in the discourse around the Geese thing, but the whole idea that we could all of a sudden be like the Scooby Gang, pulling off the mask of a band that was just some nefarious plot all along, actually made me happy. Whether you like Geese or you get them confused with Goose, the fact that people seem to care about whether they’re being manipulated once again by the things they read online is good. We’re becoming more aware, but I also think it will ultimately get people to go out and explore more instead of letting TikTok or YouTube tell you what you like. And even if the algorithm does tell you to check out Tortoise if you listened to Jeff Parker, or you go stream Lightning Bolt because you saw my comparison to Angine de Poitrine1, at least you’re stretching your mind into new territory, listening or experiencing things that I don’t think could ever be commercially viable or some cash cow for big corporations, but I’ve been wrong before.
I don’t think they sound the same. It’s just a vibe I get. Maybe it’s the two-piece thing, or that I could very easily see them playing a show with Lightning Bolt in 2003.