Album Review: Xnormal – You, Me, and the Algorithmic Sea

Concept albums can be hazardous affairs, relying on the listener buying in to not just the music but also getting invested in the overarching story.

You, Me, and the Algorithmic Sea does just that, as it relays the story of AGI DARPA – a name seemingly inspired by both the latest developments in artificial intelligence and the acronym for US technology/security spooks, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

That does give you an initial hint as to the nature of the album, for as much as You, Me, and the Algorithmic Sea appears to be snapshots of an increasingly fractured life that is searching for meaning, you are left wondering about the reality within that story.

Is this real or imagined – human or the creation of technology designed to blindside us? And that is what the album is excellent at. It opens with The Alignment Problem, encouraging you to put on your VR headset and commence a subroutine, yet once the vocals kick in, the savage and querying tone in which they deliver the lyrics is intensely human, fierce and flawed.

But you occasionally feel like you are in the middle of a new Matrix, or a Cronenberg examination of modern American culture, referencing The Golden Rule, Burning Man, and entropy as it becomes increasingly messianic and manic.

The album juxtaposes a myriad of sounds and images, mirroring the information overload that is 21st-century life, with Aldous Huxley’s Frankenstein a damning indictment of where we have allowed technology to take us.

From there, we are presented with a series of situations where life is put under the microscope, but you are left unsure if the central character of the album is human or even sentient. That does get answered in part on Trillion Dollar Man, though it leaves you with other questions after those answers, caused in part by the scenes in which the songs are set.

The album throws a real curveball at its conclusion, with the religious/profane country and western of It’s Hard Being God. Positing whether technology is a deity – or maybe it’s the other way round – it slowly glitches into ominous silence. We are regaled with black swan events and the sensation that for all that technology is supposed to free us, maybe we are just being ensnared in a different type of net.

It’s a clever album, one that will get you debating not just the issues it raises, but also the nature of creativity. If electronic music is a matter of manipulating zeros and ones, our input ever more hands-off and vaguer, when does it stop being a human creation and become AI?

You, Me, and the Algorithmic Sea is out now via Solid Bass Records and is available in vinyl format on the label website. The album can also be heard on Spotify and Apple Music and was written and produced by Xn0rmL, a performance art music unit in New York City featuring Mark Svenvold and Ted Sabety.