CODITANY OF TIMENESS.

• Author: Britschgi, Christian
• Position: MUSIC - Brief article - Sound recording review

Coditany of Timeness is decidedly generic black metal. The riffs are eerie but uninspired. The drumming is competent but not compelling. Rough vocals punctuate the songs with enough regularity to keep things interesting but unremarkable. It is in every way forgettable, which is exactly what makes it so fascinating--because Coditany of Timeness is the first black metal album written and performed not by mortal humans but by a machine-learning algorithm.

Music producer Zack Zukowski and tech worker C.J. Carr created the songs by feeding audio snippets of preexisting musical compositions into an artificial neural network, which then tried to guess which segment should come next, generating its own fresh combination of sounds.

The algorithm has since been used to create tracks in the styles of extreme metal and rhythm-defying math rock, all released on the website Dadabots--described as a...