Music streaming and listening to music using music files has been around for a while now, and it became a dominating listening medium, the artists are certainly using it to present their music but not that many of them have so far decided to tackle it as something they would conceive music about.
Now comes NYC artist/cellist/composer Alice Gerlach, who works under the moniker of alice does computer music and her new (second) album bliss. Can you turn individual songs/compositions into mini musical eco-systems, or in streaming/file terms, playlists? It seems to be the question Gerlach tries to pose and answer here, dividing the four musical ‘units’ here into equal 10-minute sequences.
Throughout, in each of the four pieces, Gerlach uses quite a few elements you could find on any personal (or not so personal) playlist that you could stumble upon, and with which she seems to be so adept at – from field recordings to vocal sequences, from experimental touches to classical orchestration – it is all here. Yet, Gerlach doesn’t simply pile them up without rhyme or reason, but tries to make a detailed sense out of it all and comes out of the process with quite some flying colors, skipping the now standard algorithm music discovering system, making it quite a personal one. And it works.
