Norwegian, Oslo-based musician, composer, and sound artist Jonas Howden Sjøvaag may be remembered as the drummer-percussionist of the chamber jazz Eple Trio. Still, in recent years, his musical focus shifted to researching and understanding aspects of human-machine relationships, primarily through the creation of self-generating audio systems, digitized collaborators, and the philosophical perspectives related to these processes.

Sjøvaag’s (is) in a River is a solo album that experiments with human-machine improvisation with AI and tape delay systems, using two custom-built Python software systems: TapePlayer, an advanced tape echo simulator, and MusicHal_9001, an AI music system. Each of the four dark ambient pieces was recorded as single takes at Sjøvaag’s Færder Audio studio in Oslo, with Sjøvaag playing clarinet, guitar, and the rohrglockenspiel tube bells, with no edits or added overdubs. Sjøvaag’s instruments were connected and fed by variable-length tape loops from the room and back into it, creating an ever-shifting sonic environment, or sonic organism.

These pieces have ironic titles – «Carnival», «(got the) Green Blues», «Prairie», and «Ding-Dong II», but there are no echoes of carnivalistic or bluesy music, and the music does not suggest wide open landscapes or rhythmic playfulness. The software MusicHal_9001 nods to HAL 9000, the AI antagonist of Kubrick’s iconic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, who turned against its human collaborators.

Sjøvaag experiments with nuanced shifts of pitch, rhythm, timbre, and textures in an attempt to create a system that functions more like a listening improviser, with a synthesized musical insight. The musical outcome is cerebral, strange, distant, and disorienting, very sci-fi cinematic in spirit. It demonstrates that we – humans – still have superior, spontaneous creativity and sonic imagination, compared to AI enhanced softwares. At least, for the time being.

Eyal Hareuveni

Jonas Sjøvaag (clarinet, guitar, rohrglockenspiel)