EVERY GENRE PROJECT - March 22 - Black MIDI

Genre of the Day - Black MIDI

Album of the Day - Potential by Sunik Kim (2023)

March 22, 2024

At San Diego’s annual Fourth of July fireworks in 2012, the unthinkable happened. Rather than the drawn out, meticulously prepared dazzle of lights traditionally prepared, a glitch occurred and every single firework went off at once. It’s awe-striking. It is also a bit frightening. But everyone agrees that as fun of a spectacle it is to look at once, nobody would like the overstimulation of this happening at every fireworks show ever. However, there’s a group of people quietly working at their DAWs exploring the sonic possibility of a fireworks show going off for about twenty minutes. This is the ‘genre’ we cover today, if you can even call it a genre so much as a hobby—although, like any experimental art, it takes an artful touch as well as effort to make anything of this magnitude.

This music pushes past the forefront of what is listenable, and more importantly, its purpose is to create compositions so dense and layered on music creation systems that if you looked at a piece in musical notation, it’d essentially be all black. To an extent, it’s a numbers game: YouTube made it possible to spread the gospel of unplayable music, advertising songs that feature one million notes or that take commonly-known songs and lift them to ungodly dense heights. They often start as a relatively normal piece a virtuosic pianist could play with ease, before displays of letters, glissandos, and key slams make the car fly off the rails. They’re visually gripping. They’re sort of music. It’s mostly an exercise in human excess. 

Beyond YouTube fodder, there is a genre of musicians tinkering with this concept and making full fledged albums out of it. I was so, so close to skipping this genre. It’s a bit of a big day in my personal life, and the ominous frenzy here was perhaps not what I would’ve sought out. But today’s genre is palpable proof that if you really accept a genre into your life for around half an hour, you can get into the groove. 

Today’s album consists of two marathon tracks, one punching in at a blinding 23 minutes and the other at a relatively zippy affair at 11 minutes. Opener “Potential” is the most straightforward denominator for what is to come: after a minute or so of noisy glitch, a song that vaguely melodically resembles “Bridal Chorus” comes into the fold. Undercurrents of more glitchy, blacked out note stacks begin to simmer, and it’s dynamic chaos from there. Throughout the song, Kim’s experimentation with the nuances such as the timbre and note lengths show that even such a genre notable for its novelty aspect can also serve as a playground of sonic world building. However, like a black hole that sucks in all semblances of melody and harmony, around the 18 minute the song bursts into the aforementioned unmitigated supernova of fireworks exploding simultaneously. It ends on a simple note, though, like the dust settling on a piano 38 monkeys just jumped on for an hour. “Morning Star” expands with some strings and drum machines thrown in, but figures the same stylistically, with a little more distortion adding some extra depth. These songs are impressive labors of love for the boundaries of machines that can make music. As much as they can expand our world sonically, technology always holds the potential to destroy it, to swallow all art whole. These songs are a meditation on that front as much as they are spamming MIDI notes on a screen. They really have to be heard to be believed. After all, how else are you going to say you just heard two million notes in thirty minutes, or some totally arbitrary number like that?