SYMS

[“Neural Swamp / The Future Fields Commission,” 2021], and it’s really fascinating and uncanny. There’s something about making music now that cuts through a lot of the existential confusion I feel in response to the oncoming tidal wave of A.I., or whatever the fuck is happening. I still want to hear a human voice—as hippie or cheesy as that is to say.

SYMS: I vocal tone every morning, so you can get as cheesy-hippie as you want.

BABBITT: In my early teens, I was drawn to people who were really in touch with the specificity of the human body and what it can do with technology—even really old technology, like a cello, for example. There’s an amazing, seamless melding of body and instrument. When you make music on the computer, it’s not that there aren’t stakes…

SYMS: No, but the stakes are different when you’re making work with humans. Being with other humans is always anxiety-inducing and exciting to me, and I seek that out.

BABBITT: I’m gravitating toward that human element right now, even though I find it to be pretty uncomfortable. But it’s two sides of the same coin—the physical anxiety and vulnerability, and also the excitement and thrill and feeling yourself surviving it, and connecting.

SYMS: That’s what I was thinking when you mentioned the melding of bodies and technologies. Like, the sound of an orchestra is very specific—it can only be achieved one way, and it sounds like nothing else. There’s also stuff that sounds like it came from a computer and could only come from a computer, and I’m equally interested in that—I want both of them. I recently started playing guitar again—sometimes I call it my “babe magnet,” because it just sits in my apartment and people are like, “Oh, you play guitar?”—but it’s true, an instrument has this pull to it.

BABBITT: I felt that way about painting in the past, because it’s not part of my work at all, and it’s not a screen. It’s a physical act that you can get lost in. The music for The African Desperate occupies an interesting place between fidelities. It doesn’t conform to the prescribed binary of, like, Is it hi-fi or lo-fi? Is it digital or analog? Is it performed or sampled?

We went for this almost psychedelic melting and collapsing of all those categories in the same piece of work. Do you remember when we did the endcredits song? You thought it sounded too shiny and flat, so we played the mix out loud and recorded it on my phone, then AirDropped it to my computer. We brought that into the session and fucked with it a bit.

SYMS: People really respond to that track. You can hear Colin and me in the background joking around and making noise. I’m gonna joke on myself by quoting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. There’s one part in an interview [with Stevphen Shukaitis in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, 2013], where they talk about the Marvin Gaye album What’s Going On, and the idea of when voices turn into music as an example of calling a class into session. They talk about teaching and how there’s a moment, as a teacher, when you have to shift tones and command people’s attention—but you also don’t want to do that too soon. You want everyone to chat and do their thing first. That idea, of the shift from one mode to the other, really stuck with me. That’s what I love about that recording.

BABBITT: That’s how it feels to work with you. Somehow you have the ability to make all the hanging out and fucking around part of the work.