Mark Cetilia: The New Way

Multidisciplinary sonic and visual artist Mark Cetilia offers up a state-of-the-art overview of experimental electronic music in twelve pieces on his new double LP The New Way. Though the titles might lead one to think of the most recent in a long line of wing-nut internet sects, it actually stems from ‘conversations’ Cetilia held with GPT-2, one of several artificial intelligence applications making their appearance online in recent years. And like the generative nature of Cetilia’s interchange with GPT-2, the music on The New Way follows a not unrelated modus operandi of Cetilia creating systems for his electronic instruments to interact in and then stepping back and letting the music develop under its own volition, as it were.

Of course, Cetilia doesn’t follow a strictly hands-off approach once things get going. The pieces often involve processes of accretion and dissolution, with Cetilia jumping back into the fray from time to time and making adjustments on his swarms of cohabiting, and at times conflicting, modular synthesizer patches. The music often tilts and sways in not entirely foreseeable fashion, no doubt due to the fact that Cetilia himself cedes control to the machines, allowing them to forge their own path forward until they sputter out or implode.

What adds depth and more than a bit of warmth to the music on The New Way is Cetilia’s use of the room acoustics from a space he’d often visited in his home town of Pawtucket both as a performer and patron, Machines with Magnets. By placing microphones along the windows and walls of the space, Cetilia was able to take the resonance of the room’s acoustical qualities and route these back into his system, thus creating a kind of chaotic feedback loop which he uses both as a sonic source and a means to modulate these sounds through his synthesizer. Not only do the electronic sounds recorded through the air and into microphones add a depth often missing from much electronic work, but the referencing of the room itself adds a dimension to the pieces which exceeds just sonic considerations.

In this sense, the twelve pieces on The New Way reflect more than just a way of working with sound but also offer good examples of how different concepts of space can shape the music. Besides the physically tangible acoustical space, Cetiila also turns to the space of memory, having spent many evenings in these very rooms with his friends or experiencing other artists’ work there. Though playing on these recording sessions to a room empty of actual physical bodies, their presence still remains in the recollection of Cetilia’s many evenings spent here. Which leads us to the most intangible of spaces, that of the room’s energy. Its vibe, for lack of a better word. Which perhaps more than anything else may have shaped the music on these recordings.

Or maybe not. Perhaps this will have to remain a secret between Cetilia and GPT-2, who seems as much a collaborator on this release as the room itself or the computer used to generate the track titles from a database of prescription drug titles. If this all sounds a bit highfalutin, don’t worry because the music also works on a purely visceral level, with stompers like “Acidevac” and “Cisymys” sure to get any dancefloor moving. Or “Benzaplex,” a slow-dive rocker sputtering away, regaining balance, practically demanding to be listened to at blistering volume. And the opening track “Vaxceril” serves up a cataclysmic lava flow of gnashing sound collapsing into a sonic meltdown. If more of a sedate steady state approach is your thing, Cetilia spends ample time on many of the other tracks navigating various drones and standing waves verging on a stasis vividly electrified by the room’s acoustics and energy.

The idea that there could be anything construed as a 'new way’ would seem at best a spurious notion at this point in the predicament humankind currently finds itself in. But in the context of this release Cetilia has raised a few good questions about, as he states in his interview with GPT-2, “how music can help us to experience and connect more deeply with things.” Which I would hope could also mean, how music can connect us more deeply with ourselves and others. – Jason Kahn

– Dusted Magazine (2023)