Özcan Saraç :: Neural Generators of the Auditory Brainstem Response (Evel)

Less than a year after TON, a two-hour-and-a-half glitch mammoth that made it into Igloo’s Best of 2024 round-up, Özcan Saraç is back on Evel with Neural Generators of the Auditory Brainstem Response—and if TON already seemed daunting for its lengths and experimentation, Saraç’s seventh album ups the ante, clocking over 330 minutes divided into twenty-five movements.

The sensory perception of sound

Less than a year after TON, a two-hour-and-a-half glitch mammoth that made it into Igloo’s Best of 2024 round-up, Özcan Saraç is back on Evel with Neural Generators of the Auditory Brainstem Response—and if TON already seemed daunting for its lengths and experimentation, Saraç’s seventh album ups the ante, clocking over 330 minutes divided into twenty-five movements.

The album shares its name with a landmark article by Danish American neuroscience pioneer Aage Møller: the text was the first to describe how the different components of the auditory brainstem response (a measure of how the inner ear and brain process sound) are shaped by its neural generators, the anatomical structures producing rhythmic brainwaves when sound is perceived. He was then able to connect auditory disorders such as tinnitus to abnormalities in the response. If this is of any indication, the album’s concept revolves around the sensory perception of sound, and potentially around how this perception can “hallucinate” artifacts and distortions when maladaptive.

Özcan Saraç is no stranger to incorporating scientific concepts and methods in his work, and has focussed on information and signal processing in the past, with art installations leveraging data visualisation and sonification. Reading more into the album’s title, however, is somewhat futile—nothing about the album’s conceptual framework is mentioned by the press release or the artist (as for the rest of his music releases), and the pieces composing the album are effectively untitled, simply providing an opus and movement number.

Dark, and uncompromising ::

The music is decidedly avant-garde, dark, and uncompromising, with the tracks often focussing on a single idea or sound and developing it in a self-contained way. After the Overture, a crescendo display of frantic quasi-beats, boiling low synths and choir-like pads, the first Movement starts with sharp cuts and beats deconstructed to the extreme, making full use of the gamut of our auditory capability, from extreme low to high frequencies, detailed use of panning, and wide-ranging dynamics. Some pieces get closer to more recognizable forms of electronic music, like Movement 20, which revolves around a heavy industrial beat with restlessly shifting sound design. By contrast, the following Movement 21 is a sparse, reverb-heavy landscape with subterranean clastic sounds and airy synth chords.

Movements 5 and 15, on the other hand, get closer to the sounds of modern classical, with a glitched-up ensemble of string sections, brass instruments and maybe some distant choirs in the first, and an often-solo organ in the second. These are just approximations, however—the sounds stay mostly alien, and making out an organ or an orchestra in the distance only gives a sense of the unheimlich, rather than being a comforting familiar anchor offered here and there during the five-plus hours.

Wrapping one’s head around this album is not easy, especially so soon after its release. To really grasp its intricacies and nuances, each movement could potentially be explored on its own for a month. At each run through, different moments stand out and leave the listener in awe, a real feeling of “how” and “what did I just hear” that makes one doubt their own perception of sound. Since the very first listen, however, Neural Generators makes it clear that it will keep on offering new discoveries and bottomless reflection, and that both in its abstraction, extension and depth, it is one of the best works of its kind in recent memory.

Neural Generators of the Auditory Brainstem Response is available on Evel. [Bandcamp]