While setting out to create a vocal work about loss, Amsterdam-based musician Asa Horvitz was searching for something more than just the right words. The singer, multi-instrumentalist and composer’s father—jazz and experimental guitarist Bill Horvitz—passed away in 2017, with the death of several other close relatives coming close before and after. Asa Horvitz wanted a musical language to evoke our metaphysical and tangible experiences with loss and the weight of history that surrounds those who have passed on. He looked to the past for answers, assembling a dataset of over 150 pre-existing texts from throughout history that deal with grief, and towards the future for the tools to mine them, feeding them through a custom Natural Language Processing AI system (designed by Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and Alejandro Calcaño). The piece that Horvitz and his ensemble built with the help of this material—full of strangely affecting non-sequiturs—was cryptic, singular, and emotionally unguarded: a stunning music-theater piece called GHOST. Part experimental opera, part neo-Medieval reverie, and part avant-pop song cycle, it is presented here as a streamlined album of standout recordings made throughout the project’s long genesis.

The compositions resulted from vocal improvisations led by Horvitz and accomplished bassist and singer-songwriter Carmen Quill (also of Scree), accompanied by Ariadne Randall and Bryan West on processing, synthesizers, viola da gamba, and more. Later, the pieces incorporated interjections from Horvitz’s father’s brother—the esteemed pianist and composer Wayne Horvitz. Intended as a jumpoff point for the musicians, the AI provided text that felt inherently musical in its odd repetitions and run-on structures, as well as non-referential. “If the text could be something that was clearly full of ghosts, but didn’t quote, then you could feel this sense of archive from the past that you are trying to dig through,” Horvitz the younger explains. As a result, the act of processing death in GHOST feels a bit like digging through dusty file cabinets full of faded, water-damaged documents and contextless ephemera, struggling vainly to make connections. The project’s website conveys this impression clearly: The user flips through photos and moving snippets of performance with the raw AI dispatches—line-broken by HTML—superimposed across the screen.

Horvitz, Quill, and the ensemble evolved a curious and bold musical syntax to suit the text, often setting it against the natural emphasis of speech, with each phoneme given equal weight. Sometimes the lyrics fall into iambic-pentameter-like rhythms or suggest the contours of pop songs, operatic arias, Vespers settings, and more. Compositionally, the ensemble seemed to draw inspiration from as many different eras as the AI’s source material. The pieces are difficult to characterize but point toward a variety of musical lineages: the spoken-word-driven operas of Robert Ashley, the tectonic synth-orchestral edifices and breathless recitations of Einstein on the Beach, Meredith Monk’s vocal arrangements (see the gasping extended vocal techniques of “Oak Tree”), and more. Like all of these works, GHOST leans into humor when appropriate. The magical-realistic detour “Great Bird” is particularly charming, with its Laurie Anderson-esque Sprechstimme and odd incidental rhymes: “You are a great bird, like the wolf of a cat/and people like that/talk about holes in the sky.”

Sometimes the group happens across inviting symmetries and even full-on hooks. Derived from one of the group’s earliest improvisations in 2019, the Quill-led “Hail Necessity” is the most overt example of this, beginning like a lute song or Baroque choral work reimagined for a fantasy RPG soundtrack. Highlighting Quill’s staggering vocal power, the first draft of the piece was improvised in a single take using an unedited AI printout provided by Horvitz, at a session that took place in the wake of the passing of Quill’s own father. (“My father is dead and I am the daughter of mighty friends,” she sings repeatedly.) “Personality” feels similarly immediate, serving as perhaps the record’s clearest statement of the project’s thematic motifs (“What kind of personality is the world of the dead?”), with the ensemble outlining and embellishing an eight chord sequence which threads through much of the record. Singing in unison, Quill and Horvitz deliver some of GHOST’s most direct and naturalistic phrases here: “I cannot be my son, I cannot dare to go on living, I cannot live, I am free.”

Around these visceral vocal performances, there are electronic glitches that seem to simulate breaks in the AI’s code. The sound palette is ragged, emphasizing the scrappiness of the project’s long genesis. Much of the album sounds like its basic vocal material could have been recorded on a laptop mic or an iPhone (with synths and effects added to create a textured, enveloping spectrum of sound). A striking example of this is the murky, room-sound-filled “Still Regent of the Dead,” in which Horvitz’s half-asleep delivery finds resonances with both outre hip-hop and vaporous Arthur Russell-like melodicism. Moments like these set GHOST definitively apart from innumerable AI-based art projects that pride themselves on their slick, utopian sheen. The piano etude from Wayne Horvitz also lends the project a very non-futuristic sense of human intuition.

Despite its autobiographical resonances, the pieces unfailingly return the listener to the realm of the abstract, making space for them to run free with personal associations. In hymn-like closer “Drown in Matter,” Horvitz takes a beatific lapse into the second person over synth squelches that function like a church organ ostinato: “This is a song for you…” It is a call to participation for the listener, making sure that we are using this opportunity to unpack the spectral truths behind our own enduring sources of pain: “Alternate now/You have a ghost now.” The song embodies the many ways in which GHOST functions like a cosmic reaching-out, remaining soulful despite its partially systematized means of production. The ensemble theorizes about the roots of our shared sadnesses by siphoning through what history has left behind for us to examine. GHOST’s compositions remain inimitable and full of empathy at every turn, tracking the tidal patterns that underpin our grief without attempting to fabricate their logic.

– Winston Cook Wilson