Using a limited set of sonic materials including reed instruments, samples of his own voice, electronic drum and synths, and a generative MAX MSP patch, London-based Giacomo Fargion’s Love Album, aptly imagines a person (or machine) trying to express a feeling but never quite being able to do so.

I like albums that sound like computers made them, but with the kinds of messed up idiosyncrasies for which only a human could possibly be responsible.

Welcome to the sound world of Giacomo Fargion, a London-based producer and electronic sound designer who also plays in a sibling band with his sister (jealous!). You’ve heard this all before: electronically-processed samples from the real world, virtually reshaped and re-gridded sounds and instruments in a digital uncanny valley, yeah yeah blah blah. But Fargion’s whole deal is different somehow.

This music sounds more like a game, for him and for us. Not a video game, but like a cross between a game of chance and a game of chess that you play with Death on the beach to determine your fate (see: The Seventh Seal).

Fargion boils it all down to the bare essentials, the sonic minutiae, the playful parametric shifts, the trap influences, the tiny wooden pieces of art that can be moved around a board. I get the feeling it’s all a game to him, and that he doesn’t care at all which way the result of that game swings — which is kind of the most punk thing I can think of, if I’m being honest.

The style here is sort of one part hip-hop, two parts Aphex Twin, and a dash of, um, belches and squelches reminiscent of some sort of humanoid slug monster who’s in love with another slug monster. In case you ever had any doubts, dear reader, I’m into it.

But the whimsy of it all is really what paints this picture so vividly for me. It’s just so playful and yet so minimal at the same time, so restrained.

The tracks that make up Love Album sound like music made by a boy sitting in the middle of his model train set, watching it go round and round, and every time the choo-choo comes around the snowcapped mountain he sets another toy figurine on one of the cars. Eventually there are a lot, some fall off, some stay on, some chatter like toy teeth, some cuckoo like an owl, the train horn bellows around the twentieth lap, and the tinker toy bleeps and bangs just keep on-a-cyclin’ until the child takes his conductor’s cap off and runs upstairs for a PB&J.

In music sometimes you can hear the creative act in real time. You can watch the artist think, and listen to the connections they’re attempting to make while you watch the map being drawn in front of your eyes. Not everything needs to be buttoned up all nice and tidy at the moment of disbursement.

Such is the delight of time-based art.

On that note, the most fascinating part of this listen, I’ll attest, is to try to hear out all of the paths not taken.

Every one of these repetitive, minimal miniatures could easily have been unfurled out in a thousand other directions, and so many producers would be chomping at the bit to fill these skeletal structures out with guts and organs and veins a plenty. Not Fargion. He’s perfectly happy to keep every 1 and 0 pinging across the hard drive as isolated as an electron sailing shadowlessly through the particle accelerator at CERN.

There’s just so little climactic momentum here. But the eeriness and “paused game player” repetition energy alone are enough to sustain someone’s attention throughout. It’s almost like we’re so afraid of the apocalyptic evolution of AI that we’re using its own tricks against it and laughing at it. Take that, robots!

Keeping all that in mind, there’s a lot of humanity on this record built in. Fargion’s own voice, other sampled voices, reeds, and other sounds make up the love language he’s constructing with, they just don’t really come together to form any semblance of a meaningful message.

Thus, if perfection could sound broken, like if a circuit board exploded and this was our futile attempt to put the many sharp fragments of fibreglass and copper back together but in the shape of an elephant, I could see Love Album metaphorizing that act.

Please check out Giacomo Fargion as well as the rest of the Unfulfillment + Stranger Ways catalog.

Listen and purchase here, please.