Genetic Selection: Darwin’s Voyage | electro industrial on Ant-Zen

One of the great thing about art you love is how you can interpret it in your very own and highly personalised way.

One of my most prized paintings, for example, depicts a scene on the surface of an unknown planet, stars and interstellar space behind it, with a few streaks meant to be space craft zipping by the distant sky.

This piece took less than 10 minutes to create and cost me around $20 from a street artist in Sydney. The medium? A couple of cans of spray paint on glossy paper, along with inventive use of spray can lids to create perfectly round shapes.

It’s a simple painting, made on the spot according to a formula. I also suspect the artist churned out several dozen of these by-the-numbers creations every weekend. Yet for me that in no way diminishes its artistic value.

Art is what you love. And art that you love is what you make of it. Indeed, over several years I have derived enjoyment from the fact that this piece hung on display in my man-room. At various times, when I found myself staring at the wall (something I did probably far more than I care to admit), I would occasionally imagine what was going on in that scene. What was this strange planet that was being colonised? What degree of technological advancement had this civilisation attained? And what else could be going on off the frame?

The artist who made the painting undoubtedly had no backstory in mind when he used the round bases of spray cans to create planetary shapes. Nor would his motive for creating it have been for a buyer to subject his work to serious intellectual evaluation. It’s just a space scene, churned out on demand for a tourist audience.

But that’s ok by me. Not all art has to be open to interpretation. If something can make you do that, then great, so much the better.

I suppose that’s why it’s called art, not science.

The same applies to music.

If you let it.

How good is the artwork? Absolutely stunning! Painted by Michael Hutter.

Imagination and artistic interpretation: Genetic Selection by Darwin’s Voyage

These very thoughts occurred to me after I began listening to the 2005 album Darwin’s Voyage by German electronic artist Genetic Selection.

Released on the experimental Ant-Zen label, it’s an instrumental industrial album that merges techno, rhythmic noise, smatterings of ambient, industrial (in all its wonderful manifestations), and other moderately dark and nasty sounds. And no, I hadn’t heard of Genetic Selection either until then.

Now I must emphasise that the sound and style didn’t blow me away. While I love all sorts of electronic industrial music, including the hard-hitting and stomping noisy varieties, I’m often drawn back to the EBM cheese and more synth-centric terror banana melodic stuff.

However, this album intrigued me. The hook was the album artwork, which you can see above.

“One thing music collectors learn over many years of accumulating physical media is to be wary of unfamiliar artists that bear exceedingly good artwork and intriguing names. Sure, it’s not an absolute rule, but in the imperfect world we inhabit it’s sometimes a sign of things being too good to be true.”

My copy of Darwin’s Voyage was acquired as part of a bulk purchase of EBM and industrial CDs from a mate. There was no pre-conceived sussing out of what this album sounded like. I did not look at it online nor (if like me you’re still into physical media) did I make some value judgement when holding it in my hands prior to acquisition. In fact, I only discovered that it was in my possession when I went through the collection after it had come home with me.

One thing music collectors learn over many years of accumulating physical media is to be wary of unfamiliar artists that bear exceedingly good artwork and intriguing names. Sure, it’s not an absolute rule, but in the imperfect world we inhabit it’s sometimes a sign of things being too good to be true.

After a first listen, my first impression was that my suspicions might be correct. Darwin’s Voyage is entirely instrumental and while it combines hard techno, rhythmic noise, EBM, electro-industrial and a whole range of other electronic music sounds that I generally approve of (plus minimal and generally very short use of samples) it wasn’t my cup of tea.

The album sounded kind of stiff. It’s hard to describe without listening to it (which you can totally do here on the official Bandcamp page). I guess it sounded to me like a techno album having a go at industrial. If that’s your bread and butter, then good for you. It wasn’t quite for me, and with something like another 100 CDs to get through, I was on the verge of passing this off as just another album that might get a few listens and then most likely never get aired again. Believe me, I own and have paid money for many such releases. Yet, I was captivated by that fantastic cover art. I’m a sci-fi nerd and that creepy, dark, human-alien hybrid was fantastic.

With that in mind (in more than one sense), I listened to it again. Thinking of the artist’s name — Genetic Selection, what a name — got me thinking, especially when I imagined the album title to be a reference to distant space travel.

Wonderful Alien, Aliens and It-inspired track names here. 

My interest really got piqued though when I paid proper attention to the track titles (I rip all my physical media to lossless but the actual listening occurs predominantly via my phone, where it’s easy to forget track names).

Now I found that I was getting really interested. I found that I was starting to ‘construct’ a story for each track, based solely on the titles.

There was the slow intermittent sound of the track Drop Ship, which in my mind could happily pass for mechanical processes of a descending vessel slowly floating to the surface of a distant planet. Or there were the somewhat wilder sounds of the opening track Xenomorph Attack, which in my mind (and I do mean, in my mind) could pass for the chaos of a violent confrontation with an alien aggressor.

I found I got into this imagination play so much that I was somewhat obsessively checking back on track names, which is not something I usually do with purely instrumental albums.

Eventually, by the time I had ‘learned’ this album, I’d constructed my own story. While it was nominally a concept-album, I allowed my imagination to fill in the blank spaces.

Incidentally, the liner notes do contain a short description (in German) of the album theme. It details how colonists are attacked on a distant planet by an irresistible and predatory alien creature. It differed slightly to the way I imagined it, but I wasn’t too far off.

Imagination and track selection

I have since listened to another Genetic Selection album: Orbital Ground Attack. This second on was the Genetic Selection debut album

It too is an instrumental album and while its songs bear titles that are entirely hard sci-fi themes (which I love) — earth under attack, interstellar combat, human resistance — it was much more ambiguous. I couldn’t quite spurn my imagination in the same vivid detail that I did for Darwin’s Voyage.

Perhaps Orbital Ground Attack wasn’t the artist’s best work, what with it being his debut work? I felt it was a bit different, but I didn’t regard the quality to be any different.

More likely, I feel that I preferred one over the other their entirely instrumental nature meant there was a ‘gap’ that could be filled with imagination and personal interpretation. Let’s be honest with the fact that the track names could have been anything. Yet, the artist chose to call them Xenomorph Attack, Through Hyperspace, Drop Ship, The Creature, etc.

The song names on Darwin’s Voyage are clearly inspired by Alien, Aliens, It and other sci-fi-horror greats. I love that stuff and I allowed myself to imagine things accordingly. Orbital Ground Attack, with its ambiguous track names, is not inferior in any way musically. I just couldn’t get my imagination to envisage things on this album in the same way.

And with less imagination, there was less enthusiasm.

Art is what you make of it

I’m apprehensive when it comes to talking about an artist’s ‘vision’ or intent. We live in a time where, more than ever, art and culture is arguably seen as more consumable and about immediate gratification. From the nature of music streaming to what passes for pop music, it’s easy to lose sight of the intention of art, and how we value it.

And yet, as I said previously, good art is what you love.

Art is not rational. It’s not a scientific experiment with measurable results. It’s not a definable or quantifiable. There is no art without imagination (except perhaps in the machine-learning art sense).

Art is what you love. And if that fires your imagination in a fulfilling way, then it’s art that is worthwhile, regardless of whether it’s a masterpiece that took years to create, or a painting made with spray cans in a couple of minutes.