Pentiments takes its first leap into CD-primary territory with a selection of audio and visual works by newly relocated Los Angeles artist and good friend Connor Camburn. Contained on the disc are seven formidable studies of a kind with some of the more barbed and uncompromising voices that occupy the noisier margins of academic electroacoustic music (the voluminous generative palettes of Kent Tankred, the charred sonic dysfunctions of Benjamin Thigpen and the alien outputs of Roland Kayn’s cybernetic systems all come to mind), although Connor’s work also displays a proclivity for the bare repetition of cells that eschews the itinerant natures of the aforementioned in favor of more homeostatic modes. The accompanying booklet consists mostly of works based on images of home construction disasters and Hans Moravec’s 1980 robotics thesis Obstacle Avoidance and Navigation in the Real World by a Seeing Robot Rover visually mangled by what is suspected to have been erring optical character recognition during its conversion into a PDF file. The result is an exhibit of algorithmic and diagrammatic crises that emphasize by means of aesthetic embrace the dissimulated pseudo-affects engendered by a computational mechanism’s attempt to parse products of sentience and intellect. A stark and laconic argument against the oncoming “technological singularity” rears its ugly head and one is encouraged to find in its code the incidental grandeur of malfunction.

In an edition of 100 glass-mastered CDs with 12-page 8×10″ full color booklet. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.