A Primer On “Impossible Music”

Robert Berry describes Black Midi, which is known “for the incredible density of notes crammed onto [songs'] scores”:

Artists use cheap software like Synthesia, intended as a vaguely Guitar Hero-ish piano tuition aid, as a means of visualising their pieces for YouTube consumption. Notes rain down on the piano keyboard like a tropical storm with some pieces averaging more than 60,000 notes a second, note counts in the millions – even billions – over the course of a few minutes. At moments of the most extreme densities, the system’s ability to represent the information it is being fed breaks down and the sound erupts into a scree of digital distortion. There is a reason why so many ‘blackers’ refer to their tunes as “impossible music”.

When I described the Black Midi stuff I’d heard to [electronic artist] Holly Herndon, she was apt to liken it to the early twentieth century cluster chords of Charles Ives, or to think of it as a kind of absurdist critique – whether deliberate or not – of the extremes of virtuosity demanded by the ‘new complexity’ music of composers like Brian Ferneyhough. … As I plunged through the online rabbit hole of Black Midi wikis and YouTube channels, with their frenzied cover versions of classic video game soundtracks, their hyperbolic boasts of lavish cpu- busting note densities; I heard something at once comfortingly alien and peculiarly childlike.

(Video: “Bad Apple” by TheSuperMarioBros2)