Unlike much of Florian Hecker’s recent work—such as 2021’s »Synopsis Seriation« or »Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera«, his acclaimed PAN-released collaboration with Mark Leckey—there is no single overarching narrative binding »Natural Selection«. Hecker describes the sprawling nine-track album as a »constellation of pieces originating from related investigations«, and the clue is in the title. Ranging from under a minute to over half an hour, the works are grouped together because they share very specific properties, using correlated modes of synthesis and approaching timbral metamorphosis in similar ways. Pieces that may initially seem incongruous are united not by a single concept, but by a cluster of queries Hecker has been probing diligently over the past few years, including ideas related to automated file selection, database-generating sequencing systems, and the prospect of synthetic cognition.

The album was written in parallel with a range of Hecker’s recent multidisciplinary inquiries: 2022’s Galerie Neu exhibition »TEMPLEXTURES«, which examined machine listening and charted uncategorisable auditory sensations; 2021’s diffusion of olfactory sonics and spatial perception study »RESYNTHESIZSERS«; and »INSPECTION«, an algorithmic reconstruction of sound that uses human hearing to parse vital timbral characteristics. Yet »Natural Selection« does not require rigorous background study. In fact, it stands as one of Hecker’s most playful and approachable releases in years, exhibiting the same balance of intensity, mischief, and brain-twisting theory that made albums such as »Sun Pandämonium« and »Acid in the Style of David Tudor« so enduringly influential.

Beginning with the brief »f92ex0.03«, forty seconds of heaving synthesised textures and disorienting frozen spectral trails, the album immediately shifts pace with the expansive »Syn 21845 8 J15 Q12«. The piece was written with the help of Hecker’s friend Vincent Lostanlen, an applied mathematician and leading voice in the field of computational auditory analysis. Drawing microscopic glissandi fragments from a database of source material for Lostanlen’s time-frequency scattering process, the track spatiotemporally reorders them to create an unsettling and utterly beguiling auditory illusion. What initially sounds like a barrage of perpetually reversing acoustic impressions is in fact a progressive metamorphosis of forward and backward time—no audio is actually reversed.

Hecker’s more succinct diversions are equally energising and, positioned between his durational experiments, function as necessary palate cleansers. On the jackhammering »m syn 260e 2402«, he transforms an analysis tool into a synthesiser, extracting spectral phantasms from runaway code, while on »Layer« he coaxes a digital reverb unit into shaping its »infinite space« into criss-crossing synthetic whirrs. There is even a turn towards technoid cohesion on the hallucinatory »m syn bold heuristic driver«, which employs a revised and extended model of Lostanlen’s time-frequency scattering process developed by members of the mathematician’s team. Here, Hecker scans harsh digital noise until it resolves into an unintentionally dubwise sequence of undulating pulses.

A variation of this process also drives the album’s extended closer, »M 35/36«, a symphonic thirty-five-minute blur of ghost frequencies and nebulous textures, accented with kaleidoscopic xenharmonic iridescence.