L’Makina review on Chain DLK

Review of the album L’Makina by Gilles Aubry (Corvo Records). on Chain DLK, June 2025.

In an age where the hum of machines is often just background noise, Gilles Aubry’s “L’Makina” invites us to lean closer, to really listen – and to think. This is not a mere homage to mechanized sounds or a cold exercise in electronic music. Rather, it’s a profound meditation on the uneasy, ambivalent dance between humans and their machines, through the lens of a nearly century-old Moroccan song that anticipated these very questions long before AI and algorithms colonized our imaginations.

“L’Makina” is anchored in history yet propelled by the future. The title track nods to L’Haj Belaid’s 1930s “L’Makina” – a song that wryly wrestles with the phonograph as both marvel and menace, a machine that could “steal” the voice and livelihood of a traditional musician. Aubry picks up this thread, weaving it into a modern fabric spun from his recordings with Moroccan musicians Ali Faiq (vocals) and Idr Bazrou (lotar, rebab), and processed through a machine learning model (RAVE) designed for timbral analysis.

The result is a layered conversation: part homage, part experiment, part philosophical inquiry. The synthetic textures and the organic timbres merge and diverge like dancers unsure whether to embrace or resist each other. Aubry’s deft manipulation of electronic processes doesn’t erase the human presence but interrogates the very nature of co-creation when the “other” is a non-human intelligence. The music sometimes feels like a ghostly echo of L’Haj Belaid’s rebellion and resignation, filtered through the prism of contemporary computational anxieties.

Yet, despite the cerebral undertones, “L’Makina” is far from clinical. There is warmth in the way the lotar and rebab float amid the glitchy shimmer, and a touch of humor in the machine’s occasional stumbles – a reminder that artificial intelligence is still learning to grasp what humans have practiced for centuries: social nuance, storytelling, and the sacred duty of musical transmission.

Aubry’s sound world here is simultaneously intimate and vast, with moments of quiet reflection that bloom into dense, almost ritualistic soundscapes. The album’s two long parts – 17 and 16 minutes respectively – demand patience but reward it with immersive detail, like peeling back the layers of a delicate, sonic origami folded between tradition and innovation.

This work is not just music but a thoughtful, poetic artifact of cultural and technological convergence. Aubry’s extensive history of bridging avant-garde and traditional music, and his collaborations with artists from North Africa to Berlin, clearly inform this release’s nuanced perspective. His approach isn’t about nostalgia or rejection of progress but about reckoning with the paradoxes and promises embedded in our ever-deepening relationship with machines.

The limited vinyl edition (100 copies) and the sober, elegant cover by Sofia Fahli encapsulate the tactile and contemplative nature of the project – a quiet jewel for listeners willing to engage deeply.

In sum, “L’Makina” is a sonic meditation on memory, modernity, and machine intelligence that asks: Can a machine really know a song? And if it can’t, what does that mean for the future of music, culture, and human expression? Gilles Aubry doesn’t hand you easy answers but invites you to join the dialogue – headphones on, ears wide open, heart ready to be both challenged and charmed.