Earl Patrick pivots sharply away from his usual indie-folk and guitar-driven comfort zones for his newest release, the wildly inventive album “Conditioned By Machines”. The Portland, Oregon-based composer, singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist has spent over two decades building a dense, eight-album catalog. Here, however, he entirely flips the script. Feeling that classical flute music too often prioritizes gesture over pure melody, he set out to create modern, accessible compositions he actually wanted to hear. By unexpectedly marrying minimalist classical arrangements with the head-nodding grit of 1990s sample-based hip-hop, he strikes an utterly bizarre yet beautiful balance.
What is genuinely remarkable about this release is the cinematic, voyeuristic tension Patrick cultivates. On the track “What’s The Matter With New York Police”, he meticulously layers vintage plunderphonics over a smooth, descending jazz progression. The resulting soundscape pits ordinary domestic mishaps against a dark, film-noir dialogue concerning crime and societal apathy. It feels eavesdropped and wonderfully moody. Later, he pulls a jarring left turn on the title track, “Conditioned By Machines”, a blast of retro-futuristic synth-pop and space disco mapping the erasure of human expression. The tight, mathematically quantized patterns bounce beneath expansive harmonies, leaving you to ponder the creeping alienation of modern automation.
Still, Patrick occasionally sets the spoken dialogue aside to let pure orchestration breathe. The track “A Big Light Comes” drops the vocal samples completely in favor of an airy, sweeping, and highly expressive melodic progression. You can feel the organic vibrato gliding effortlessly, slowly shifting the mood from quiet melancholy into a deeply majestic, grounded energy. Conversely, “Again I Ask For Silence” uses a rapidly plucked, trip-hop staccato loop to backdrop an absurdly theatrical struggle for authoritarian control, forcing rigid classical structures to bump directly against frantic vocal samples.
He applies this same surreal experimentation to raw physics as well. Patrick actually turns physical oscillations into a bouncy, highly syncopated groove on “Do You Know What Causes Sound”, accidentally conjuring the delightfully odd aesthetics of brightly colored 1980s educational videos. The continuous juxtaposition of old, crackling human voices and sleek, purposeful instrumentation keeps you constantly slightly off balance. The entire project feels deeply introspective, weaving through anxiety, peace, and the stark realities of isolation. As the final sweeping tones fade into the background of your own room, a bizarre paranoia begins to settle in. Are the recurring patterns of your own daily life dictated by genuine feeling, or have you already unknowingly synced up to the cold, mechanical rhythm of the room?
