Human Story 3
| Human Story 3 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
||||
| Studio album by James Ferraro | ||||
| Released | June 14, 2016 | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 41:07 | |||
| Producer | James Ferraro | |||
| James Ferraro chronology | ||||
|
||||
| Alternate cover | ||||
 |
||||
| Singles from Human Story 3 | ||||
|
||||
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Pitchfork | 5/10 |
| Tiny Mix Tapes |  |
Human Story 3 is a studio album by American electronic musician James Ferraro, self-released on June 14, 2016. The album's concept revolves philosophically and structurally on how technology that can be used meaningfully is often used less usefully for commerce and, as a result, how the technology may eventually end up subverting humanness. The record landed at number seven on Tiny Mix Tapes' year-end list of the best albums of 2016.
Human Story 3 conceptually and, by its ambiguous narrative, revolves around a "smart planet" where service robots, performed by text-to-speech voices, attempt to cognitively interpret the world around them but are at the same time musically shown as still performing repetitive tasks. The aim and moral of the record is that while technology can do a lot of commands that are beneficial, it ends up only being used less usefully for commerce and, as a result, the technology may eventually end up subverting humanness. The word salads in the titles of cuts such as "Immanent Cloud," "Security Broker," or "Plastic Ocean" cause the meaning of symbols to be changed, much like how marketers alter the meaning of some objects to create what Ferraro described as strange and "contradictory" products.
The text-to-speech voices often display slight mispronunciations, which give the album a surrealistic feel regarding how technology sometimes fails to replicate human cognition. As Ferraro said, "Certain newer apps tend to bring people together – in a mechanical, artificial way – in shared space. I think that’s probably the trend, post- this hyper-individual era. So it’s obviously going to be unnatural if it’s being manipulated through a third party like that—a bit alien."Human Story 3 follows several text-to-speech characters, male and female voices, that repeat brand names, buzzwords and phrases like "IKEA," "GPS," "Starbucks," "market crash," "mobile payments," "FedEx," "smart car" and "latte" at musical swells and crescendos, along with detailed speeches. Mehan Jayasuriya of Pitchfork wrote that this dialogue feels "like a torrent of audio pop-ups that can’t be blocked."
...
Wikipedia