A Chat with Macro/micro (24.06.26)
With A.fter I.ntelligence, Macro/micro explores the deeper philosophical questions surrounding intelligence itself. While electronic music has long examined humanity’s relationship with technology, few recent releases approach the subject with the same elegance and nuance. We caught up with Macro/micro to discuss the album and the ideas behind it.
OSR: A.fter I.ntelligence explores artificial intelligence through a philosophical and existential lens rather than a purely technological one. What first inspired you to make AI the central theme of this album?
Macro/micro: My interest/fears in the long-term ramifications of AI slightly predate this album’s start. It ran parallel without intersecting for quite a while, maybe at the 80% point. Sam Harris had a very striking TED talk in 2017 where he distilled a lot of work and ideas/fears of AI researchers in a very concrete way. Then, getting more into the ideas of people like Nick Bostrom and Eliezer Yudkowsky gave more depth to those concerns. Once I was very deep in the writing process, I started seeing a shape of these certain tracks coming together as a morbid curiosity about our entanglement with AI, and its worst possible (but actually possible) outcomes.
OSR: The title suggests a future beyond intelligence as we currently understand it. What does ‘A.fter I.ntelligence’ mean to you, and how did that concept shape the album’s narrative?
Macro/micro: One of the things I’m happiest about is how the album turned out, in that the name and music both have clear points of view, but their outcomes could vary in probabilistic ways. There’s a range of what “A.fter I.ntelligence” and the sonic narrative of the album mean to me; some outcomes are quite bleak, some actually have some potential light at the end of the tunnel. But one of the many things the title means to me is that it could be an entire reset of civilization, like a true B.C/A.D. moment (to use that vernacular), a moment where future people draw a line between epochs.
OSR: Many of the track titles reference well-known ideas in AI theory, such as the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment and Artificial General Intelligence. How much research went into the project, and how did you translate these concepts into music?
Macro/micro: I can’t say I’m an expert, and if anything, I’m like a lot of us that go down podcast rabbit holes and cultivate an informational obsession over some topic. But I know enough to maybe be like an initial pointer of where to look for those just now getting familiar with the AI concern landscape. But just as important as it was for me to point people towards Nick Bostrom’s thought experiments, it was to point people towards thoughts of the mysteriousness of consciousness (David Chalmers), ecstatic experience, and finding peace within oneself in a very loud, distracting world.
OSR: Throughout the album, there seems to be a tension between technological advancement and human consciousness. Do you see AI primarily as a threat, an opportunity, or simply an inevitable stage in our evolution?
Macro/micro: That’s a great question, and I think I see all of those as possibilities, but with different weighted likely outcomes. While we can’t disregard true potential uses of AI to greatly improve conditions for humans and the world, I am much more concerned about the downside than I am optimistic about the upside. The main thing to realize is that whatever it can become, we will be in relation to it. And while that may seem obvious, try to really feel what that means — that our lives would be plunged into new kinds of dangers and concerns, like animal species “below” us on the food chain would harbor towards us. And not to say that we should fear it consuming us, we should fear that it will be in relation to us as we are to ants. We don’t hold a grudge against the ant colony we destroy to build a house, so it will just enact its directive without second thought (a directive that’s in an ever-evolving, alien language).
OSR: You’ve described Macro/micro as a search for “deeper, intuitive truths about the relationship between inner and outer space”. How does A.fter I.ntelligence continue or expand that artistic mission?
Macro/micro: At a personal level, I think a lot of the album was me purging these bound-up fears. I think cathartic music feels more appealing to me when I feel like I’m struggling against something. And then, in terms of the sonic narrative, that turn takes place in Act 3 of the record. It dives into the realm of subjective experience, and we go through the rest of it essentially in first person.
OSR: You worked as an audio engineer alongside Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on projects including Watchmen, Mank, and Soul. What lessons from that period have had the greatest impact on your own work as a composer and producer?
Macro/micro: Routine and work ethic, for sure. Getting to work with a fixed and predictable schedule did so much for my ADHD brain creatively. I gravitate toward unstructuredness and have a hard time prioritizing lots of different random tasks. But treating it like a regular job (start at a certain time and never quit before a certain time), your brain settles into a routine and is freed up to be in the modality of creativity without getting distracted/disrupted. I can actually feel the difference ever stronger now that I have 2 young kids, and it’s hard to keep a strict schedule!
OSR: The album moves between moments of tension, dread, reflection, and even beauty. Was there a particular emotional journey you wanted listeners to experience from ‘Clicks (Prologue)’ through to ‘Judgement Day’?
Macro/micro: Definitely, but I want it to be subjectively interpretable to people (within reason). I hope that the intensity of the first 2/3rds will give the feeling that this is a potentially dire situation worth taking seriously, and I hope that the final act can handhold the listener to dive within.
OSR: One of the album’s most intriguing tracks is ‘The Hard Problem: Intelligence Is (Not Necessarily Sufficient for) Consciousness’. Do you believe consciousness can ever emerge from machines, or is there something fundamentally unique about human awareness?
Macro/micro: The scary thing is that I fear it will be impossible to tell. If AI is conscious but we treat it like it’s not, we’ve invented a new form of slavery and mass suffering. But if it’s not conscious but we treat it like it is, the amount of schizophrenia this will cause to our own understanding of who we are and what consciousness is terrifying. My personal fear is that the second is more likely to be true.
OSR: Experimental electronic music often balances technical complexity with emotional communication. How do you approach that balance when composing, particularly on a conceptually dense project like this one?
Macro/micro: When making music as Macro/micro, my MO is to not bring any preconceived ideas of what I want to make musically; I try to always start in an exploratory way, by playing with sound until something catches me emotionally. Then I just follow what that sound/emotion is and I build it how it’s telling me it wants to be built (when listening quietly, through the filters of my personality and past experiences). This way, the song feels organic to me, like it guided me to help write itself. So while I didn’t think it at the time, I feel like my pent-up fears of things like The Alignment Problem were coming out of me through my path of emotional discovery through sound.
OSR: Looking beyond A.fter I.ntelligence, what questions or ideas are currently occupying your mind as an artist, and where do you see Macro/micro evolving next?
Macro/micro: Oh man, well I’ll answer just as a person instead of an artist (as I explained before!). I mean, the state of the world politically has been insane to me. But I’m just starting to get the faintest whiff that the fever of authoritarian new-right is starting to break. I’m really excited to make new music and see what the sound is telling me about myself and my own interests.
Many thanks to Macro/micro for speaking with us. Find out more about Macro/micro on their Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Spotify.
