Unlocked is the debut album on Pheek's Archipel label by William Jourdain, known under the moniker of Automatisme. He began the project in 2011 and has been publishing since on various labels, such as Constellation, Mille Plateaux, and Outlines, while simultaneously being active as an art historian and curator. His generative ambient dub techno music is continually reshaped in the studio. This album is a compilation of post-produced sound archives, including stems, presets, and templates dating from 2011 to the present day. Jourdain and Pheek met in 2017 and made two albums together via their Viatorism duo. Unlocked was mainly produced during a residency at Pheek's studio in August 2023. William Jourdain was going through a life transition at that time, which marked the end of his use of an artistic moniker and the beginning of creating under his own name. In his day-to-day life, he seeks out the semi-wakeful-sleepy state. A non-conscious transit space of lucid dreaming. It is a fictional location influenced by both the conscious and subconscious minds. For him it can be likened to an improvisation that follows us.
This record mainly contains Audialab's artificial intelligence deep sampling tools and K-Devices out-of-the-grid and generative MIDI sequencers and audio modulators. The tracks were exported using a hard drive that was malfunctioning and producing errors when calculating file states. There's also a reference to 'locked groove', minimal house scores plus the addition of constant mutations in the surrounding elements. This creates an interesting dichotomy of two opposing worlds, as the music is both catchy and modulatory. Could this be a way of traveling through our
roots? In short, it's a collaboration with the help of his double, an artificial intelligence, which learns by remixing the artist's work. The risk-taking of this project results in the restriction of the extended format of the pieces, following a basic theme that must take three or four directions maximum. This is where worlds merge together as one part ends and another begins. The titles of the pieces entitled Levels symbolize the small steps we climb, one at a time. The album also addresses how to be nuanced in noise, which is a sound source that masks all others. The result is a collection of storms between sublime and chaos. William Jourdain thinks it is the natural context for everything and that we are learning to live in it.