Signal to Noise: Music for the Attention Economy

Version française

Original title: “Signal sur bruit : Musique pour l’économie de l’attention”

Links

• Bandcamp

Tracklist

1. First Impressions (“Premières impressions”)
2. Delayed Gratification (“Gratification différée”)
3. Echo Chamber (“Chambre d’écho”)
4. Vicious Circle (“Cercle vicieux”)
5. Infinite Content (“Contenu infini”)
6. Still (“Pourtant”)

Credits

Aymeric Gibon : Composition, recording, instruments, effects, mix Manon Léon : Composition (1, 4, 6), vocals (1, 6), piano (4, 6), visuals Mastering : Mastered by Edouard

About the album

Signal to Noise was “assembled” around September 2025. Each track was built from a simple element—a guitar loop, a mellotron line, audio feedback—manipulated through analog means using guitar pedals and cassette tapes, so that I could spend as little time as possible in front of a screen.

This approach allowed me to embrace accidents, avoid getting distracted, and produce sounds I wasn’t able to make with a DAW. Thanks to that, it’s the only project of ours that I can still listen to from time to time: to me, it sounds more like a compilation of stray noises, accidents, and impulse decisions than tracks “composed” alone or with Manon.

Yet, I was tempted not to release it: as of April 2026, according to Deezer, roughly 170,000 new tracks hit streaming platforms every day (44% of which are AI-generated). What then is the point of adding to the ambient noise?

Above all, why do it for this kind of music? Ambient is a strange musical genre: it’s always in tension with our attention span.

When produced or consumed actively, the genre can help us reach an introspective, quasi-meditative, state. “Infinite Content”, the track around which this entire project took shape, was the result of a twenty-minute-sorta-trance, and I couldn’t recreate it if I tried. Ambient can also be quietly moving: one of my most profound musical experiences was sitting with If Thousands’ Lullaby on a Sunday morning by the edge of the canal.

Still, it’s impossible to ignore that ambient has mostly become a dumpster genre. Spotify fills up its “chill” playlists with AI-generated tracks to avoid paying real artists: ambient is the sound of slop. Beyond that, the genre’s current boom reflects a productivist mentality: it’s music to study to, music to work to; a sonic background designed to fill the silence so you can better focus on something else. It’s a crutch used to compensate our growing inability to focus. Ambient is the sound of multitasking.

I finally chose to release this project after reading “Listening to Noise”, an excerpt from Damon Krukowski’s book The New Analog.

The text examines the transition from the analog to the digital era. It draws a parallel between how noise— unavoidable in analog music—was erased in favor of digital perfection, and how social media algorithms now choose for us what constitutes a “signal”.

“When we listen to noise, we listen to the space around us and to the distance between us. We listen below the surface. We listen each to the limits of our individual perceptions, and we listen together in shared time.”

In analog music, noise carries information: you can hear musicians recording in real time, limited by the cost of tape; you hear their mistakes, the room, the gear, sometimes physical movements or background conversations; you hear the physical medium on which the music is pressed ; that physical medium can even create human interactions. Noise carries context, an environment. It also carries a responsibility, since it’s up to us, the listener, to parse it from the signal.

Just as digital music erased this noise, social media platforms pick for us the information they deem relevant—i.e., whatever will get us to engage. They filter out relational and cultural “noise” for us and, along with it, anything that exists outside our echo chambers and infinite feeds. To keep us scrolling, they bombard us with signal and discourage us from interpreting the noise ourselves. In doing so, they isolate us and occult the plurality of perspectives.

By putting words on so many of my frustrations with today’s technological and musical environment, “Listening to Noise” gave a purpose to what wasn’t yet named Signal to Noise. This compilation of stray noises, accidents, and impulse decisions is, in itself, meaningful.

I can’t—and wouldn’t want to—stop anyone from putting this on in the background to help them focus on something else. On the contrary! I simply hope that the project’s analog, sometimes abrasive approach will compensate for the numbing effect inherent to the genre. I hope the album and track titles provide enough context to encourage listeners to question their own relationship with ambient music and the attention economy. In a way, I do hope to add to the ambient noise.

Music that influenced Signal to Noise

• Lullaby, by If Thousands, mentioned above
• I’m always, in some way, trying to plagiarize Symphonic Holocaust by Morte Macabre; here, it’s mostly visible in the mellotron lines of track 2, “Delayed Gratification”
• If I were a better guitar player, I’d probably be doing stuff that sounds like The Durutti Column, especially Vini Reilly; I make up for it by employing Manon to emulate the tracks “Opera 1 & 2”
• I bought a cassette recorder because of my obsession for boombox-era Mountain Goats
• You can’t make ambient music with magnetic tapes without paying tribute to William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops