In the radically entangled notational landscapes of Bil Smith, we encounter not scores as linear documents, but speculative surfaces—part cartographic event, part para-chemical ritual. These are not mere directions for sonic action. They are entangled fields in which temporality, neurobiology, linguistics, and post-mathematical logics converge in sedimentary strata of signification. Each score is less an instruction than a biosemantic artifact: a zone where cognition and biology co-compose.
What emerges, through careful looking—not “reading,” for reading is too sequential a term—is a metabolization of deep science through symbolic intuition. The works on bilsmith.com do not depict a world. They perform it. The notation becomes a form of speculative modeling, where aesthetic structure draws from biochemical scaffolding, from informatic grammars, from entropic behaviors embedded within matter.
These scores conjure an epistemological liminality: we are always on the threshold of comprehension, of musical fluency, yet never fully permitted entry. Glyphs mutate mid-sentence. Standard staves dissolve into pharmacological spirals. Whole pharmaceutical registers—non-place names like “Equitroclage,” “Axirol,” or “Penopolclip”—become both agents and actors within the notation, suggesting a pharmakon of sound: a cure and a toxin, a formula and a hallucination.
Materiality and the Post-Scriptural
Smith’s scores are artifacts of extreme mediation. They emerge not only from human intention but from algorithmic interventions, coded languages, and machinic generativity. There is a confrontation with the post-scriptural: language no longer denotes; it deforms. It swims. Musical notation here is not a universal system but an idiolect—a personalized script for an ever-mutating sonic organism. And within that script, deep metaphors reside: anatomical fragments, botanical morphologies, even synthetic hormonal flows render the score less a composition than a hormonal map of vibration.
The symbolic logic here is recombinant. In one score, a metonymic loop forms between a cochlear cross-section and a segment of urban topology. In another, a waveform is diagrammed like a viral bloom—suggesting that sound is not produced, but incubated. These references to microbiology, gene therapy, and cognitive science suggest a deeply embedded logic—a pre-conscious system through which music becomes a form of evolutionary utterance.
Temporal Entanglements
The scores insist on time not as duration, but as density. There is a saturation of graphic matter that refuses horizontal temporality. Instead, time thickens, folds, and burrows. One feels that the event of the score happens all at once, like a complex protein folding in on itself—a sonic autopoiesis. The performer is not just an interpreter but a biosensor, activating latent structures, decoding embedded ontologies.
What then is a musical gesture in this context? It is a data transfer. An epigenetic trigger. A moment in which sound extends beyond the ear, entering the bloodstream, altering our perceptual metabolics. Smith’s metaphors are not decorative. They are functional code—working upon the performer, the viewer, the reader at a cellular level.
Toward a Science of Affect
There is a great ambition here: to fuse the felt and the formulated. To allow the experiential ambiguity of metaphor to co-exist with the precision of molecular reasoning. Sound is chemical. Listening is molecular. Composition is a prosthesis for interspecies communication, for post-human poetics.
We might say these scores operate as heuristic prosthetics: tools not for the reproduction of sound but for the invention of new cognitive topologies. In this sense, Smith is not composing music, but composing models for neuro-affective activation. These are not scores for concerts, but protocols for experience.
And this is where his work opens onto a broader horizon. Beyond genre, beyond media, even beyond music itself, Bil Smith proposes notation as a speculative practice: a way of thinking, of becoming-with the unknown. A lexicon of the future embedded in the language of the now.
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