“You who read me—are you certain you understand my language?” asks the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel.” The Argentine writer’s short story, first published in 1941, imagines an infinite archive of books in which the alphabet has been configured into every possible combination, resulting in a limitless array of texts meaning everything and nothing. In creating Library Copy Do Not Remove, her third solo album as Discovery Zone, JJ Weihl connected Borges’s logical puzzle to the simulation hypothesis, the popular theory that, since at some point the human race will probably achieve the ability to create billions of historical simulations, we’re more likely to be inhabiting one of these simulations than the “real” world.
Until now, Weihl has been a singer-songwriter-producer of pillowy art pop. But on Library Copy Do Not Remove—an ambient space odyssey composed with Lucas Chantre (World Brain) and arranged with Andrew Rahman and Timo Bittner for a single spatial-audio performance in Berlin’s Zeiss-Großplanaterium—she abandons conventional song structures in favor of expansive drones, playful Korg arpeggios, synthesized choruses, and an ARP that sounds like stardust. In the 2023 live performance’s ambisonic environment, referred to as a “heavenly dome” by a pitch-shifted voice on the album’s title track, those sounds converged on their audience from 49 speakers.
It’s hard to imagine the live experience from a small room, a few dozen monitors short of the space dome, but the album is immersive even without those trappings. The tracks are layered with as much textural complexity as the theories they represent, but density rarely bogs them down. Opener “Big Bang” is a seven-minute drone swell that plays like a grand overture. Treble synths twinkle above bass tones, illuminating their gentle currents. Even here, on the opening track of her first ambient LP, Weihl’s pop sensibility peers through the cracks.
Elsewhere, she lets it rip. An infectious Korg ostinato persists throughout “Dusk,” working as both backbeat and topline alongside clever bass licks and synth chords that get stabbier as the track progresses. Higher melodies interweave with the main riff, capping off the record’s most rhythmically dynamic cut. Despite pentatonic arpeggios that verge on city-pop impressions, the song skirts both the clichés that often come with control and the unraveling that can follow overextension.
Library Copy Do Not Remove is divided into two three-track sections, with “Habitat”—a lovely stretch of layered field recordings that morphs into an ominous synth march in its second half—bisecting the project. It serves as a gentle intermission, tossing us our only tether to Planet Earth and connecting the fadeout of the title track to the buildup of “Arp Angels.” These two songs function as the record’s thematic and sonic climaxes, respectively.
“Library Copy Do Not Remove” throws another life raft, this one to the world of language, in the form of a robotic message. “In the circular library containing everything that ever will be or ever was, there is a pattern encoded into the dome,” it begins, tweaking Borges’s world. “In the holographic chamber, there is a telescope through which one can observe The Boundary, outside of which is a True mirror, that reflects the boundary back on itself in all directions,” it tells us later. Weihl is dealing with heady concepts here, and at this crucial point—the project’s de facto mission statement—they’re too unwieldy, pushing her down cryptic dead-end roads.
“In the course of the performance, I would like to explore the relationship between Chaos and order through the theoretical framework of…‘technomythology,’” Weihl wrote in a directive to Zeiss-Großplanaterium’s visual team. Coined by contemporary thinker LD Deutsch, technomythology is a “hybridized phenomenon” exemplified by the simulation hypothesis, a creation myth for the postmodern world, “not quite science and not quite fiction.” It’s unlikely any artist, even in a heavenly dome with a crack AV team, could encapsulate all of the ideas laid out here—library as universe, simulated realities, Chaos and order, cyborgian big-bang theories—in a single performance. And as for order and chaos, Weihl never fully probes their interplay. The titular ARP 2600 that skitters across “Arp Angles” and the very beginning of “Big Bang” is the album’s closest representation of chaos; the other tracks’ parameters are too neat to evoke disarray.
After “Arp Angles,” the album winds down with the benign jam “Castle in the Moon” and “Supernatural (Planetarium Mix),” the second extended rework of the short intro to 2024’s Quantum Web. It’s light and bubbly, which ultimately weakens the album’s cosmic punch. Library Copy Do Not Remove scratches at something awesome and terrifying, something perhaps life-changing when broadcast in three dimensions from 49 speakers. As an album, it doesn’t quite get there, but it’s a captivating listen nonetheless.
