Presenting Unspecified Enemies – Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback
Single title track out 14 February. Seven-track debut album NMBRS66 arrives 28 March on vinyl and digital.
“It’s the microelectronic sound of a city playing strange light games with itself, evoking bitcrushed desires and floating images, an urban phantasy stored on the broken circuits of an Ensoniq ASR-10.” – Louis Digital
→Listen to and preorder Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback
The origins of Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback trace back to 2006, when Louis Digital launched Diamond Sea, a series of events at London’s ICA that introduced the Unspecified Enemies project and a label called City of Quartz. The vision was to merge the hi-tech electronic textures of contemporary R&B with the sampling and sequencing techniques of pioneers like Anthony Shakir and Soundhack. However, the music was lost in time, and City of Quartz never released a single record.
Yet, the story took an unexpected turn. At one of these events, Spencer from Numbers received a CD containing early recordings. Years later, Numbers encouraged Louis Digital to reconstruct the lost music for an album. The result is a work resurrected from the past and reimagined for the future—retrieved in fragments from a broken Iomega Jazz SCSI Drive.
Expanding on the album’s themes, Louis Digital reflects:
“By the late ’90s the cinematic image of Los Angeles and the sound of Detroit techno had crystallised a new style of living in time and space. In 1997 Mike Davis — the political activist, urbanist, writer and historian of Los Angeles — suggested that it all had “something to do with a microelectronic aesthetic of very transient and decaying states”. It was a romantic vision — one where the city’s glass surfaces reflected a musical desire for futurity not yet dominated by data-driven corporate life. These were strange days to live through. This album evokes the embers of this fibre-optic moment, when urban revolution in an age of digital reification still felt possible.”
The album features full sleeve artwork and a poster designed by Ben Drury. In support of the release, an NTS show titled Romance and Reification will explore the cinematic and electronic music influences behind the album.
Preorder Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback now and listen to the title track everywhere.
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Unspecified Enemies — Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback
Vinyl / Digital • 28 March 2025
Numbers • NMBRS66
1. Mathematics Parc
2. Romance in the Age of Adaptive Feedback – Listen now
3. Glass Skin
4. Nixon/Volcker (Mezzanine Level)
5. Yield Compressor
6. Her Husband is a Lawyer
7. Bonaventure Effect
Written and produced by Louis Digital for Unspecified Enemies
Additional music data generated by CiM (Ann Aimee, Delsin)
Artwork by Ben Drury
Mastered by Beau Thomas at Ten Eight Seven
Numbers 2025 • NMBRS66
