The cinematic music project of Marc Altink

SystematicStatic

Songs for a restless century.

Orchestral noir, art pop, experimental jazz and literary songwriting. Nocturnal, literate, political and never quite at rest.

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The project

Systematic Static is the cinematic music project of Dutch creator Marc Altink. Working with AI as instrument, studio, orchestra, mirror and distortion machine, Altink makes music that is technologically new but unmistakably human in its concerns: freedom, memory, power, grief, beauty, disillusionment and the stubborn possibility of hope.

Orchestral noir Art pop Experimental jazz Electronic melancholy Literary songwriting
The catalogue

A sequence of imagined films

Each record is its own world: nocturnal, literate, romantic, political, ironic and wounded. Tap any cover to read more and listen.

01Dust album cover Listen & info

Dust

A dystopian record about control, surveillance and the erosion of freedom; a society covered in residue.
02On the Lowdown album cover Listen & info

On the Lowdown

Secretive, urban and shadowed. Conspiracy and late-night confession; the first crack in the wall.
03Silk Road album cover Listen & info

Silk Road

Movement, encounter and the exchange of cultures: trade routes, desert cities and echoes across time.
04Interstate of Discontent album cover Listen & info

Interstate of Discontent

Restless, sharp-edged and politically charged. America caught between myth and menace.
05Märchen album cover Listen & info

Märchen

Into the dark forest: fairy-tale menace and theatre, and how stories can still resist power.
06Nocturnes for a Loud World album cover Listen & info

Nocturnes for a Loud World

The most expansive statement so far: music for inner life under external pressure.

Forthcoming

Forthcoming Scenic Detours, Live in Tulsa, cover

Scenic Detours

Live in Tulsa

Looser and more immediate: side roads, improvisational turns and late-night electricity.

Forthcoming East Coker cover

East Coker

with words of the poem by T.S. Eliot

A literary-orchestral project: meditative, grave and luminous, circling time, ancestry, humility and return.

Music made with machines,
but not for machines.
Systematic Static
About

Songs with shadows

Rather than hiding the role of artificial intelligence, Systematic Static treats it as part of the artistic condition of the present. These are not songs without a maker.

They are songs made by a human being using the strange new machinery of our time: prompted, shaped, selected, rewritten, directed and emotionally grounded by Marc Altink. The project began as a way to make songs out of atmosphere: music that feels as if it had been found in an old hotel room, on a night train, in a forgotten theatre, or in the static between two radio stations.

Over time it has grown into a body of work with its own visual and emotional world. A project for listeners who like arrangements with architecture, political undertow, literary resonance and emotional risk.

For fans of

Cinematic art pop, chamber noir, orchestral melancholy and experimental songwriting.

…and records that sound as if they remember something you have forgotten.

Marc Altink
Creator · writer · director
About the band

A band of outsiders

Systematic Static is written and directed by Marc Altink and inhabited by a cast bound by sound, loss, humour and the shared need to turn darkness into form. Tap a portrait to read their story.

Watch

Featured video

Watch the latest film from Systematic Static.

View the channel on YouTube

More on the official YouTube channel

Listen & follow

Find the static

Stream the catalogue and follow along as the sequence of imagined films continues.

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