There is no Auto-Tune on Let the Alpine Play.

Ordinarily this is the sort of fact that arrives freighted with tedious moral instruction. No computers here, buddy. Real musicians. Real music.

Scaled Alps do not particularly fit that story. The record is full of studio manipulation: delays, spatial treatments, doubled voices, pitch shifting, strange reverbs, synths, distorted guitars, voices instructed to travel through the stereo field “like a genie flying around making suggestions.” The objection is not to technology.

What remains conspicuously untreated is the basic proposition that a singer had to sing.

James Quentin Devine's voice shifts across the sixteen-song record without disappearing into a standardized surface. It is sometimes low and intimate, sometimes theatrical, sometimes stretched into vowel sounds, sometimes stacked against itself, sometimes allowed to become unpleasant.

That irregularity matters more now than it might have ten years ago. Perfect surfaces have become cheap. A photograph can be perfected without a camera. A voice can be produced without lungs. A song can be generated without the inconvenience of assembling several people in a room.

A human mistake is becoming metadata. It says: somebody was here.

Scaled Alps recorded Let the Alpine Play as an album rather than an inventory. That difference is central to Devine's own thinking about the current music economy. “Culture isn't being distributed — it's being warehoused,” he says.

A song can exist simultaneously on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp and YouTube and remain culturally motionless. The warehouse contains it. Nobody walks down that aisle.

“We do not make music because we like music that's been made,” Devine says. It is a line calculated to irritate musicians, which may be one reason it works.

A recommendation engine wants to know which previous object predicts the record. A person only needs to decide whether to put it on. For musicians, that is presently the difference between a warehouse and the world.