I put on “Virtual Island” by Christopher R. Kramer’s project Son Tensei, expecting nothing more than unobtrusive background noise for half an hour, but got hopelessly stuck on “Music I Need.” I got stuck on “Music I Need” longer than I planned: there is a line there sung as if a person is making excuses to himself for the fact that music has become more important to him than people. I became interested in who Christopher R. Kramer was, I googled it – and found out that before me was a master who spent fifteen years shaping the sound of other voices.

Kramer is one half of the production duo Tensei, a Grammy winner for the album J. Ivy, author of a book on “Sustenance Economics” and, most surprisingly of all, an engineer who came up with an architecture that is supposed to make “sin” almost impossible for artificial intelligence. It sounds like the premise of a science fiction story, and Kramer himself doesn’t seem to argue. The logic of the system grew out of his long-standing interest in Buddhism – not the most obvious source for a technical architecture, but after listening to the album, I stopped being surprised by it.

Because “Virtual Island” is the exact same system of checks and balances. Only not for a machine, but for a person who spent too long building tools for other people’s voices and finally decided to play them himself. The album features ten songs without a genre registration: hip-hop neighbors oriental intonations, a crossover – a confession in Japanese. Holding it all together is the voice: Kramer is a natural barytenor without an academic school, and he describes his style as one instrument with a variable aperture – the tonal center is constant, only the degree of opening changes. I liked this description more than the metaphor of the “island” in the title itself: an island implies isolation, while Kramer’s voice, on the contrary, is constantly trying to reach out to someone.

The first tracks on the album are precisely about this attempt. “Music I Need” is a song about a saving addiction to creativity, where the line “You’re all I need to get by” sounds like a declaration of love to a person, but it seems to me it is addressed to music. “Shitappa Life”, almost entirely in Japanese, turns the record sideways: it is the voice of a person from the lowest step of the working hierarchy, whom the system is used to seeing as a function. It can be summarized in one sentence – “I am at the bottom of your hierarchy, but the dreams remain with me” – but it is precisely the calmness with which this is said that works strongest.

Further on, the album goes along a familiar trajectory – from breakup to return. “Never Again” and “Don’t & Won’t” are two sides of the same gesture: first liberation through “never again”, then the line “Every day I create to create”, where creativity ceases to be a means to success and becomes a way of being. “Sayonara” softens the tone – it is a song of a person who is ignored, but who knows how to wait with dignity and a boundary: “I got time”, but not endlessly. A light, danceable song relieves the album’s atmosphere.

Choosing oneself is only the beginning; then it is important to understand where to go. “The Last Call” answers this with the image of returning home: to a person, roots, or one’s own inner center. Here I felt the main caveat to the album: Kramer’s lyrics often balance on the verge of therapeutic aphoristic nature – “home”, “path”, “choice” – and sometimes slip into it. The album concludes with “The Wall” – a song about a dead end and a decision that cannot be delayed. When a personal wall in the second verse becomes a social one – pressure, violence, attempts to knock one off the path – the track acquires the concreteness it needs.

And right here it is worth returning to where Kramer began talking about himself – not as a musician, but as an engineer. His work with AI is built around the boundary beyond which technology begins to cause harm. “Virtual Island” poses a similar question to a human being: where is that line after which waiting becomes self-destruction, closeness – addiction, and a familiar role – a cage? This is very similar to how Kramer formulates the album’s concept: “The choice always stays in the listener’s hands. It’s like a twelve-step program — people assume that’s a substance thing, but it works on anything with an emotional component you want to fix. The first step belongs to the person. You can hand somebody the whole map. They still have to decide to walk.”

This is no accidental coincidence of metaphors. “Virtual Island” is a portrait of distance: between people, between past and future, and most broadly, between us and machines that have imperceptibly stood in the middle of our relationships. A person who plans ethical limitations for algorithms by day, writes songs by night about how not to lose oneself among screens, roles, and masks. A rare coincidence of profession and topic.

In “Virtual Island” Kramer avoids trends; here Japanese neighbors rap, confession with a social statement, lightness with heaviness. Behind this variety stands a recognizable voice and a thought that holds the entire album together: anyone can give you a map, but you have to walk it yourself. After fifteen years behind the soundboard, Kramer, having created the Son Tensei project, finally decided to walk this path honestly. And honesty, it seems, is more important to him right now than any trick.

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