7/10

What happens when an artist takes the idea of the simulation hypothesis and folds it back in on itself? Swiss producer and creative director Giorgio Fazio attempts just that with 'Nothing but Simulation', a conceptual EP and generative digital experiment that treats music as an unstable system in motion.

The opening title-track feels like a program breaking down and rebuilding in real time. Its fractured rhythms and unstable pulses refuse to settle, embodying the sense of living in an environment where the ground beneath us is coded rather than carved. By contrast, the companion piece 'But Something Feels Real' drifts in suspended atmospheres, like a loading screen that never quite resolves, its patience as unnerving as it is hypnotic. Heard together, the two tracks form a dialogue between collapse and suspension, motion and stillness.

But the project doesn’t end in sound. Fazio extends the idea into a generative digital environment, where algorithmically reimagined portraits of the artist shift endlessly with the music. Each visit spawns a new sequence, ensuring no two encounters are identical. The effect is disorienting yet strangely intimate, like staring into an infinite hall of mirrors where identity and perception loop without resolution.

There’s an intellectual weight to the project, but it never slips into a sterile thought experiment. Instead, 'Nothing but Simulation' feels alive and undeniably human. Fazio isn’t just interested in illustrating the hypothesis of simulated reality; he really wants to push us into experiencing its vertigo firsthand.

The result is both conceptual art and raw listening experience, a piece that thrives on unease and curiosity. If the question is how far we can go before the simulation becomes the only truth we know, Giorgio Fazio edges us one step closer to that threshold, and makes the journey oddly beautiful.