Written in response to Jesse Draxler's "Tongue of Angels", by Luca Vergano, strategic designer of complex systems for Fortune 500 companies.

In the digital platform world there are horizontal sequences, no timeline, no history. There is only a shifting network of nodes whose tenuous connections are defined by who’s tracing them, in a sort of quantum state. The algorithms continuously build on top of what has been just produced, in a data quagmire we can only influence through consumption.

So how can we regain cultural agency?

This is a fundamental question we are all facing - artists, scientists, designers, everyone.
This is the question Jesse Draxler’s new album Tongue of Angels is trying to answer by applying digital systems architecture to a human network.

In this system Draxler is the algorithm, but instead of limiting agency, he encourages it, in a
metaphorical yet tangible act of resistance against disintermediation. If Brian Eno’s generative work uses rule-based systems to let code produce autonomous outcomes, Tongue of Angels operates as a parallel system in which agency is social rather than computational.

Authorship is distributed but structured: Draxler defines the dataset and the relational architecture; the artists generate outcomes; then the system is selectively redirected.

But despite this distributed authorship, Tongue of Angels is not a compilation. It is an ecosystem, an experiment in what happens when you give many minds the same raw matter and then start to bend the lines between them.

The result is an 18-track album that is cohesive yet genreless, an engineered field of interactions rather than a sequence of isolated songs.

The result is an example of how technology does not need to limit us by being a factual engine. It can inspire us by providing new conceptual maps of behaviors.

This is the answer Jesse Draxler’s Tongue of Angels offers to the question of agency.

-Luca Vergano, New York, NY Spring 2026