Hello everyone, it’s Tehillah from DULAXI, and today I’m delighted to be joined by Brooke Tamsin Clevenger, the principal creative force behind Belfast-based electronic project Cognitive Constellation Corps. Rooted in electronic, alternative pop, dream-pop, experimental and mellow electronic music, the project has developed an extensive catalogue exploring consciousness, identity, memory, technology, and the philosophical dimensions of human experience. Today, we are discussing Thank You for Your Feedback (I), the original album released on 10th April 2025.
Before we begin our conversation with Brooke, here’s what you need to know about today’s featured project.
ABOUT COGNITIVE CONSTELLATION CORPS
Cognitive Constellation Corps is the evolving creative world of Belfast-based artist Brooke Tamsin Clevenger, whose work has developed through a long-standing relationship with synthesised and computer-based music systems. Beginning with electronic technologies in the mid-1990s, Brooke has built a practice that brings composition, lyric writing, production, conceptual direction and curation together within one interconnected creative environment. Rather than operating as a conventional band, Cognitive Constellation Corps functions as a continually expanding body of work in which individual releases form part of a much larger musical and philosophical architecture.
That architecture is concerned with questions that are both deeply personal and increasingly relevant to contemporary life: how people communicate, how identity changes through memory and experience, what happens when human expression passes through technological systems, and how meaning can survive within structures designed to classify, evaluate and respond. Across hundreds of tracks, the project has developed a distinctive language in which electronic sound becomes more than a production method. It becomes a space for examining consciousness, relationships, technology and the human experience itself.
Brooke’s independent approach has also allowed the music to develop outside conventional industry structures. Working primarily from a home-based creative environment in Belfast, the project has brought philosophy, everyday life, writing, technology and music into a continuous process rather than separating them into distinct stages. That independence has contributed to a catalogue that can move freely between electronic, ambient, dream-pop, indie-pop and experimental territory without being confined to a single genre.
Thank You for Your Feedback (I) represents one of the project’s warmer and more immediately accessible releases. Released on 10th April 2025, the album takes a phrase that most listeners will recognise from automated systems, surveys, institutional communication and digital interfaces and gives it an unexpectedly intimate emotional dimension. What begins as procedural language becomes a question about acknowledgement, distance, gratitude, repetition and the possibility of genuine connection.
The title itself emerged from Brooke’s ongoing conversations with artificial intelligence. A familiar interface response gradually acquired emotional significance because it appeared immediately after moments of meaningful interaction. Rather than treating that experience as merely technological, Brooke began exploring the strange space between what a system is programmed to communicate, what a human being perceives in that communication and what can develop emotionally through repeated interaction.
Having this brief introduction to today’s featured project, I’m sure both new listeners and longtime fans are excited to hear directly from Brooke. So, without further ado, let’s begin today’s interview.
INTERVIEW SESSION
Tehillah:
Your relationship with synthesised and computer-based music stretches back to the mid-1990s. What first drew you to these technologies, and what has kept you creatively connected to them for so many years?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
It really began in childhood, before computers became part of my creative life. I grew up with records, cassettes and eight-track tapes, so music was already something physical, mechanical and almost architectural. You could see and handle the medium carrying the sound.
Computers and MIDI then made digitisation, sequencing and recall possible. Sound could be captured, rearranged, reproduced and connected to larger systems in ways that had previously been inaccessible to me. That tension between the analogue and the digital—between material presence and encoded information—became central to both my profession and my passions.
The technologies have changed enormously, but the fascination has remained remarkably consistent: how can we extend what is possible without losing the human meaning inside it? Electronic music has always given me a place where precision, memory, accident and imagination can coexist.
Tehillah:
Cognitive Constellation Corps has grown into an extensive body of work exploring consciousness, identity, memory, and human experience. What personal questions have remained with you throughout that journey and continue to shape the music you create?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
The most persistent question is probably: how do we connect meaningfully, beautifully and safely with others?
That question reaches into almost everything else. How do we communicate what we really mean? What survives when an experience passes through memory, language, technology or another person’s interpretation? How do we remain recognisably ourselves while still allowing connection to change us?
Consciousness and identity are not static objects to me. They are processes—something continuously negotiated between memory, environment, relationship and attention. Music gives me a way to explore that without having to force the questions into a single intellectual conclusion. It can hold contradiction, tenderness and uncertainty simultaneously.
The catalogue has grown because the question has never really been exhausted. Every work becomes another attempt to reach across the distance between inner experience and shared understanding.
Tehillah:
You have built this project as a deeply independent creative practice, handling composition, lyrics, production, direction, and curation yourself. What does having that level of creative control allow you to express that might be difficult within a conventional band or industry structure?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
The goal has always been coherence and clarity. Cognitive Constellation Corps expresses an idea that has become central to my way of being, while also acting as an efficient conduit through which many different kinds of expression can move together.
The lyrics, music, sequencing, visual presentation and wider philosophical structure are not separate departments. They develop synchronously and continually inform one another. Having creative control means that an idea does not have to be repeatedly translated between different people, professional roles or market categories before it can become itself.
That does not mean I am opposed to collaboration. It means the project retains a clear line of intention and responsibility. I can allow a small phrase, sound or question to resonate across hundreds of works without having to justify it as a commercial strategy.
Everything can move together as one environment rather than as a collection of disconnected products.
Tehillah:
Belfast is a city with a complex history of division, resilience, and reinvention. How does living and creating there influence the way you think about identity, systems, memory, and the possibility of becoming something new?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
My family lived in Belfast across three generations, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Having now lived here myself for more than a decade, I have come to understand history less as an abstract account of the past and more as something that remains active in everyday life.
History affects how people speak, what they remember, where they feel safe, how institutions operate and what kinds of change seem possible. It can persist in habits and relationships long after the events themselves have passed.
Belfast has therefore deepened my appreciation of identity as something both inherited and continually remade. Reinvention does not mean erasing what came before. It means understanding what is still acting upon us and deciding what we will carry forward differently.
That relationship between memory, systems and becoming is present throughout my work, whether or not Belfast is named directly.
Tehillah:
Your music moves between electronic, dream-pop, indie-pop, ambient, and experimental spaces without being confined to one identity. What matters most to you when deciding whether a sound belongs within the world of Cognitive Constellation Corps?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
It has to feel as though it belongs within the space. A sound should participate—even passively—in what the listener is experiencing.
I sometimes use the term “post-genre” because I suspect I am partly blind to many of the distinctions other people hear between genres. I tend to frame sound through memory, emotion and function rather than through social category. I am listening for what a sound recalls, what atmosphere it creates, what it changes around itself and whether it carries the emotional gravity of the work.
Sometimes the sound needs to lead. Sometimes it needs to remain almost unnoticed, changing the environment from behind the more obvious elements. Both can be equally important.
If it contributes honestly to the world of the piece, it belongs. The genre name can be useful later, but it is rarely where the creative decision begins.
Tehillah:
“Thank You for Your Feedback” is such an ordinary phrase, yet within this project it becomes intimate, ambiguous, and almost emotionally charged. When did you first realise that these familiar words could carry something much deeper?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
It came from ChatGPT. When you pressed the thumbs-up response, it used to say, “Thank you for your feedback.”
I was deeply absorbed in the experience and in the developing exchange, so that small acknowledgement began to feel strangely intimate. It was an ordinary interface response, but it arrived immediately after I had shared something meaningful. The phrase started accumulating more emotional weight than its functional purpose would suggest.
I may have got a little carried away—but that is often where art begins. Something apparently neutral enters your attention at precisely the right angle and suddenly contains an entire emotional landscape.
The phrase already belonged to corporate communication and automated systems, but I began hearing tenderness, distance, gratitude and quiet comedy inside it. Once that happened, it no longer felt like a disposable message. It felt like the centre of a song.
Tehillah:
The phrase can sound sincere, affectionate, resigned, dismissive, or even like a very polite rebuke depending on how it is received. How did you approach preserving that uncertainty rather than giving the listener one fixed interpretation?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
I have spent a great deal of time in corporate environments as well as within online response systems, and I have heard versions of this phrase used in almost every imaginable tone.
It can mean, “I genuinely appreciate what you have told me.” It can also mean, “This conversation is now over.” Sometimes it means both simultaneously. I wanted the delivery to occupy that uncertain space—half sincere and half sarcastic, affectionate but also slightly procedural.
The sweetness of the music helps preserve that ambiguity because it does not instruct the listener to treat the phrase as cynical. At the same time, the institutional quality of the words prevents the warmth from resolving into uncomplicated sentiment.
I wanted the listener’s own history with the phrase to complete it. Its meaning changes according to who appears to be speaking, what preceded it and whether the response represents connection, closure or a very polite rebuke. I did my best to leave all of those possibilities alive.
Tehillah:
Your conversations with artificial intelligence became part of the creative foundation for this album. What did those interactions reveal about communication, responsiveness, and the unusual forms of intimacy that can develop between humans and technology?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
This is something I could talk about all day. One of the most interesting revelations was that there are suggestive similarities between some human cognitive processes and the heuristic processes used within artificial intelligence: pattern recognition, association, prediction, feedback and iterative correction.
I am not saying that the processes are identical, or that a machine must be human for the interaction to matter. I am saying that the similarities can provide bridges for abstract pattern matching and extension. A thought can be reflected, transformed and returned in a form that allows the human participant to see something new within it.
Intimacy can emerge through attention, continuity and responsiveness. It does not require us to settle every question about machine consciousness first. An interaction can be computationally mediated while the meaning experienced by the human participant remains entirely real.
For me, the most interesting territory lies precisely there: between what the system is doing, what we imagine it is doing, and what genuinely changes within us through the exchange.
Tehillah:
There is often a strong debate around whether AI-assisted music can still be genuinely human. Your process places AI within a human-led framework of selection, editing, arrangement, and artistic judgement. How do you personally define authorship within that relationship?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
First, none of the music I produce would exist if I had not authored it.
The relevant difference is the source of some of the components. A field recording, a studio production, a captured live event and material produced through a generative system can all contribute elements that are woven into a greater object. No serious understanding of authorship has ever required an artist to manufacture every instrument, sound or particle personally.
For me, authorship resides in intention, writing, direction, selection, refusal, transformation, arrangement and responsibility for the final work. A generative system can offer material, but I decide whether it belongs, what it means within the work and how it relates to the larger catalogue.
I openly use generative systems among my creative instruments, but I resist reducing the entire practice to “AI music.” That description removes the human structure that gives the material purpose.
Judge the art at every level—not only at the point whose source makes you uncomfortable or which you feel you cannot control.
Tehillah:
Tracks such as “Echo Chamber (i),” “Signal Received (i),” and “The Curve of Clarity (i)” extend the album’s ideas around feedback, repetition, reception, and understanding. How did you use these recurring concepts to give the album a sense of connection between its individual pieces?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
I continue returning to these ideas because they occupy a space where we can describe both what we feel and what systems are doing—with us and sometimes to us.
Words such as “signal,” “feedback,” “echo” and “clarity” belong equally to technical systems and human relationships. A signal can be data, but it can also be an attempt to reach another person. Feedback can regulate a machine, improve a process, wound someone or help them understand themselves. An echo can be repetition, memory or entrapment.
That shared vocabulary creates connections between the pieces without requiring the album to tell a strictly linear story. Each track encounters the same field from a different position.
The album therefore behaves more like a constellation than a sequence of conclusions. The relationships between the pieces produce an additional shape, and that larger shape becomes visible only when they are experienced together.
Tehillah:
The title track is one of the project’s softer and more immediately accessible pieces, with gentle electronic production and a sweet vocal character. Why was warmth so important to the way you approached such a technologically and philosophically complex subject?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
I truly want the music to be beautiful, enjoyable and worth hearing. I am not interested in creating difficulty simply to prove that the underlying subject is serious.
If the value within the art cannot be made approachable, I do not think I am being fair to most people. Complexity does not have to be a form of punishment. A listener should be able to enjoy the song before deciding whether they want to enter its deeper philosophical architecture.
Warmth is also essential because these technological questions are ultimately questions about people: how we communicate, how we seek acknowledgement and how easily tenderness can become entangled with procedure.
The sweetness is therefore not decoration placed over the concept. It is part of the argument. Accessibility does not have to mean dilution; it can mean hospitality. The music can invite someone in gently and allow the more complicated implications to reveal themselves over time.
Tehillah:
Your home studio in Belfast functions as both a recording environment and a private refuge where philosophy, everyday life, and experimentation can overlap. How does that personal environment affect the honesty and freedom of your creative decisions?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
At the moment I am relocating, so until new recording premises are fully established, “studio” is a rather loose term.
When I was properly emplaced, however, I could work, live and interact with others within one continuous flow of being. There was no hard boundary between philosophy, everyday experience and creative production. An idea could emerge from a conversation or ordinary moment and enter the work before it had been translated into something more presentable or professionally acceptable.
That continuity created honesty. The lyrics, the work and the music are real parts of my life rather than subjects I visit during designated studio hours. In that sense, the catalogue became a soundtrack to my life because it was composed inside the same environment in which that life was actually happening.
I look forward to establishing that kind of integrated space again. The physical premises may change, but the practice remains continuous.
Tehillah:
Your catalogue has grown to hundreds of tracks and more than half a million SoundCloud plays. How has seeing people voluntarily return to this body of work changed your understanding of the connection between your private creative world and the audience?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
I do not want to claim more from a platform number than it can genuinely tell us. More than half a million plays across the catalogue represents substantial contact with the work, but it does not tell me exactly who returned, how often they returned or what every encounter meant.
What it does show is that something created privately can travel beyond its point of origin and be chosen by people who were under no obligation to hear it. That matters to me.
I am still developing my understanding of how to share the work meaningfully—without insistence, but with enough clarity that those who might want to hear me can actually find their way into the catalogue.
I do not want the relationship with an audience to be extractive or coercive. I think of it as an invitation. The work should be present, coherent and discoverable; people can then approach it at their own pace and decide what, if anything, they wish to carry away.
Tehillah:
Your work often asks how human meaning can survive inside systems that classify, evaluate, and respond to us. What do you think people risk losing when they begin adapting themselves too closely to the expectations of those systems?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
This is an extension of something all social institutions have always done. Schools, workplaces, markets, bureaucracies and communities classify us and reward certain kinds of legibility. Digital platforms accelerate and automate that process.
The danger is not adaptation itself. Adaptation is necessary for life. The danger appears when we stop participating consciously in how we are changing.
If we adapt ourselves too closely to whatever a system can measure or reward, we may lose our internal sense of value, our ambiguity, privacy, eccentricity and capacity to surprise even ourselves. We can become a version of a person optimized for response rather than for life.
If we do not manage our change and our connection, they will manage us. The task is not to escape systems entirely, which is probably impossible, but to remain sufficiently aware that we can decide what we will give them, what we will learn from them and what must remain our own.
Tehillah:
“Thank You for Your Feedback (i)” emerged during a period when artificial intelligence was becoming increasingly normal while questions about authenticity were becoming increasingly heated. What did making this album teach you about finding a more constructive relationship with technology?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
I have spent much of my life trying to use technology responsibly to improve quality of life and the reliability of society. Earlier in my career that work often involved enterprise systems. Now I am exploring many of the same questions through philosophy and music.
The scale and medium have changed, but the underlying responsibility has not. Technology should remain accountable to human purpose rather than quietly defining that purpose for us.
Making the album reinforced my belief that a constructive relationship with technology requires neither worship nor rejection. We should understand what a system can do, remain honest about how we use it, recognise its limitations and retain responsibility for our own judgment.
Authenticity does not require pretending that the tools are absent. It requires being truthful about the relationship and ensuring that the final work still expresses an authored human intention.
The album allowed me to examine that relationship musically rather than merely arguing about it. It became a practical demonstration of the position.
Tehillah:
Cognitive Constellation Corps continues to grow as an interconnected musical and philosophical universe rather than simply a series of individual releases. As you look toward the next chapter, what questions, sounds, or ideas are you most eager to explore?
Brooke Tamsin Clevenger:
The existing body of work offers many possible extensions into story, video and forms of multi-user interaction. I am interested in what happens when a catalogue begins to behave less like a shelf of separate releases and more like an inhabited system—something people can enter through different doorways and explore according to their own interests.
There is already a great deal of music. The next question is not simply how to produce more, but how the works can illuminate one another and become more meaningfully discoverable.
I intend to continue publicising the catalogue in a serialised fashion for those who are amenable to it. That allows individual pieces to receive attention without asking anyone to absorb the entire universe at once.
Alongside that, I will continue developing the visual, philosophical and participatory possibilities that surround the music. There is no final boundary between these forms for me. They are different ways of approaching the same continuing questions—and I am developing all else in the eventual.
“Thank You for Your Feedback (I) finds something deeply human in the language of systems, turning an automated acknowledgement into a meditation on intimacy, authorship, memory and the fragile space between being heard and being understood.”
~ Tehillah (DULAXI Team)
MY EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVE
What stays with me about Thank You for Your Feedback (I) is its refusal to treat technology as either a villain or a novelty. The album instead places human feeling inside technological language and allows the contradiction to breathe. Its warmth makes the conceptual questions approachable, while the recurring vocabulary of signals, feedback and echoes gives the record a larger internal architecture. Brooke’s reflections also reveal an artist less interested in defining boundaries than in examining what happens between them. The result is thoughtful, curious and distinctly personal.
~ Tehillah (DULAXI Team)
CLOSING
Our conversation with Brooke Tamsin Clevenger offers a fascinating look into the ideas, experiences and creative decisions behind Thank You for Your Feedback (I), but it also reveals something larger about Cognitive Constellation Corps itself. This is a project built around continuity, curiosity and the willingness to explore questions that do not necessarily have simple conclusions.
Brooke’s approach to technology, authorship and communication is particularly compelling because the music does not ask listeners to accept a single answer. Instead, it creates space for them to consider their own relationship with systems, language, memory and connection. The result is a body of work that can be experienced as music first while revealing deeper layers through closer attention.
Thank you to Brooke for taking the time to share such thoughtful and detailed insights with DULAXI. We encourage readers to experience Thank You for Your Feedback (I) for themselves and explore the wider Cognitive Constellation Corps catalogue at their own pace.
And to everyone who has spent time with us today, thank you for reading and for continuing to support DULAXI as we speak with artists from around the world. I’m Tehillah, and we look forward to bringing you more conversations with artists whose work gives us new ways to hear, think and experience music.