I'd maybe agree with you if this was organic music played by real people, but it's all electronic, so you can guarantee someone entered 13/8 into their sequencer's time signature.
The history of [digital] electronics does not fit with our modern neat notions of how things exactly must be. I've been there, seen the extraordinary contortions taken to make things work at all on equipment we'd consider completely incapable thereof; explaining why things worked out a particular way requires explaining how bad things were (relative to our norm) and, given such atrocious platforms, what mentally painful rationalizations gave rise to what needed doing - and the strange artifacts which accompanied those achievements.
The composer didn't "enter 13/8 into the sequencer's time signature." He recorded a sequence, then hit "repeat" at an inopportune moment which, serendipitously, led to the effect he was looking for. We take for granted setting time signatures as an absolute act framing the subsequent content inserted therein; wasn't so neat & tidy back then.
Because we take certain automatic framing processes for granted (to a near-exestential degree), we cannot create such art without great deliberative effort, and have great difficulty understanding why such art happened when it did.
As the article clearly says, the piece was never explicitly composed for any specific time signature; the signature it ended up with was almost an accident.
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I'd maybe agree with you if this was organic music played by real people, but it's all electronic, so you can guarantee someone entered 13/8 into their sequencer's time signature.
The history of [digital] electronics does not fit with our modern neat notions of how things exactly must be. I've been there, seen the extraordinary contortions taken to make things work at all on equipment we'd consider completely incapable thereof; explaining why things worked out a particular way requires explaining how bad things were (relative to our norm) and, given such atrocious platforms, what mentally painful rationalizations gave rise to what needed doing - and the strange artifacts which accompanied those achievements.
The composer didn't "enter 13/8 into the sequencer's time signature." He recorded a sequence, then hit "repeat" at an inopportune moment which, serendipitously, led to the effect he was looking for. We take for granted setting time signatures as an absolute act framing the subsequent content inserted therein; wasn't so neat & tidy back then.
Because we take certain automatic framing processes for granted (to a near-exestential degree), we cannot create such art without great deliberative effort, and have great difficulty understanding why such art happened when it did.
As the article clearly says, the piece was never explicitly composed for any specific time signature; the signature it ended up with was almost an accident.