I haven’t blogged extensively on my latest project, as I couldn’t be bothered. Quick precis: I recorded an album on a 4 track tape recorder and now have 19 songs ready to release into the world. Thankfully the mastering of this project was fairly simple, largely because there was very little I could do beyond the original recordings, and it also veers from the ethos of the project. So, the plan is to release it in late January/early February.
It comes at a time where I am a bit disillusioned with a lot of creative endeavours. Like others, I find A.I. and streaming to be a general slush of shit, and beyond an initial technological ‘curio’ (ooh, what would Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’ sound like if it were made in the sixties?) the overwhelming output is meh. I’m not a humanist, a Luddite, or a technophobe, but I simply don’t see the point of listening to shit that has been made by a computer, especially when there is lots that is being made by human beings who are wishing to communicate ideas or perspectives.
I don’t consider A.I. to really be a threat to what I do because I make no money from music and barely anyone listens anyway. I am happy making things for my own benefit and sharing them in case anyone cares to hear it, but I don’t assume it is my privilege that you should listen. However, I am despondent at the general ennui that it creates. More pointless noise. I’ve written before about bots listening to songs; we seem to be in a loop of A.I. writing shit for A.I. to listen to. The philosophical question of Tree/Forest/Sound could be amended to say ‘a tree is cut down in the forest to provide energy for computer to pretend to listen to the sound’. Yeah, I know, it makes no sense.
So I’m not anti or pro A.I., I’m utterly indifferent. I think most people will become indifferent to it (in all its manifestations), but it is the overarching indifference to anything creative that concerns me. In a world with so much pointless shit, it is hard to find the good stuff, and curation becomes more crucial than ever. Ironically, A.I. likes to think it can curate based on your previous listening habits. It’s like McLuhan’s point about driving forwards using the rearview mirror. It knows where you’ve been, and wants to predict where you’ll go. Humans being habitual creatures, it is probably right a lot of the time. But we don’t discover ‘new’ things that way, we discover similar things that way.
My conclusion is that I will stop making music this way for a while. My theory is that if A.I. can create a song in the style of gingerjamesfair then I am clearly becoming predictable. Moving forward, I wish to examine the curveballs, the surprising, the idiosyncratic.
