Illstrap 

Aw, as always you say the sweetest things! Yes, the AI strings sound amazing - and then just a little bit of Hydrasynth and Eurorack tweaking around the edges to sharpen it all up somehow ... I hope you enjoy the rest of the EP. This isn't especially my favourite track or anything, realistically it's just pretty much the shortest and I wanted to put up something without having to spend hours and hours sorting a video out. I don't think there's anything ground-breaking on there exactly - same old shit, pretty much! - but I do remain very happy with the sound and process, and certainly still enjoy doing it. See what you think, at any rate.

Hey Martin, thanks very much. I'm glad to have contributed you to being happy, and in return your reference to the Moomins has given me a pleasant dose of nostalgic happiness. I think the AI's ability to generate tones which carry a genuine kind of emotional weight there is really fascinating, though also possibly a bit terrifying. But that's something that I think also ties into some of my general philosophy about music - something about the line between the organic and the mechanical, between the ethereal/spiritual and the mechanical/inert, and between the living flow of process and the refined precision of programmed music ... that's my pretentious way of looking at things. Still very much creating my stuff, yes - less around on RU-vid at the moment, sure, but that's also to do with my ageing laptop and its diminishing ability to cope with the video processing side of things. But also, I guess, trying to put some more structured stuff together into these last few EPs. I think even fewer people are reached on Spotify than here, but it does feel really nice for me to know any of it connects with anyone anywhere. Stay cool boss.

@@joelnicholson I wish I knew more about AI - normally i throw myself into new technology with abandonment, but I am one of those terrified by it. I like to imagine AI cannot produce something which resonates in us, spiritually, emotionally or even cognitively, but I think I’d be wrong to assume this. I guess we can view music like we view the dual wave/particle nature of light - we can hear it mechanically, understand the rules being applied, and write it down in a way that can reproduce it pretty faithfully. We can understand that Bach is playing his main theme backwards to create variety and make it interesting. But we can also hear it emotionally and spiritually, in a way that affects our behaviour (as a side, dogs seem no different to humans in their response to music). The machines don’t have pineal glands or a hippocampus - they have to make an intelligent guess, from mountains of empirical evidence, how most will perceive the music. A machine would be good at guessing how we both respond to the concept: “Moomin Valley”, so we think it shares our feelings. How would a machine do at guessing how we would both respond to, say, “The Adventures of Gregory Peccarry” by Frank Zappa? I might love it, you may hate it, fair enough. And the machines will know that such music is likely to be divisive - but they don’t have an opinion themselves, not like you or I do. I don’t believe they ever will, personally, but I have my doubts, and I admit that consciousness is a strange and elusive thing. Will an algorithm ever be able to mimic our subtle emotional response to music, taking into consideration, our memories, culture and our knowledge of the history of music, mood at the time, mode of listening etc? Perhaps in 200 years you can buy a hardware-hippocampus from PC World. In the meantime, AI has all the material we’ve collected to absorb and learn from, and I agree, the results are strangely fascinating. I’ll always click on your videos mate, although I suspect the RU-vid algorithm sometimes fails to flag them up, for reasons best known to itself 😉 You’ve inspired me to think about that mechanical/organic thing - I’ve started playing along to Eurorack with acoustic guitar, with a bit of practice it could be interesting. Having a saxophonist, percussionist or violinist, play along to machine music would be really fruitful I reckon. Keep on producin’ and thinking about music mate.