the internet is getting boring
I can see through the veil of perception...
HI
I’m in your inbox today to tell you about “Veil” — a new song of mine that just hit streaming. It’s a cover of a song from my friend’s dream pop project PYNKIE’s truly beautiful 2023 album Songies. I related to the few lyrics the second I heard them — I too miss the promise of the internet, of open source information bouncing back and forth around the world, of new websites like beautiful destinations to visit, of countless recommendations from new friends you've never met. Corporations ruined that like they've ruined so much else. And unless you’ve been residing under a boulder, you may know that they’re now colluding with their besties the “United States” government to ban the most entertaining and generally fun social media app. What else is new!
My version of “Veil” started life as a remix; my attempt to channel my initial vision of the internet as a place to take inspiration from others and sample it, make it your own, radically transform it. I’ve recently been thinking about what massively accessible AI tools will do to music, and I wanted to use this track as a way to demonstrate messy, imperfect ‘AI-proof’ production. After I reharmonized the melody, I decorated and built out the track using distorted voice memos, a bunch of different synthesizers both analog and digital, and weird noises from when my power was being weird and surging and my landlord didn’t fix it for like a month.
Similar to the internet itself, I don’t think AI is necessarily bad, but when combined with the capitalist need to cannibalize anything it thinks will make money, the trend seems to be towards boring, rote parodies of genre rather than the lateral thinking and creativity that goes into Human Art. I’d rather listen to a shitty Garageband demo by somebody creative than a Perfect-Sounding AI Song. Why can’t AI just like, do our taxes or something?
Anyway, thanks for reading all of that, or not. I hope you enjoy the song. For anyone in the Los Angeles area, we’ll be performing it at our upcoming show on Jan 26th at Genghis Cohen in Fairfax. If you can, please buy tickets beforehand to prove we should be booked on other future shows. And while you’re spending some money, I implore you to donate to imprisoned firefighters’ who have been risking their lives for pennies an hour this last week.
till next time <3
Kabir