Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

it is elven, not zandali

" her album basically vanished without trace, it seems"

well it's hard to release an album in the middle of a pandemic plus she couldn't do much promotion for it considering she was pregnant. It's a good album.

it didn't really vanish any more than almost all albums do these days

I hear more people still mention her new album than I do that Poppy album that came out early this year.

actually, fiona came through and reminded everyone what an actual good album sounds like.

both good albums but v different imo except both made by a woman

the songs from last year I liked way better than anything off the album :(

nice grammar there

i like "darkseid"

The album absolutely still “slaps” (sorry), and sounds particular great when driving around the streets in this moment...

her best album imo

Can you actually imagine doing this ding dong performance art fuck shit at a time like this?

https://www.popbuzz.com/music/news/grimes-selling-soul-10-million-art-show/

pic.twitter.com/R27Nn88l0Q

— PopBuzz (@popbuzz) June 2, 2020

You can buy a piece of Grimes’ soul for $10million 😳https://t.co/cVMc4gwUGt pic.twitter.com/j9FrF4gbPc

— PopBuzz (@popbuzz) June 1, 2020

if we could please avoid a piece with elon in a tub filled with baked beans

buying her soul documents and donating them for display at the tampa hard rock cafe who publicly turns it down would be a pretty good own, though

afaict they posted the blackout at 11pm (probably midnight or after their time) after posting dumb ephemera all day

some site out there has to be auto-posting and didn't turn off, but they seem in the clear

"delete forever": the song of the year, by the artist we deserve

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/style/self-care/grimes-AI-baby-sleep.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

some interesting stuff here

"I think A.I. is great. I just feel like, creatively, I think A.I. can replace humans. ... She spoke with The New York Times on a Zoom call alongside the team behind Endel, an app that says it uses artificial intelligence to generate ever-changing soundscapes to fit different moods. It has received funding from companies including True Ventures, an investment firm that bankrolled the Grimes collaboration."

“If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art.” It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, “like, David Bowie times a million,” she said. “An artist who’s just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously."

maybe the second half of david bowie's Low times a million

but not even that, really

*audio clip of HAL-9000 singing "Daisy"*

“If you feed an A.I. all the greatest artists ever, it will probably be able to auto generate really creative, really evocative art.” It may even be able to create superhumanly talented artists, “like, David Bowie times a million,” she said. “An artist who’s just super charismatic and amazing and fun, and just makes the best music, and can make 1,000 songs a day, and just do 1,000 interviews a day, simultaneously."

― Vapor waif (uptown churl), Wednesday, October 28, 2020 4:03 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is dumb. even if possible, that level of production would be overwhelming and human listeners wouldn't get anything out of it. if shakespeare wrote 10,000 plays just as good as hamlet no one would bother trying to wrap their head around his oeuvre. same if bowie made 10,000 Lows

this shit will be used in spas and hair salons. at least grimes' tech-hype profits won't get anyone's head removed by a truck.

i know she is all jazzed up about robots replacing humans but i just think it's fundamentally dumb. if a.i. really replaces us, and isn't just a sped-up imitation, they would make their own forms of art that wouldn't be comprehensible to humans because it would emerge from and reflect the umwelt of a.i.

brad otm about the single to the album being good though, i guess.

I think experiencing art is about connecting with something essentially human. Listening to AI music would be like watching robots play football or something.

exactly. even grimes' attempt to transcend and escape her humanity, or embodiedness, you know, it's a human impulse. this is why she can make art about it that people can connect with.

xp there will be a new game, "Pop Star Manager"

this is dumb. even if possible, that level of production would be overwhelming and human listeners wouldn't get anything out of it. if shakespeare wrote 10,000 plays just as good as hamlet no one would bother trying to wrap their head around his oeuvre. same if bowie made 10,000 Lows

by this logic, shouldn’t we try to minimize the number of great works of art and music, in order to free us up from the bother of trying to wrap our heads around too many of them?

exactly. even grimes' attempt to transcend and escape her humanity, or embodiedness, you know, it's a human impulse. this is why she can make art about it that people can connect with.

― treeship., Wednesday, October 28, 2020 5:14 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is Turing testable, I’d be willing to put money on you failing it. tbh AI have probably already collaborated on songs you like

if a.i. really replaces us, and isn't just a sped-up imitation, they would make their own forms of art that wouldn't be comprehensible to humans because it would emerge from and reflect the umwelt of a.i.

without knowing what umlaut means... idk, this sounds potentially pretty fresh? humans make landfills worth of music that presumably results from their umwelt, and sucks

those op-eds written by gpt-3 are as good as like the 99th percentile in any canadian newspaper

the sponsored content i write for building material companies is irreplaceable though, right?

umwelt just means lifeworld, like how the world presents itself to the senses of a specific organism, "what it's like to be a bat" or whatever.

my contention is that, even if a.i. makes stuff that can't pass a turing test, they are still just imitating forms and conventions developed by people. the real a.i. art would be made for and by a.i.

also, the a.i. generated op-eds i've read have seemed bizarre and meandering. do you have a good one?

canadian newspaper op-eds are also terrible so it’s a low bar

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

even if a.i. makes stuff that can't pass a turing test, they are still just imitating forms and conventions developed by people. the real a.i. art would be made for and by a.i.

im saying the art by and for AIs could be cool

most art by and for humans is awful, but a small minority hits the umwelt’s g-spot; maybe some art by ai for humans will be also be like that, maybe not. imo a close collaboration between human and ai will be more the thing. like you say “hey ai, play 10 different guitar licks over this bassline that sound kinda like a mix between Ron Asheton and Jimmy Paige” and then among the 10 you pick one you like and change it a bit

cool now she stole Holly Herdon's thing

But Holly Herndon is actually building it. Grimes is merely "talking" about it. She is very much the Steve Jobs to Holly Herndon's Wozniak in this regard. Unless she's getting her hands dirty and coding with the Endel team or a very hands on product management type role, but I'm guessing she's playing more of a consultant role and contributing a public face to help market it.

Also, Herndon's incorporation of AI and the ritual around training it into her recent live sets goes far beyond anything Grimes has ever done from a performance or even conceptual standpoint.

Lol @ grimes haters like “she doesn’t even have a phd in computer music!”

i don’t think holly herndon has dibs on this; it prob won’t prove to be just a gimmick. (also her AI album left me cold). more than one musician will collaborate with AI; as they get better it’ll start to become more common

Lmao sure as if this isn’t the rich person version of blowing weed smoke in your pet’s face and insisting “they love it” https://t.co/rqE5kHOVXP

— Alex®️ (@sexymollusk) October 28, 2020

Herndon has not, AFAIK, gone around advocating for machines to actually replace human endeavor, let's keep her out of this imho

yeah sorry she doesn't deserve that

what’s “human endeavour”?

doin things

You don’t have to be “rich” to show your kid Apocalypse Now; you just need a VCR.

I’m sure AI created music will reach a point where at least one out of 10 of the biggest hits of the year is generated by computer algorithms but it doesn’t work for every genre and there’s many factors to consider besides “it sounds good”, most chart hits are personality-driven. I don’t think if THXF-2543 released some crap like “Toosie Slide” it would receive the amount of attention than if someone like Drake released it.

Mostly I think it will end up helping human musicians get out of a writers block, inspiring them to try some arrangement or progression to a song they hadn’t considered.

Even when I’m playing extremely procedural games like Galaga I still feel like I’m having an artistic experience created by a programmer

I think the future she’s suggesting would be the same as owning an iPhone— different songs (different apps) but still essentially a conversation with the device, the programming, the designer

I would very much like to see a Data-style cellist face off against the greatest we humans have to offer

I can bet my house - and I swear it’s a beautiful house - that I’ll die before any AI creates an album like say this year’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple or idk Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On or even an album like Art Angels or Visions to stay in topic.

thinking about those bumper stickers that said "drum machines have no soul" here

i guess this makes me pretty much a to-be-forgotten hayseed but shucks, what if making music and art wasn't so impossible bc noone has the time. maybe automate the other stuff and let us make the art? lol that's the kind of thinking that gets me sent to a crappy off world colony i know

more seriously can art be optimized in this way? i'd say its conceivable but not likely