
Raised on Candy – Nishuane Park
Apart from bar brawls and black metal, nothing grows out of noise. In fact, everything develops from silence and through it. Nowhere is that more obvious than in good music. In fact, the very best songs, modern or classics, have silence practically ingrained in them. The seconds after every instrument has stopped playing at the very end are part of the composition.
Speaking of music, little information is properly transferred by works of great length. There’s little vitality, usually, in the kinds of pieces of work that require you to take notes, to remember what the main character was doing back in Act I, or that have you studying the context in which the music genre that the song belongs to developed in the first place. Most of the truly great ideas are delivered with immediacy and then fade into silence.
Raised on Candy’s “Nishuane Park” is a song constructed from the fundamental sonic recipe of alternative rock – silence, big whopping noise and then silence again. Nothing else would suit the inherent drama of the piece, certainly not having the singer cry in agony or the guitar play turn to Eddie van Halen-styled solos. “Nishuane Park” sounds like a great big shock. It happened, it was tremendous, and it was gone again.
Alexx Artificial – Ignorance
There’ll be a time when I’ll review AI-produced music and won’t even know it. Don’t worry about me! It won’t leave me red-faced and wishing you to desperately prove my credentials once again. It’ll just leave me worried about the state of music and the artist’s creativity.
But when it happens, and maybe it has already, you’ll know it was good. You’ll know that we reviewed it because an algorithm was better than a human. And, algorithms can’t tell a joke, or tell anyone, convincing that they love them.
Technology, hopefully, advances, and an artist must react for or against it. What they cannot do is be indifferent. There was outrage when synthesisers or drum machines started being used in pop music. Plenty of real musicians claimed that if you cannot play a piece of music yourself live, you shouldn’t use it. Yet, some of the synth-pop albums of the age are bonafide classics.
Alexx Artificial’s “Ignorance” isn’t AI music per se. That is still monstrously lame. It is, on the other hand, using AI, as per the author, to generate ideas. Now, you may be against this, as I often am. But the truth is that “Ignorance” is a colossal sound that is hard to ignore. And interestingly, it mixes sounds that have been popular in rock recently. It’s a mix of math rock, rap and metalcore. Does it sound any less real than many of the rock bands active right now? Maybe, but only just a little. These sorts of sounds will become used ever more often. Do you really think Motley Crue didn’t use it on their recent single? Come on! It won’t change what music is, but clever artists may find innovative ways of using it.