Shapes in the Mirror – MONO
You might be as concerned about the rise of AI music as you’re with the result of the Tours de France. It’s likely just a thing that you’re vaguely aware of, but not concerned enough with to add to your list of grave concerns.
And, while I can’t blame you, nor want to disturb your calm, I’d like to tell you that certain music genres have been more affected by this rise of the robots than others. The most impacted, to my mind, have been the faceless genres.
Electronic music, especially EDM, was the first casualty owing to the fact that a repetitive 30-minute drum loop can, as it turns out, be produced by an algorithm.
Commercial pop has suffered, owing largely to the fact that pop fans are relatively easily pleased by a good chorus regardless of its origins.
But it’s modern metal that has, shockingly, taken a beating as well. Over-produced, highly-polished, and technically proficient hard-rocking music is being targeted by the machines.
This is all a long segue way into saying that bands like Germany’s Shapes in the Mirror need your help more than ever. They deserve it as well. There’s skill and pathos involved in the making of the single mono, a track that moves from pummeled verses where every single instrument sounds like a piece of percussion to the 2000s-styled, emotional chorus. But it’s meant to be real, and designed to thrill. And the truth is yours, if you want it.
Zeit Driver – Soundtrack of Today
Rock music, I was told by my teachers as a youngster, was a silly distraction, a kind of trick played on us by long-haired weirdos decked in leather jackets and boots. Yet, as I recall, those same teachers, when attempting to impart their wisdom, would always quote the news as if reading from some Bible, or complain to us about how hard their lives were.
With this in mind, rock music, or whatever you can find to substitute it, is a wonderful distraction and if used properly a tool against mind-control. Yes, you’ve heard me. It can be that important when your very sanity and decision-making are at stake. This, by the sound of it, is what Zeit Driver has found out, and the German musicians are taking the appropriate steps.
“Turn off the Devil’s sound,” screamed Zach de la Rocha a few decades ago, and the battle’s remained the same. On the sludgy, thick riff-driven “Soundtrack of Today,” Zeit Driver contemplate all of the sounds meant to slip inside your ear canal and, eventually, control your brain. They’ve only one way to fight it, and it involves loud electric guitars meant to drown them out. It’s the best distraction that there is.
