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Top or slop? When it comes to the future of pop music, AI is the pink elephant in the record store. Bands created by software like The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust are increasingly populating Spotify and YouTube, while the music industry whines and complains loudly – but has long been working on new, interactive business models. Not good times for indie musicians and small labels. Marc Richter observes this development with concern, but believes in the power of authenticity that is difficult to kill. The man in his mid-fifties started out as a punk in Freiburg and founded the experimental label Dekoder in Hamburg at the end of the 1990s. With the Chicago record label Thrill Jockey, Richter has so far released four albums of abstract apocalyptic electronics as Black To Comm. And as if all that wasn’t enough, he also produces short films.
Under the alias Neue Deutsche Kunst, the very relaxed-looking bearded man has now released an album that is one hundred percent based on AI: music, videos, covers, song titles, simply everything. Richter’s interest in artificial intelligence began in 2022 with image generators like Stable Diffusion: “That was at the end of Covid, you were at home a lot and had time for experiments. Before, it was more of a topic for programmers, with the new software you could do it without any technical knowledge. I actually only started doing it because of the soundtracks to my films. That also runs parallel to my other music.”
For Richter, working with AI is like a scientific experiment
The recently released album “No non-music” is a bulky but not unpleasant chunk of avant-garde that delivers sound collages full of breaks and contrasts. As if Frank Zappa had worked with a folk singer from the seventies or the Sun Ra Arkestra had recorded a margarine commercial. Existing musical styles between jazz, easy listening and pop are not simply imitated, but rather dissected and dissected with relish. The lyrics are pure Dada, one song is called “Siefen slings and bind barrels”. Videos, especially the great “Hugs & Kisses”, look like they were shot with a cast of aliens – and yet still convey a tender intimacy. When the ten-minute short film was shown in February at Criticism Week, a side event of the Berlinale, the jury and audience were very impressed with it. “There are nothing but artificial creatures that appear in ‘Hugs & Kisses’,” says Richter, “but many viewers said afterwards that the film had touched them very much.”
For Richter, working with AI is like a scientific experiment, trying out the possibilities: “There is a lot of curiosity: How far can you take the software, can certain censorship mechanisms be exceeded?” Nevertheless, there is a lot that bothers Richter about AI, which is why he also released “Keine Nichtmusik” on vinyl, “as a counterproduct to what is now being uploaded thousands of times on Spotify and Co.” – the so-called slop. AI music sounds so mediocre because the software works with the average of everything that already exists. Recognizability is the priority, not originality. “If you use English post-punk in the prompt, you often get a voice – sometimes even a female one – that has the same pronunciation and intonation as Mark E. Smith. The Fall singer is probably overrepresented. And anything that is overrepresented when training the models often shows up in the results.”
AI may not catch on in indie rock
When it comes to Black To Comm’s music, however, Richter forgoes the support of artificial intelligence: “I’m more interested in the process. If you work on a piece of music for a month, it’s like solving a puzzle.” The AI cannot provide authentic stories or biographies either, which is why it will establish itself more quickly in the pop sector, but less so in indie rock, where the artist’s personality is much more valued. Nevertheless, times are getting tougher: “An underground scene may soon no longer be represented on Spotify. That doesn’t make much sense to us – there’s hardly any money for it anyway.”
