Repetition, Replication, Ruins

Repetition, Replication, Ruins begins with Louis Andriessen’s M is for Man, Music, Mozart. I use its formal design as a framework, filling it with my own music and sampled material drawn from AI-generated songs, social media and videogames. I’m interested in what happens when something is copied but its contents change: how much of the original survives, and at what point the copy becomes something else.

I. The Binary Song

The first movement, The Binary Song, follows the structure of Andriessen’s first movement. I took an AI-generated R&B a cappella recording, cut it into syllables, and pitch-shifted and time-stretched them to fit the melody of the Alphabet Song. The voice retains traces of its original phrasing and expression, but is made to sing a tune that has nothing to do with the song it came from. Around it, I place royalty-free sounds used in social media and video game sound effects: short fragments designed to catch attention, mark a transition or give a moment an emotional cue. Taken out of that setting, these familiar sounds become part of the musical material. The movement brings together a tune associated with learning, a synthetic voice imitating human expression, and the sounds through which we increasingly encounter both music and language.

II. Diamond Lake

The second movement, Diamond Lake, takes its inspiration from the lake theme in Pokémon Diamond and draws on tropes from anime music: parallel chord progressions and beautiful-sounding chords whose movement is non-functional, rather than directed towards a conventional harmonic resolution. I use recordings of military tanks, aeroplanes, ammunition and weapons as percussion, and harmonise military sounds into chords. These sounds become part of the attractive musical surface, even as their sources suggest something much more disturbing.

The movement is about society ignoring what is happening in the world, and my interest in the rise of city pop and other optimistic musics as a form of escapism. A voice repeats “I’m not thinking” over and over again. The music offers somewhere pleasant to retreat, while the sounds of what is being avoided are already embedded within it.

III.

The third movement samples an AI-generated McDonald’s advert. I chop the song into individual beats and pitch-shift each one down in microtonal steps. The cheerful advertising music gradually loses its tuning, sounding like a melting circus show.