As I touched on in my last post, I've been working on an album as an outlet for my increasing feelings of nostalgia lately.

I'm famous among people such as myself for never really committing to a large musical project outside of mandatory assignments back in Uni and obviously any work I was given for commercials or short films.

But outside of those, I really only ever made music up to the point where I 'got the point', didn't feel like I could learn or get anything else from it, and just stored it away to rot for literal decades. I have a Box.com account still to this day storing random, often brilliant ideas, most of which never to be finished into their potential true form.

I think one part of the problem was always that my music never really followed established rules, so naturally I just had no idea what I was meant to do next. It always felt like uncharted waters.

For all I know, this album will be the same thing. I could very well just get the jist, stop feeling nostalgic, lose direction, and move on to growing plants in my apartment or something.

That being said, I've never taken it this far before and I've even started to explore this tab in my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation - the software one uses to produce music) for the mastering part of the musical journey. A page I've had available to me for years and never spent more than 3 seconds there.

5 tracks, practically ready for release. Pretty cool.

The songs

Well, as you can see, the 5 tracks amount to about 12 minutes. In a concept album kind of way, they tell a kind of story together. Or, perhaps, they paint a picture. Or both. There are many of my influences written into each track (Daft Punk, Jonsi, Linkin Park, English/Irish Folk music, old movie soundtracks and such).

The general theme is of nostalgia but also the destruction of what we used to be, in place of more 'convenience' in the form of sterile, soulless electronics.

The fight against AI

One side-concept of this album is a fight against AI. I started off with the intention to just rapidly whip out an album of Lofi or vaporwave just to get good at the techniques. But when looking for inspiration on youtube I noticed the results now are almost entirely AI slop. And when I say slop I mean perfect renditions of vaporwave and its variations.

The difference is, any given channel is churning out 6 hours of material per video, per day. Every day.

It's super depressing and just completely cheapens the whole vibe of the nostalgia hit I used to get with this music.

So one thing I decided to focus on my music here is ways that it can still be approachable and easy listening, while also having some deliberate elements that an AI would likely never do. Thinks like unusual structure, odd instrumental combinations or unexpected harmonies/chord progressions.

Nothing too egregious or in your face, but enough to be a bit different from the six-hour-per-day-per-channel junk that's now completely dominating the industry. Ironically it means I have to actually listen to these channels a bit to identify what not to do lol.

Urgh.

Oh well. To be honest, if you're a musician so easily replicated then you deserve everything coming to you. The struggle to be different should be a part of the creative journey, not just copy-pasting everything that came before you.