YACHT Shatter Pattern William Fields $20 Early Bird $25 Advance All
sales final YACHT closes out Algorithmic Art Assembly with a live
performance following their latest album CHAIN TRIPPING. CHAIN
TRIPPING is the band’s seventh album and third with DFA Records.
Recorded between the band’s home in Los Angeles and Marfa, TX, the
ten-song collection marks a shift in the group’s relationship with
technology and their art. Rather than trying to comment on existing
platforms from within their own filter bubble, the band stripped their
process down and rebuilt it using a technology entirely new to
them—Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, machine
learning. The result is an album that merges invention and intimacy,
“challenging” technology from code to content. In order to compose
CHAIN TRIPPING, YACHT needed to invent their own AI songwriting
process. It was a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to
discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers
and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82
songs using machine learning tools. “We listened to raw audio
samples of a neural network trying to sing in Claire’s voice,”
says Bechtolt. “We reduced our entire compositional output to MIDI
data. We flattened our lyrics into text files, into words among
millions that would be fed to a weird custom algorithm. We talked to
pioneers of algorithmic composition, and to startup founders who
promised us they could reproduce our sound in two hours or less.”
Eventually they created their own working method, an
uncharacteristically low-tech approach to a high-tech possibility,
painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense
together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated
music and lyrics, themselves emerging from models created with the
help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI.
Armed with these custom and custom-tweaked machine learning models,
YACHT was able to generate massive volumes of lyrical and melodic
information—much of which was “hiding in-between” melodies in
their our own back catalogue—which they then approached as source
material, using a process more influenced by analog cut-up writing
techniques than anything explicitly technological.
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30/03/2020 Last update