Solange at the Latitude Festival, Southwold, England, July 13, 2018.
(Carla Speight/WireImage/Getty Images)
Solange at the Latitude Festival, Southwold, England, July 13, 2018.
(Carla Speight/WireImage/Getty Images)
MUSICREDEF PICKS
Music Data Wars, The Cultural Force of Solange, How Rami Became Freddie, Kurt Vile, Nile Rodgers...
Matty Karas, curator October 16, 2018
QUOTABLES!
quote of the day
DHM means Deep Hidden Meaning, a song's DNA, its core truth. It's easy to do songs that are child-like and rhyme, but those child-like rhymes have to actually have a secondary, if not a tertiary, meaning to us. I honestly, I really don't know how to do it any other way.
music
rant n' rave
rantnrave://

Do androids hear music when they dream of electric sheep? Is there imaginary music in their android heads? Is there actual music on the android Bluetooth headphones that they wear to sing themselves to sleep? I asked SIRI but she wasn't any help, maybe because she doesn't like the word android. I ask you because APPLE has either bought or hired the founders of ASAII, a music data startup that says its algorithms can "find the next JUSTIN BIEBER, before anyone else." That means before you, you mere human A&R scout, and before you, you mere human playlist programmer, and before you, you mere human writer/curator sending emails into the void every morning. WARNER MUSIC owns one of these things, too, and a lot of smart people think they're the future of A&R—or, at the very least, a big part of the future of A&R. There are 3 million indie artists on streaming platforms and they're uploading upwards of 20,000 tracks a day, which are competing for space on 12,500 "key" playlists on SPOTIFY alone, reports CONRAD WITHEY, whose company, INSTRUMENTAL, is in the same data-mining business as Asaii and Warner's SODATONE. Withey's message is, if you think you can track which tracks are getting traction on those playlists with nothing but your human ears, eyes and nose, you're going to fail. He puts it in somewhat harsher terms. You need help, he says. Robot help, specifically. Meanwhile, in the middle of an interview well worth reading about the continuing struggle of songwriters and publishers to protect their copyrights in the digital sphere, composer JEAN-MICHEL JARRE casually mentions that we're all about to be blindsided by artificial-intelligence-based content creators. Jarre, who's president of the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), says AI is on the verge of being able to "create original scores, original books, original cultural content," and the engineers working on this are currently focusing on "music that is like JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH—an ideal type of mathematic music and melody." So if one AI is creating it and another AI is developing and signing it based on how many kids are listening to it, the one question that's bugging me is, are those going to be actual kids or AI kids? We know AI can create and we know AI can discover. But can AI literally listen? Will AI ever develop, to use a term of art, ears? I find myself thinking that our ears, our actual ones, may be our last line of defense between us and the coming robot invasion. And that we oughta be using them, every chance we get... UMG, following in the footsteps of WMG, makes a deal with MIXCLOUD... CALL ME BY YOUR NAME director LUCA GUADAGNINO is turning BOB DYLAN's BLOOD ON THE TRACKS into a movie... TRANSPARENT, the TV series, will end as a two-hour musical... CHANCE THE RAPPER has scheduled a press conference this morning "regarding the Chicago mayoral election"... Philanthropy is punk... Your local coffee shop may be killing you... RIP TAKEHISA KOSUGI and BILL KRASILOVSKY.

Matty Karas, curator

October 16, 2018
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