premiere: patten – In Me

We first raved about patten's groundbreaking and dizzying new record Mirage FM -- "the 1st album fully made from text-to-audio AI samples" -- after hearing the oddly emotionally affecting and nostalgic lead single "Fly", which felt like a disembodied, half-remembered '80s radio hit that had my brain filling in sounds that weren't actually there. patten coined the term "crate digging in latent space" to describe the process of creating the record, and I love how evocative and accurate that is, because Mirage FM does feel kind of like an uncanny valley Donuts. We're psyched to premiere another one from the album today, with the haunting "In Me". The New Yorker recently called the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT "a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web," and thinking in that context, Mirage FM would be an unlabeled bootleg mp3 of the history of recorded pop music, with "In Me" being the record's hallucinatory '90s R&B fever dream. patten tells us about the track's stunning, self-directed, AI-assisted video:

We can use AI not just to replicate the known world and familiar images, but to imagine entirely new ones. What does wide access to these new tools open up for our shared cultural imaginary? What kinds of images are yet to exist & why? What are images for? Who are they for? What can they do? The video was made using hundreds of images generated using Midjourney, carefully stitched together in standard video editing software. I’ve always been struck by films like Chris Marker’s ‘La Jetée’, Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson’ series, Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar’s work as Otolith Group, and the idea that Sci-Fi is a powerful tool for restructuring the present through the lens of the future.

Mirage FM is out April 14th via 555-5555.