ALBUM OF THE MONTH
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Electronic musician, visual artist and lecturer Damien Roach has spent close to two decades experimenting with sound, images and ideas under the alias patten. His latest project, Mirage FM, is perhaps his most experimental yet: it’s the first album to be made entirely from samples produced by generative artificial intelligence.
The samples in question were created with an AI-powered text-to-audio sound generator called Riffusion. Type in any prompt that you can think of – anything from “electric guitar solo” to “serialist
G-funk theme tune for ’70s cop show” – and Riffusion will begin playing a short, looped clip based on the prompt you’ve entered. Though the sounds it produces are garbled, lo-fi and often unrelated to the text input, the results are still fascinating.
After spending several late nights feeding the app with a variety of prompts, he patiently combed through the results to find sounds that caught his ear. These were then arranged, manipulated and stitched together in software to produce Mirage FM. Roach’s brief manifesto for the record reads “crate-digging in latent space”, likening his process to the way a producer like DJ Shadow or Madlib might rifle through crates of vinyl, hunting for samples with which to craft a beat: except Roach’s sample-digging didn’t take place within the four walls of a record shop, but instead the digital field of infinite possibility opened up by AI.
The 21 tracks that make up Mirage FM are captivating, entirely unique and disorienting in their stra
