Bleep

The years-long Zeitgeist of AI doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon, so why not step into it head first? For his first album in three years, patten breaks new ground in a time of fervent technological innovation, presenting an album “made entirely from text-to-audio AI-generated sound sources”. Asking very necessary questions about the power of AI and how our ideas of popular music are filtered into it, Mirage FM is a series of hazy vignettes jumping from UK garage to glitchy soul loops to spectral ambience.

Like vinyl or tape, there’s a surface noise to AI sounds that gives Mirage FM its shimmery, nocturnal character. Everything is blurred just so slightly at the edges, beats bleed out of their usual microsecond frames, vocals and melodies lack clarity like low bitrate internet rips, yet the bass remains intact and the rhythms both driving and confounding. The house beat of ‘Forever’ morphs like a Lovecraftian creature, infused with dense reverb throws swallowing smoke, while ‘Walk With U’ is a dizzying display of hypnagogic drill with syllables just out of reach, lost to the airwaves.

Amidst wonky, moody beats that repeatedly implode is ‘In Me’ with a shredded two step rhythm, washed out and slippery as its vague vocal samples are transmitted through portals. A vocal sound is flipped into a swelling string on ‘Like Rain’, having the album’s most discernible lyrics if any can be interpreted at all. (“Like rain, she’d love to make me lonelier”, perhaps?) ‘Trust’ starts off metallic and abstract before finding a hip hop groove with a slamming bassline, while ‘Green & Pink’ is arguably the most “future” that garage can get.

patten likely has a world first with Mirage FM, and his immensely creative use of text-to-audio AI will surely be a benchmark of progress for both tech and music.