I cannot claim to have worried too much about the impact AI might have on my musical world. I trust my own ears to recognize the authenticity in older music and I would argue my tastes in newer releases tend to lead me towards the more organic sounds played by legitimate musicians and even in the realms of more electronic sounds, there is usually a human element; a creative hand controlling the technology that will draw me in. I believe that in the same way anyone paying a modicum of attention could spot a fake or a poor photocopy of a hit on one of those tacky seventies cash-in Top Of The Pops albums, not to mention a synthesized eighties original artist re-recording of a sixties hit (and there are far too many of them floating about) a mile off, so could I immediately identify a piece of music that has been made with AI.

But I was wrong. Late last year I found a couple of tracks by an artist that ended up featuring in my monthly playlists. I liked them for their retro soul sound and the attention-grabbing precision of the lyrical observations. The cover art of these releases came with an all-too authentic looking vintage vinyl presentation, looking for all the world like cleverly detailed throwbacks even right down to the fonts and the way the covers adopted that seventies trope of visually representing the title with the sleeve image. The name of the band was Almost Vinyl and I featured them twice, not being too put off by the total lack of any biographical information about the artist, I just assumed this was probably some enigmatic collective managing to maintain an air of mystery much like SAULT have and, thus far, continue to cloud themselves with.

My discovery and theory that this is the work of AI is still unconfirmed (although a google search including the words Almost Vinyl and AI seemed to support my suspicion) but I got to wondering after reading about a worrying new trend on Spotify. Apparently the music streamers business model sees them still paying a large percentage in licensing for every track streamed and recently, in order to push themselves towards greater profitability, successfully by all accounts, they have started creating their own tracks by fake artists using AI technology and including them subtly and yet consistently within their curated genre playlists. The Almost Vinyl songs would indeed sit unobtrusively inside a Retro Soul playlist and not jump out to anyone as something illegitimate.

Luckily whenever I find a new interesting release I do, especially now this has cropped up, dig around for any information about them, up coming live dates or festival appearances especially, so I do not expect to be caught out by AI fakery too often, if ever, going forward. That said, I cannot quite get my head around what this all means. Does the lead vocal on those tunes I enjoyed, ‘I’m Back On My Bullshit’ in particular, actually belong to a human being because it sounds for all the world like an off-the-rails soul veteran straining the last juice out of his engine before descending into another long night of over-refreshment? Are any of those analogue sounding instruments played by anybody? Does the audio actually feature any instruments in the traditional sense? Does any of this matter when I enjoy the end product without knowing anything about it? I suppose it does because after all, it was the spark of human creativity and sonic exploration that brought these sounds into existence in the first place and ultimately, even if the technology has advanced to previously unimaginable sophistication, a copy is still a copy and a fake remains a fake. The search for new talented musical creatives will never die even if sometimes it feels like scientific progress can look to take the fun out of everything. It does not work, I mean for example, many people still appreciate the experience of playing music on vinyl even though we are in the fifth decade after the arrival of CD and all that followed, music lovers still relish that needle drop and the unbeatable vibration of deep grooved sound. There are many such examples in the Fruit Tree Records Discogs store https://www.discogs.com/seller/Fruit_Tree_Records/profile right now with AI fakes nowhere to be seen…