kraftwerk

Get this, and get it good: If you’ve never heard Kraftwerk before, this stuff isn’t just rated five bottles out of five. This set, "3D - The Catalogue", is about 30 bottles out of five. Or a couple of kegs. 

The first Kraftwerk record I ever heard was the single "Autobahn". I heard it on the radio, a surprise and rather freakish hit in 1975. Beyond that, I gave the band no more thought until I heard the LP "The Man Machine" at my mate Paul’s place, which prompted a continuous scurry around the second-hand record shops until I had everything I could find. 

Kraftwerk, along with the Ramones and the Stooges, are members of a fairly exclusive gang of determined minimalists who worked to change how the world saw music.

_{Mark Roxburgh fronting Joeys Coop. Murray Bennett photo}

In no particular order a bunch of music and music related things that have grabbed my attention. Some of it is shit and some of it I’m ambivalent about but all of it has fed my passion for music.

A.I. and music @ Skynet
I was researching AI and design about five years ago and saw that much of what designers did would soon disappear and design would split into two camps – bespoke design “crafted” by people or mass-produced design generated using AI via the prompts written by people. I suspect music will follow a similar path. 

People will still write and play songs the old fashion way and it will probably be a bit of a niche / bespoke activity. A lot of mediocre mass-produced music will be generated using AI via the prompts written by people. We’ll probably hear more of it in things like corporate videos or ad jingles and the ubiquitous Tik Tok videos to begin with but I suspect it will eventually dominate the popular music landscape. The precursor to this is of course sampling. 

The advent of sampling has led to a huge growth in genres of music that is not written so much as it is cut and pasted together. Honing one’s prompt craft to get a song out of AI is the next logical step. The soundtrack of Skynet. Meantime I’ll still write and sing songs no one will listen to apart from 15 blokes of a certain age in a dodgy bar somewhere.