#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The second bonus track for THE ONLY SKULL album was released today, courtesy of the Soulsigma backers. A MERCILESS NIGHT was mastered by the same audio engineer who mastered the previous 12 tracks, so the heavy guitars are even crisper now. It’s available on UATV, on all the usual music platforms, and on YouTube.
Someone asked Deepseek about the founders of Psykosonik.
It’s almost impressive how it is completely incorrect in every way, except for the bit about Minneapolis.
We were on TVT, but they were our publisher, not our record label. Paul and I were the two founders of the band; we wrote three songs together, after which Dan, who was a DJ at our favorite club, The Perimeter, and Mike, the best friend of Paul’s younger brother, were asked to join the band so that we could play live shows. Paul and Dan were the main composers, I wrote most of the lyrics, and Mike contributed a lot of the sounds that Paul and Dan built the songs around, such as that rich wuah-wuah that begins Silicon Jesus.
The first bonus track from THE ONLY SKULL campaign has been released as a single. You can hear it on Unauthorized, on the various mainstream music platforms, and on YouTube. The second bonus track will be released as a single next Monday, and I have no idea when the third bonus track, being the organic one, will even be recorded, so that one will be a while.
In other news on the creative front, a new chapter has begun in the serialization of TEMPUS OCCULTUM on Arktoons, chapter four, entitled Deceptus Eclipsus.
The abbot’s study was illuminated by tall windows that admitted thin blades of afternoon light, slicing through dust motes that danced in their path. As I entered, I sensed the weight of authority in the room—not just ecclesiastical, but something older, more primal. Father Umbertus stood by the abbot’s desk, his expression tense. Abbot Gerhardt sat behind it, fingers steepled, his face an impenetrable mask. And there, by the window, stood the stranger I had observed in the courtyard, now examining a celestial globe with affected interest.
“Brother Lukas,” the abbot intoned, “may I present Doctor Alessandro Visconti, Chief Archivist of the Vatican Apostolic Library.”
Visconti turned at the mention of his name, fixing me with eyes so dark they appeared almost black in the shadowed room. The ring with the quartered circle gleamed on his right hand as he offered a slight bow.
“Brother Lukas,” he said, his Italian accent precise yet subtle. “I have heard much about your… scholarly endeavors.”
“You honor our humble abbey with your presence, Doctor Visconti,” I replied, bowing in return. “Though I confess I am surprised that my humble work cataloging manuscripts would attract the attention of the Vatican’s Chief Archivist.”
A smile flickered across his face, cold as winter sunlight. “The Church takes a keen interest in all scholarly pursuits, particularly those concerning the correct interpretation of historical documents.”
It’s not just a problem for the outcasts and the unauthorized anymore. The ease and speed of AI production are removing any need for low-level artists producing buffet-style art for mass consumption. This article refers to how Spotify is now directing listeners toward its own fake artists, but Amazon is doing exactly the same thing with ebooks and audiobooks.
In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists. I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.
Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?
In April 2022, I finally felt justified in sharing my concerns with readers. So I published an article here called “The Fake Artists Problem Is Much Worse Than You Realize.” I was careful not to make accusations I couldn’t prove. But I pointed out some puzzling facts.
Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names. Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).
How was that even possible?
I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.
A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers. He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.
- Trumpet Bumblefig
- Bumble Mistywill
- Whomping Clover
- Qeazpoor
- Swiftspark
- Vattio Bud
I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names. The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform.
Around this same time, I started hearing jazz piano playlists on Spotify that disturbed me. Every track sounded like it was played on the same instrument with the exact same touch and tone. Yet the names of the artists were all different.
Were these AI generated? Was Spotify doing this to avoid paying royalties to human musicians? Spotify issued a statement in the face of these controversies. But I couldn’t find any denial that they were playing games with playlists in order to boost profits.
By total coincidence, Spotify’s profitability started to improve markedly around this time.
If your brand and your sales are dependent upon a major platform, you need to be prepared for the fact that you are going to lose it sooner or later, because once established, it is always much more profitable for a platform to generate its own content than serve as a middleman paying out the majority of its own revenue to external content creators. And the combination of algorithmic influence with the total indifference of the modern mass consumer means that there is no brand loyalty on a major platform.
As the analyst observed: “This is what happens when distributors take control of a creative industry, and outsource content.“
And it is why it is absolutely vital for a creator-centric community to stick together and relentlessly find ways to work together, because the larger economic forces are now operating in a way to eliminate independent creators. Fortunately, we have a small, but strong and battle-tested community, as well as several loyal creators who understand the importance and the necessity of standing together.
We have a lot of talent in the community. This is why I’m always encouraging people to take on new projects of which they conceive, like Vox DAI, just to give one example, and to support external creator projects like A WORKING MAN – which launches today, by the way – because it gives us all a much better chance than those poor bastards who still think they can rely upon YouTube, Spotify, and Amazon going forward.
And that’s why, although some of my music can be found on Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes, all of it is available in the very highest quality on UATV, including the 8th track on the Soulsigma album, THE WORD DESCENDED.
Nothing dramatic, actually. But tonight’s Darkstream will be a listening party for the new SOULSIGMA album release, so if you are interested, please stop by. And if you’re not interested, then please don’t because we will not be discussing JD Vance, Russia, the release of the Epstein Files, or anything even remotely related to current events.
My first complete solo music project, The Only Skull, was released this morning on YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify, as well as a number of other music platforms of varying degrees of obscurity. It’s not entirely solo, as I collaborated with one celebrity corpse and an AI system in composing and recording everything, and all ten songs were mastered by an excellent audio engineer whose primary clients are heading one of the world’s most iconic music festivals this summer.
A link containing the appropriate download will be sent out to the backers later today, and for those who are interested, we’ll hold a listening party on the Friday Darkstream. I have not selected the two bonus tracks yet from the five that have been recorded, and the engineer and I are still working out how we want to approach the promised organic track, which is likely to be a really good new song that does not appear on the album but will be provided later to the relevant backers. It may be that this song will be provided only to the backers, because there is a reasonable chance that it will be released by another artist who is interested in recording and releasing it himself.
Anyhow, I am well aware that this is not an area that most of the readers here are much interested in, but I would encourage you to check it out if you are curious about the current state of the art of music technology at the moment.
A new release from Vibe Patrol just in time for Spring Break! Now on Spotify and Youtube, as well as UATV.
For a very different sound, there are still four days to support the Soulsigma album campaign.
In light of The Only Skull campaign hitting its goals – thanks to the backers, of course – I’ve gone ahead and had the ten songs professionally mastered, so they’re going to sound even better than they do on the sampler video which John Bradley of Booster Patrol graciously prepared for me, and which we put together to demonstrate the audio quality.
This required changing the first stretch goal, which now, in response to some requests, will be a fully human-performed song that will be professionally mixed and mastered, a song that is not one of the ten that are already on the album. So, if you’d like to see how far we can push this thing into the organic realm, consider backing the campaign.
And if you missed it, you can also watch the video for A Merciless Night.
SOULSIGMA represents the current cutting edge of music and technology, with the combination of man and machine intelligence. All ten songs are entirely produced with AI music technology, then edited and mastered with digital audio tools to produce a very high-quality alternative rock sound that is original without feeling lifeless or uninspired.
The ten songs on the album entitled, THE ONLY SKULL, are:
3:35 RIDE AND DIE
4:17 THE ONLY SKULL
5:03 ANGEL IN FLIGHT
4:16 SEASONS
3:58 NEPTUNE GRIEVES
3:28 MY SECRET SIN
3:27 THE SHINING WIRE
3:15 THE WORD DESCENDED
5:29 ONCE THERE WAS SORROW
3:53 THE RIDE NEVER ENDS
All ten songs were written by your favorite dark lord, with the exception of The Only Skull and Once There Was Sorrow, which were co-written with George Gordon Byron. If you’d like a taste of what the songs sound like, Booster Patrol have helpfully created a showcase video for one of the songs that isn’t on the album, A Merciless Night. UATV viewers will probably recognize it as the English version of 悲しみの影 as a reverse-Murakami approach was effectively utilized.
If you’d like to back the album, you can do so via the two-week campaign on Fund My Comic. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a priority project like the campaign at the end of March will be. The final mastered versions will be made available on UATV and Spotify after the campaign, so you’ll be able to hear them whether you choose to support it directly or not.
UPDATE: Thanks to the four backers, the project is officially funded already!
UPDATE: Fandom Pulse very kindly covered the project’s announcement.