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LP
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PURR 145LP
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"Julius Smack engages in a dialogue with a fictional AI assistant to create an album using the prompt, 'Make an album that tells the story about the origins of Julius Smack.' Starlight emerges as the imagined response, envisioning a world where beauty and violence intertwine, and memories and dreams are excavated to craft stories. In a near-future Earth, where artists are among the planet's last inhabitants, a symbiotic relationship has formed between humans and AI -- each relying on the other for nourishment and healing. At the sight of a shooting star, artists mine their memories and dreams with generative AI to produce art, which sustains them but generates toxins that must be expelled upon the next shooting star by creating more art. To compose Starlight, Julius Smack drew inspiration from all facets of life, with the album's 'dataset' serving as a kind of diary. It weaves together old demos, bookmarked TikTok clips of AI-generated content (such as a deepfake of Biden and Trump singing in Mandarin alongside Kamala Harris' laughter), 2000s dance music, and '90s cyberpunk anime, including Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Everyday experiences also became part of the dataset: learning Yaqui in online classes with fellow diasporic Yaquis, riding the train, walking the dog, and dreaming. These disparate threads coalesce to question AI's role in creative and labor economies, forming a counterfactual narrative where everything -- and nothing -- is art."
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LP
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CTATSU 005LP
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"Following its release in the winter of 2018, Landmarks, a collaboration between veteran ambient artists Celer and Forest Management, initially drew quiet accolades and a steadfast listenership that has since swelled to unimagined proportions, resonating with listeners perhaps now more than ever and cementing its status as an experimental classic. Inspired by Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast and Peter Weir's 1986 film adaptation of that book, Landmarks sets out 14 tracks in a 'stunning hour of music' (The Quietus) that creates a 'general sense of foreboding, critique of romantic retreat into individualism and colonialism' (A Closer Listen). The album is now offered on vinyl for the first time (originally out on cassette tape), newly remastered by Stephan Mathieu to enhance the depth and richness of this oneiric soundscape. Both Americans, Celer (Will Long) resides in Tokyo, Japan and Forest Management (John Daniel) in Chicago, USA. Landmarks was born of their months-long collaboration, trading music back and forth and reshaping each other's work using a series of patches, tape looping, and electronic manipulation. As a throughline in each piece we hear their distinct voices and cultural contexts blend to unique, often otherworldly effect, conjuring a dreamlike tension that refuses easy resolution. We are hooked by a mood that captured listeners back in 2018 and continues to hold us today in the context of current events, related disquietudes, and a nostalgic longing for solutions that may be more imaginary than real."
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