patten - Mirage FM (2023)

On April 14th the electronic musician, visual artist, designer, and cultural researcher Damien Roach - aka patten - releases his first new album in three years, ‘Mirage FM’. A historic milestone, being the first longplayer of its kind, made entirely from text-to-audio AI-generated sound sources, the record is an emotion-drenched, trippy joyride through contemporary music, and a radical glimpse into the near future and beyond.

After working with AI for years in his visual output, long before DALL-E 2 came on the scene, Roach heard about a new tool for music creation over the recent winter holidays, and immediately started experimenting in one epic all-day and all-nighter, capturing hours of recordings. The system he found, ‘Riffusion’, works by inputting written descriptions of what you’d like to hear, the AI creating a new 'imagined' spectrogram image based on the text, and then turning that into sound – utilising what it's learnt from its vast dataset of recorded music history.

Like a crate digger in latent space, patten scoured hours of lo-fi recordings from these sessions for tiny sections that resonated, and used these as building blocks to assemble ‘Mirage FM’. With countless hours of chopping, sequencing, layering, EQ, repitching and fx, it started to take shape.

Across its 21 beat-tape-meets-Musique-concrète style tracks, genres from pop to techno, R&B to opera, hip-hop and grime to ambient, are distilled into half- remembered fragmented forms. Low fidelity and weird, with an aptly spectral quality, sonically the results are like something dialled in from a parallel universe, recalling the degraded sound of early low bitrate MP3s and dial-up audio streaming.

Everything from heartfelt AM radio ballads, out-there jazz excursions, peak time dance breakdowns and stargazing electronics collide with a stuttering, half-collapsing form, like a failing WhatsApp call or podcast stream. But, somehow, in all its wrongness, it works, like the vinyl crackle or warped cassette of our times. This is the ghost in the machine, singing back broken songs of love and loss, hopes and dreams, things to come; Whether a warning or a celebration, or somewhere in-between, only time will tell.