Can you introduce yourself in a paragraph or two?
Hello, I’m Mark. I’ve been a full-time artist since around 2007 (or arguably for all of my life, I made games from the age of 11, but they were more like art than commercial products). We Robot is my 39th original album, since Arcangel back in 2000. Amazingly, almost half of my 70 releases so far (that figure includes remasters, singles, etc.) have been in the last 5 years or so.
My early albums were electronic instrumental music, influenced by computer games, but around 2015 I began to work with poets more and began to perform art live. The Anatomy of Emotions was an art performance of live piano accompanied by spoken word, I was self-learning to play the piano at the same time. This led to myself and Deborah Edgeley founding Fall in Green, a contemporary lieder duo; spoken word accompanied by music.
Those experiences led to more explorations in poetry, and ultimately the desire to create songs. Despite the song-based music, my albums remain influenced by classical structures and a feeling of an album as a complete artwork, rather than a mix of songs. This aesthetic is really unpopular at the moment. Most people want shorter and shorter pop songs and have little patience for an entire album, but of course, there are people who, like me, like an entire ‘symphonic’ experience to music.
As a result of these influences, my albums tend to alternate between concept albums with some sort of structure, and simple collections of songs. My music, like my art, is slightly surrealistic, suffused with energy and fun, and the song-collection albums give me a chance to explore those songs.
What are the main themes in your new album We Robot?
We Robot tells a story of sorts, in three parts. The album is ultimately about the balance between emotionless logic and machine life, the impact of machines on our minds and the world; and emotions, the human response to these changes and this world. This is a persistent feeling in my work because computers have had such a marked impact on my life. I got my first computer at the age of 10 or 11, and I became obsessed with it, withdrawing into its world of numbers and mathematical perfection. My wayward and docile childhood was transformed and I became withdrawn but empowered by the ability to create programs. I effectively stayed in this way for decades, striving to create computer games, before shedding that role to embrace art instead.
So, in a sense, this album is partly autobiographical, but it’s more of a fictional exploration, like all art. All art is a mix of autobiography and fictional exploration.
We Robot starts with an introduction and a pursuit, a search for love or something, an allure for a machine. Things don’t quite go according to plan, and the song Fake Plastic Lies is about dissatisfaction, as well as a general critique of social media.
The middle section then starts, with Mothmoon, a sort of ‘entering the machine’ section. There are a few songs then from the perspective of a robot or machine. The song I Think You Love Me is sung by a speech synthesizer – this is actually a very old song, I wrote it over 10 years ago, but it’s taken this long to record! The act itself was somewhat painstaking, recording and editing together each syllable over many days. It was worth it, and necessary, of course. One interesting fact is that none of the album uses AI at all, or autotune (which I hate, the sound of it and the way it destroys emotion).
After that, we enter a final section, starting with a song of loss called ‘Where Is Love?’, then things become more positive and reflective. Flight Over Rust City is an instrumental inspired by the feelings of Bladerunner 2049. Then a song called Silicon Carbon Genesis, unusual in the treatment of AI as an equal, not something to be feared or embraced, but something natural; machines as nature.
Who would you say are the formative influences on your music and more specifically on the album We Robot?
Formative, the music of my childhood, which is probably everyone’s case. For me that’s Catholic Hymns, the 60s music of my parents, but also Commodore 64 game music which I avidly collected on tape. I preferred melodies to words then, but now value words at least as much if not more. I guess that We Robot has a mix of all influences since. Each album is a progression for me.
You used your own software for the production of We Robot, can you give us some technical insight into how you go about making your music software and where people can find it if they want to download it themselves?
I started work on my main sequencer/synthesizer Prometheus in 2001. It was inspired by Protracker on Amiga, so a sample-based tracker, but with better timing resolution, not crude ‘blocks’ of time or events. I didn’t have a clue about audio programming at the start, but couldn’t afford to buy music software, so decided to program my own. The first version, Noise Station, is free to download on my itch channel, but Prometheus has had 20+ years of upgrades since and is based on external plug-ins which I designed. Some effects are harder than others to code. The saw-wave generators and filters in Noise Station are still in Prometheus (though upgraded a little, my filters are now 24dB/oct for example), but reverbs, compression… these all needed new work. I’ve spent more time working on this software than any single thing in my life, and I’m still working on it today.
The closest thing to Prometheus that is available is my sound design software SFXEngine, which was based on an earlier branch. Prometheus is basically SFXEngine with the ability to play at different pitches and record sequences.
Where do you think the future of music production is going?
Over the past 40 years it’s got cheaper and cheaper, and more democratic. It’s almost the case now that the technology is as cheap as it can be, and time will always be expensive, so it’s hard to extrapolate that trend from now onwards. The big revolution in music of the last 10 years isn’t creation but distribution. Visual art, painting, drawing, etc. has little impact on the world now because the messages of television, then social media, replaced it, but music has remained culturally informative for much longer because the mass media was the art; the artists were independent ‘ordinary people’, like artists. The growth of AI artists may change this, making music may become a vacuous on-message form of media created for entertainment and pleasure, like the visual mass media of television; but there are caveats to this forecast. First, AI music is rubbish and will generally be disliked. The better it gets, the more it will need work and costly human involvement, negating its benefits. Second, technology has made music, and now television, mass-participation media. Not only can anyone create a TV programme, we can be our own TV station, record company, and more. Postmodernism destroyed trends for years, but social media has resurrected them. Cancel culture, for example, is a new cultural trend since the postmodernist ‘anything goes’ era.
What is your opinion on using AI in artistic production?
Generally speaking, the more AI in a creative system the worse the results, just as the quality of a film is inversely proportional to CGI content. Even a human-level AI (we are nowhere near this) could only, artistically, show us what it’s like to be an AI, which probably won’t be very engaging for humans (although such art may be liked by other AIs). For making human art, tools can be a great help, but they’ll always take as much work to use well as doing anything by hand. One must be careful not to let a tool, machine, whatever dilute a feeling. Every expressive media dilutes a feeling to some extent. When playing an instrument, its limits destroy something of your emotion; so all tools must be used with care.
If you could meet any musician living or dead who would it be and what would you say to them?
It would be nice to meet Beethoven and hear him play the piano. Conversation would be difficult.
Write anything else you would like Artistic Echoes reader to know about your new release We Robot
We Robot is my first album which has a full-length video for each track, so I effectively had to make a 45-minute film. This was partly because Spotify plays short, looping videos for songs, so I thought I’d make bigger versions for YouTube, and these necessarily grew to become more complex. These videos weren’t intended to fully replace high-production music videos, simply provide something to view while listening, but in the end they became quite sophisticated. As with the music, the videos were created using software of my own design called Argus. Without that I’d have no hope of making videos like this, but there are pros and cons with programming your own tools.
There’s not much guitar on here, most of the solos are played on synthesizer (often live in one take, the expression you can get now is amazing; we have such amazing tools for music now), so this is much more a pop-oriented album than ‘rock’; though I’d always think of my music as rock to some extent because my historical inspirations are art-rock artists, from David Bowie and Brian Eno, to Genesis, Pink Floyd and those era of artistic, symphonic, progressive-rock musicians. What genre music is shifts all of the time and can be based on arbitrary criteria like instrumentation. Of course, these are just labels to help people find more of what they want.
