Forgotten Echoes by Magnus Pålsson

I have gotten a few messages of surprise due to this album. I understand and I should say something about this.

I have a complicated relationship to some of the tools available to musicians nowadays.
I am aware that on the one hand some amazing stuff can be made. On the other hand how much of the artists soul and fingerprints do you really have on the resultant music?

And how much does that matter and how much should one care when you really like the music regardless?

And then if the music was generated with very little effort, does it still warrant a money exchange? Do we pay for the result or the work put into it?

The world is going to have to battle with these questions a lot in the coming years. My personal belief is that at least from an artist perspective the ones on top are going to be the ones who do a combination of their own hard work and using AI in ways that are undetectable to the user while still sounding like the artist. And the music lovers who decide who is going to succeed is going to choose with their money what artists are going to make it.

Obviously, this album sounds nothing like I have released in the past. I'll tell you right up front how much work went into it: very little compared to VVVVVV.

The song Potential for Anything took me 3 weeks to create with painstaking programming in an editor that looks like an airplane cockpit.

The songs on the newest album took less than an hour each. What I would typically do is to voice a recording into my computer of beats and melodies, and then tell the computer what instruments and style the music would be in. Added a couple of lyrics in form of text at some choice places. If I didn't like a particular section I would replace it in the final rendering. Sometimes endings were cut off and I would rearrange the songs.

Despite all of these things it is difficult for me to say to all my fans that hey this is a fully fledged album by me and you should pay a normal price for it. That would have felt like a subtle kind of deception to me.

So I made it completely free with the optionality of making donations.

The donations go towards the American Tinnitus Association, because about a year and a half ago I unfortunately acquired a very loud and brutal case of tinnitus. I can never again experience silence. Instead I hear a variety of tones that are so loud that I hear them when taking a shower or flying an airplane over the atlantic.

That stuff has been extremely traumatic in many ways for my life in general and ruined my own ability to focus clearly while making music the normal way. It is extremely distracting and absurd and abnormal in many ways, and I must always have a sound floor of white noise playing 24 hours a day in order to not go batshit insane. Without that I would probably be suicidal. I am on top of all the latest research about it and wish to avoid well-meaning suggestions to try different solutions you might have heard of or find on the web.

Using AI has been a boon to creating things especially when I feed something I have made myself into it and have it polish up the results. I don't need to be as sensitive with my hearing in the creative process which enables me to stay engaged in this great passion I have in life for music, a passion that survives the trauma of tinnitus.

In a perfect world i would still be in the cockpit flying the plane of chiptune making. But I have to roll with the punches. Life has hit me hard and tinnitus is a constant soul burden.

They say that tinnitus is something you can get used to but i am not in that place just yet. All my normal music making has completely stopped.

I still have some unreleased chiptune music that I want to put out there at some point and maybe it will be a hybrid album of craftsmanship and AI. I am still working out how to proceed with it.

Rick Rubin said something in an interview that I find sits perfectly in the intersection of man-made and computer made music.
It was a conversation in an interview and he said something like the following:

"I don't know how to work. No technical ability. I'll tell you what I get paid for: the confidence I have in my taste and my ability to express how I feel has proven helpful."

Perhaps what I release out into the open with some AI assistance can have value if not only do I put some of my musical and lyrical DNA into it, but also if the curation process filters out all the bad stuff so that i am confident that my taste shines through and my feelings are expressed through the music in a way that still connects with an audience.

I'm certain of one thing though: I want to put more of ME into the next thing I release. Be it telling a story with humor or sadness in the lyrics, or more of the musical essence of my heart on display.

Love you all. Take care of your ears. Once busted, they can't be fixed (as of yet).

I've been into games since I first laid my hands on some Game&Watch handhelds from Nintendo.
It then continued with C-64, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, and later on PC.
I love the music those machines had. The gaming music. The OLDSCHOOL gaming music! Nowadays I've broadend both my listening and creation genres, but still love the good ole days.

magnuspalsson.com