Electric Paradise by rocomoco, The Hidden

Artist collaborations are the thing in Lo-Fi music to create fresh smooth beats. Now, here comes a very special kind of collaboration: Dan McRae aka The Hidden (Southampton UK) and rocomoco (Ingo Kreutzer, Thorsten Klages Berlin Germany) first met on Sound Cloud in 2018 for a remix of a track called “A Sunday Morning Hangover With Spring In The Air”. Since then they have maintained their shared obsession with creating visual storytelling and beats to reveal the emotional layers of their everyday life. Six years and two EPs later it’s spring again and Dan flew from the UK to Germany to celebrate the release of their album “Electric Paradise” in Berlin at the gallery 'Reflektor Neukölln' on the 17th of May 2024.

The production of the album started in summer 2021 by collecting first ideas for another EP. Soon they decided to write songs towards the album title “Electric Paradise” which proved to be a solid framework for substantive ideas over time. They also decided to release the whole album song by song like entries in a diary.

– A journey with an uncertain destination began.

In July 2022 the AI boom started to take off sustainably into the broad public with the open beta of the Midjourney bot on Discord. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts. “Endless Possibilities, just imagine” – this is Midjourney’s mantra and they are offering their AI tools strikingly now under www.imagine.art. Midjourney combines language, pictures and styles from an infinite digital archive by using artificial intelligence trained to serve the desires of the user. Like many others rocomoco & The Hidden connected their minds with the Midjourney bot to create cover artworks and started to follow the discussions around the fast emerging AI tools whose next ignition stage was not long in coming as Chat GPT kicked off in November 2022. Soon it became clear that AI is an all-pervasive, disruptive new technology that would dominate the future. How is the public discussion dealing with the AI innovation and what can we learn from the past when other disruptive technologies such as the gramophone, the camera and the computer came into the world? The past is more important than ever as it also affects the future by supplying the AI ​​with training data.

These themes left their mark in “Electric Paradise” and in the daily lives of rocomoco and The Hidden, who tried to navigate the new worlds without losing their artistic and human identity. As time progressed, it became possible to produce generative video footage for an entire music video by using the AI ​​tool Runway, which led to the videos for the latest songs "Electric Paradise", “Paul Take A Picture”, "Serenity of the Sirens" and "Everything Is Ok". AI tools like “God`s Particle” became part of their standard arsenal of music production plugins. At the beginning of 2023 they also opted in to a musical collaboration with the AI ​​tool SOUNDDRAW for the track "Paul Take A Picture".

Here is what the artists say about the album:

“In terms of mood, the journey to the “Electric Paradise” fluctuated with great amplitudes between euphoria, thoughtfulness and fear of getting overwhelmed by the life forms of a machine learning intelligence. We were also surprised and had fun with the errors and shortcomings that revealed its essence to us. Their almost perfect imitations or surreal imagery sometimes lack the intelligent ability to relate the simplest parameters to one another on the basis of an understanding. Like in the artwork for our single As Cool As You Please: AI stuck the orange slice against the laws of gravity to the cocktail glass instead of sticking it into the edge of the glass.” (rocomoco)

The album documents two journeys of transition, both physically and mentally into a new age of humanity. It deals with both the dark and the light, touching on fears, anxieties and tensions but with a half glass full embrace of the unknown, with A positive anticipation for a more relaxed and brighter future. The period of writing this album has left us all hanging with the questions of ‘what are we losing and what are we gaining?’. Where humanities ‘progress’ has always been considered a forwards propulsion, we also like to look backwards, to pick up on some of the things that have changed beyond recognition or been lost along the way. To Look back at them again with a fresh perspective and use that one step backwards to empower our decisions for two steps forwards. (Dan McRae aka The Hidden)

Music Videos
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtjB513aO8dbfG4ZB57cSZKseXd83-ub2&si=MRLd2ka1HpMIlaDK


www.aviarybridgerecords.com/pages/rocomoco
www.aviarybridgerecords.com/pages/the-hidden

The Hidden has evolved through many experiments within a lo-fi ethos. ranging from bootleg modern orchestral right through to lo-fi hip hop, boom bap and ambient soundscapes.

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