Matthew Robert Cooper’s latest album under his modern-classical Eluvium moniker doesn’t just promise complexity in its instrumentation ((Whirring Marvels In) Consensus Reality boasts a full live orchestra), but also the ideas embedded in each of the record’s 11 tracks illustrate ideas sourced from our current moment in history where the line between fact and fiction, human intelligence and artificial intelligence, is more blurred than it’s ever been. With the dialogue between man and machine at the center of this new project, Cooper’s promised to unleash two new chapters each month leading up to the album’s release, slowly unveiling the full tapestry of instrumental meditation before it arrives as a wholly stitched-together piece on May 12.
With “Swift Automatons” among the first tracks to be revealed, today Cooper is building upon that track by sharing a music video for it that helps illustrate his ideas. Created by “computer-assisted” musician and artist Infinite Vibes, the mesmerizing visual was created using open source 3D software and AI image generation software to automate the process of evolution. “The music is meant to offer a snapshot of an ever-continuous speeding up of automation and machinations of things from post-birth-of-the-clock to now and beyond, the many mutations of the robotic, and the effect it has on us and perhaps our evolution,” Cooper shares. “I stumbled upon [Infinite Vibe]’s work a bit at random, but it seemed to exemplify a lot of my inexpressible marvel of this.”
“The creative process was slightly unusual,” adds the video’s director, “because the visual popped into my head fully formed on a freezing afternoon in November after walking around Tempelhofer Feld, a former airport turned public park in Berlin. From that moment on, I set to work using a combination of Blender and Stable Diffusion. The AI tools are still quite unpredictable, so there was a lot of trial and error to get it right, but hopefully it's ended up as a worthy accompaniment for this beautiful track.”
Watch the video below.
