On a sunny afternoon
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Hello, friends and fair readers, hello! It has been too long. That’s entirely on me, you have been great. I hope this letter finds you well!
A lot has happened since the last letter from the desk of coolguy.website. I went back to the States, by surprise, and was there for a couple months dealing with some family things and will be heading back there this Saturday for slightly more easygoing family things.
I am never sure how personal to make this letter. It is a newsletter from my personal website, but one that continually and delightfully is stumbled upon by strangers. And it feels rude to have personal business clogging up your inbox. Always down for a cup of coffee though!
Also, embarrassingly, what I do sit down to write you, the subject matter is involuntary. My brain locks onto some odd, nagging thought I cannot move past and it interrupts any plans to write of my latest goings-on; instead I rant on the random topic taking up too much space in my head.
I would like to write to you today about family and travels and America but I can’t, because of the cover art for the newest album by White Sun, a new age Kundalini yoga band. I saw it a week ago and haven’t been able to move past it.
This is the art:
It’s bad, but a bad that I find soul-insulting and gives me this small existential pain, like a bellyache that reverberates.
WHITE SUN
Now I am sure you did not subscribe to my email to read take-downs of obscure, but still Grammy-winning, spiritual pop bands known for their “trailblazing use of the gong” and recent exploration of a “more latin” sound… but that’s what I have to give! This album art boooothers me. It’s mostly due to the sun — it doesn’t look right. And the orb placed in front of that sun is off too: it never fully settles in as a planet, or a moon, or cloud, or large bubble. Neither the sun nor that strange orb have the right kind of roundness, a human roundness. There’s an off-ness that betrays this cover is almost certainly AI-generated.
QUICK SIDE NOTE: I tried to find any sort of credit for this art before writing and could find nothing. Still, if it turns out that someone did draw this, then I take back most everything I’m about to say. If you are the artist for the work above and are somehow reading this newsletter, please reach out to me and I’m sorry! END NOTE
I’ve followed White Sun’s career v. loosely, I know them only because I am married to a Kundalini yoga instructor and White Sun are affiliated with a somewhat infamous Kundalini teacher. They are also affiliated with a lot of strange crypto schemes ( they mainstaged Dogepalooza — the music fest, and trainwreck, dedicated to Dogecoin). I admit that I am not a fan of White Sun, though I find them interesting. Within the “new age yoga studio music” space they’ve done quite well, winning multiple Grammys and having their music taught in University level courses around stress management.
Their work is mostly Kundalini mantras, written in a sacred language, to which they add electronic flourishes, acoustic guitar, and that trailblazing gong. Kundalini yoga is intended to awaken and amplify your inner spirit, to focus on the present moment, and strengthen your endurance through yogic poses that boost your inner fire. White Sun’s music is explicitly spiritual… yet when it came time to make the album art for this devotional work they thought, “ah, just ask the computer to do it.”
One case for AI is that it allows for “non-artists” (nonsense phrase) to realize some idea that they could not create themselves. White Sun’s album art is of the sun and clouds plus a couple stars. It is a drawing assignment literally given to kindergartners. Any member of the band could have drawn this, and they definitely could have found an artist friend to draw it.
The other reason given for AI art is it saves time and effort. This, I think, is the reason White Sun used it. They can feed a prompt to the computer as a productivity hack, saving them precious time.
This is what bothers me: what are they saving time for? Using AI for their album art says that they were just trying to get it done, assumably so they could focus on their real, more important, work. What is that, though, if not their music? This album is a culmination of the band’s purpose and work, the first thing you see when you go to their site. Put simply, it is the point. They sing mantras meant to attune oneself to the present moment, yet act as if being in the present moment takes too much time.
This is my fundamental problem with AI — its insistent yet subtle change in our worldview, a change that says “it’d be faster if you just let us do it” while glossing over what “it” is. My friends and I recently started a biweekly RPG campaign. At our last session, AI was brought up as a possible help to our sessions. The idea was that we could ask AI to come up with settings and lore and interesting backstories for the NPC characters we meet. The suggestion confused me. The entire point of our campaign was to imagine cool stuff together. Offloading this to AI saved time, but also removed the reason we spent that time together.
When AI is used it doesn’t just create art or backstory, it also affirms this nagging feeling of haste. This idea that there is some more important thing waiting beyond your current creative task. AI convinces us that the fun parts aren’t the fun parts, they are chores in the way of the more important thing… yet never articulates what this more important thing is.
I don’t want to continually save time until all I have left is the hustle. Life is not a path in which we should look for shortcuts. It is not a path at all. It is an open field, where your friends are hanging out, sitting in the grass, having a picnic. And what a waste it’d be, in the interest of saving time, to eat something before you arrive. To impatiently listen to your friend’s story, hoping they’d get to the point. To see the idle afternoon ahead of you, and wish you could describe that afternoon to a computer, so it could return a high-level summary. It seems foolish to look for the shortest path across the field when all it gets you is to the other side.
Anyway, it’s out now on all major streaming platforms, but who cares! I would rather switch to better things that I like!
ZACH’S REVIEW CORNER!
I wanna switch over to a recent album that I absolutely LOVE:
Grains, the self-titled debut from the Wellington band Grains. I’ve mentioned them in this newsletter before, when their set blew me away at Welcome to Nowhere. This album came out a few months ago (it was the soundtrack of my American trip), and I absolutely adore it.
Grains is a mix of modular synthesizers, guitar, drum, and beautiful wails. Though it’s the sound of machines, there is something in their music that feels primordial. It evokes giant fern trees and man-sized dragonflies and heat. It’s also fun, and propulsive, poppy, makes you want to grow legs and jump out of the primordial pool so you can dance. Honestly, it kinda feels like lost songs from the soundtrack to BEAST WARS.
The album moves from ambient to power ambient to kosmische to new age to straight dubstep. There’s something delightfully foolish about it, like the joyfully dumb smile that only shows when you aren’t aware that you’re smiling. Grains produces these strange textures and totally new sounds but in service of big drops and drawn out grooves that are unabashedly fun. Though sonically they are quite different, the band Grains reminds me of most is Fang Island, an old favourite most often described as “the sound of high-fiving”.
Ultimately, that is what I love about this Grains album. While it does sound like ancient banana trees and spacefaring robot dinosaurs, it mostly sounds like friends in a room in love with playing music together, making beautiful and bizarre sounds to impress one another before they collectively lock into something surprising, powerful, and huge. Absolute big recommend from me!
Secondly, I want to recommend a comic book that was recently returned to the Wellington library and available for you to borrow: The Great Beyond, by Léa Mureweic.
This is a funny and beautiful book that absolutely sideswiped me emotionally. It has an aggravating and oddly sympathetic main character living in a world that is equally sci-fi and parable (my fave kind of world). It starts with a basic “what-if?” premise that then reaches a poignancy I was not expecting, but absolutely loved. The art is wonderful to behold. It is accomplished and intuitive, moving from really tight graphic design to rubbery big shoe cartooning, often within a single panel, and always in service of expressing the intangible emotion of the story. A book to read and re-read!
Shameless plug: AIRHORN TOMORROW! plus music!
Lastly, I want to say that AIRHORN IS TOMORROW! I am so excited for this lineup and so happy to be back in NZ long enough to do this again. Tomorrow is shaping up to be one of our wildest (and sexiest?) Airhorns and you can get tix still over at https://airhorn.nz
And if that’s not enough, Angelica put together the AIRHORN RADIO SEASON 1 MEGAMIX (we have seasons now). If you want to get pumped to the hypest hyperpop and choicest airhorn samples then this is the mix for you. You can listen to it now on https://airhorn.nz/radio!
Thank you for reading my kinda long letter! Have a good weekend, maybe we’ll hang out!
- ZACH!