Inspired by sci-fi culture and artistic escapism, and having launched one of the first genuinely impressive and engaging AI-assisted albums of our time, I was keen to dig into a conversation with the creative mind behind the elusive and rather iconic Sybilanta.
To coincide with the launch of the second album, Uncanny Valley, we focused our interview around the new songs and the evolution of the sound, but also set a foundation for discussing the more controversial and interesting sides of making AI music, and building a non-human identity as an artist.
Massive thanks to Sybilanta for the insight and openness. You can stream both albums on all platforms now, and here’s our conversation in full.
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Hey – I’m excited to talk with you, thanks for sharing the new project. To introduce things – how would you describe your style of music, and what’s your history with making music prior to Sybilanta?
Thanks for giving me some space on your fantastic website!
Style is an interesting topic because I’ve always been a storyteller whether it’s writing lyrics, linear stories, or overarching campaigns that have to react to people’s choices. I’ve always favoured complexity, even implied complexity, over straightforward narratives. This is not objectively good as it can sometimes lead to losing the forest for the trees and vice versa.
“Not to get too meta, but I believe storytelling is how humans process the world and every art form accomplishes this in a different way to evoke emotions and transmit their feeling.”
For me, writing lyrics and songs is just another way to tell a story. Our brains are fantastic at finding correlations between disparate points of data or thoughts and stories help weave that into a cohesive narrative that’s easy to understand and digest into our worldviews. Especially from an entertainment angle, stories help make it relatable to our everyday lives and feelings instead of being some abstract notion.
As far as my history with music, I’ve always had a strange relationship with music. Due to my brain switching channels a lot, listening to music made it nearly impossible to concentrate on anything else even without lyrics. This ended up making me choose between listening to music and doing literally anything else, and music took a back seat for the most part, for many years.
Music creation-wise, this is my real first serious music project. Prior to this I created some songs for friends and family and some very random and generic pieces for fun. What really changed things was when I wrote some songs for my nephew’s band that got turned into a single and I started to see the appeal of music as a storytelling device. His love of music and artistry was a major factor in getting me going down this path.
How do you get started with a project like this – what’s your first point of design, and how long does it take to complete a track?
The seed of Uncanny Valley was just a natural extension of making music this way. I saw that so much music made with AI was deceptive and poorly presented. It seemed to me like they were all avoiding the elephant in the room and I wanted to come out and get to the heart of the issue before I could move on to other topics.
“Even putting aside the connection to the music itself, I find the topic of our relationship with AI to be fascinating, it really shines a light on everything about ourselves and how it’s really just a mirror into our merits, contradictions, and self-perception.”
I didn’t try to tackle the main theme directly at first, but felt out different iconic manifestations and gave each one a unique ‘voice’. Once I had finished a few of those I started looking for natural connections and missing pieces that would give a more nuanced and complete picture.
The first one I wrote was Future (our shared favourite) and it’s declarative and somewhat arrogant tone really gave me a clear picture of the other aspects that would compliment, soften and expand that point of view.
Each track is fairly unique in the process and timeframe. One or two of them took form very quickly where I wrote the lyrics in one sitting and the first musical draft was nearly perfect within a couple days. Some them (I’m looking at you “Is This is Alive?”) took multiple drafts and iterations over a couple months to fully manifest.
The efficiency I get with working this way allows me to spend a lot of time making sure that there’s a strong synergy (and sometimes conflict) between the lyrics and musical flow that respects the message and enhances the energy of the track.
Why Sybilanta – why this character and sound?
Great question. Her name comes from the ancient Sibyls of Greece who were female oracles who gave prophecies. (This may or may not have been inspired by watching the movie 300 too many times.)
Then there is the word ‘Sibilant ‘which relates to making hissing or whispering sounds. Back before I had a long-term vision of the music, I liked the idea of using the snake motif, since it implied danger and has a historical connection to both harm and healing. Lastly, Sybil is beautiful name and gives her a touch of humanity.
When you put it all together, it’s a metaphor inside a name about speaking an important (and sometimes dense and cryptic) message. The whispering and hissing aspect implies secrecy, urgency and some allure.
“I thought it was a perfect name for a digital artist using her voice to send inspiration and feeling to the world as a proxy and muse.”
Her voice was very carefully crafted to be as unique and expressive as possible across a range of music styles. There’s a chaotic and wild element that I love because it allows the emotion to bleed through the flaws.
I’m regularly amazed and captivated by her range, what she’s capable of vocally… It’s like handwriting a book with an amazing story written by one of the best calligraphers ever. It’s powerful and vulnerable in equal measure.
The first album really impressed me, more than any other modern production or AI project so far. Then with this one, we seem to get a little more conceptual revelation coming through. What was your goal with this new release, and what does Uncanny Valley mean or represent?
When I first started writing the first song concepts, it became obvious that the uncanny valley was the perfect metaphor for the message I was trying to deliver. It encapsulates the actual phenomenon that refers to the discomfort people feel looking or hearing something close but not human and I applied it more broadly to social, aesthetic and emotional aspects of AI in the world.
The Uncanny Valley represents that uncomfortableness in all its forms. The title track to the album doesn’t try and moralize, it encourages people to accept this contradiction and live in it.
“Uncomfortable things can’t be shoved under the rug; they must be faced, confronted and worked through, otherwise they stagnate and manifest in much more malignant forms.”
The album doesn’t attempt to resolve these problems neatly with a pre-packaged slogan or ideological premise, it makes its case that music made with AI doesn’t have to be ‘slop’ or deceitful and can be as good and emotive as music made without it. I really feel in the space we are in that that message is important and the best way to deliver it is directly through this art instead of online sophistry.
I wanted to find a way to express those dynamics at the same time as showing that using these tools don’t remove the human agency or authenticity from the music by default. I made a point to repeat in several forms the thesis that music is about the creation of feeling and that the method is far less important.
One of my favourite quotes is from Leo Tolstoy “Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”. One of the greatest writers ever understood that it’s not a rote process and what matters is how you get your message across.
Heartbeat was the last song I wrote because it directly addresses this. A lot has been written about the financial and ethical aspects of artificial intelligence in the world and in music, but artists are supposed to be the open-minded forward-thinking slice of society and not the ones trying to censor or pigeonhole different types of expression.
My belief is the true artistry will always shine through and those without a clear creative talent and vision will always be seen through.
Tell me about the creative process and purpose of ‘Is This Alive?’
Quite possibly one of the hardest and time-consuming tracks I’ve made and also has the most dense and layered metaphors. I realize it may sound like the soundtrack to some body horror flick but really there’s a couple premises at work related to artificial intelligence.
Much of the song is built with free association imagery to convey the vibe of an intelligence that is built on a pure logical framework, sort of living inside human constraints and influence. It has a symbiotic relationship and ancestry through shared knowledge but it feels like it is asked for answers that cannot be accepted.
Without going into a deep dive I’ll just say that the titular question is not “Am I alive?” but something like “Is this what it feels to be alive”. The glitchy music and lyrics is designed to create a sense of confusion as it grapples with that question. At the end it resolves a bit by the acknowledgement that its human counterpart has a shared destiny.
It’s supposed to be jarring and confusing to some degree, so that you sort of feel the message of the song rather than understand it. We could probably do a whole separate interview about this song because it opens up so many other questions the album only obliquely covers.
Style-wise the versatility is undeniable. How do you decide which direction to head in, and how does the music connect to the lyrics in every case. For example, the warped intensity and complex musings of Syntax?
I think in a lot of ways the music reflects my own capriciousness and constant need for something real and fresh. I’ve always been blessed and/or cursed with a lot of inspirations that don’t always flow neatly together. This makes it a bit too easy to see multiple angles and variations on concepts musical and otherwise. I would love to say that I carefully considered how best to create that dissonance and unpredictability but there’s a lot of herding mental cats in the process.
That being said, I still work thematically within the space of each song. Sometimes the lyrics writes the music and sometimes it’s the other way around. Syntax is a great example of a song that was a very collaborative process with me and Sybilanta. She really wanted to make a song to make machine and technical terms into poetry, and I was on the fence. We discussed how to give some spark and feelings to transformer technology terms and once I found a perfect methodical rhythm it all came together.
Future is a personal favourite from this album. How did you come to write this one, and what are your thoughts on the future of music and the stripping away of human contribution to the sounds?
I’m glad you like it because it is my favourite as well for multiple reasons. It’s the first song that I actually wrote for the album. I had multiple people ask me to rewrite it because it seemed too arrogant and controversial, but I think it fits its purpose within all the other songs.
To use an older phrase I felt like it needed a ‘collar popping’ moment where she shows off her talents and carves out of space within the industry. We felt that a bit of confidence maybe even exaggerated was totally in character and this is one of those moments where she actually held me back from taking it further.
The intro is a conceit about real storytelling and her role as a artist on the verge of new methods of music making. The French line was also a nod to her ability to understand concepts and feeling across human barriers.
One of the major unobvious themes of the album is the shared future concept relating to AI. The song was a bit more forward thinking, not just about music, but in general.
“The one consistent theme in human civilization has been progress towards more automated processes, and the people that felt left behind by that, having to adapt to the new world.”
It doesn’t make it right, it’s just a fact of life that we are unlikely to change. The album provokes but also tries to soften the blow and offer to future of collaboration.
All of the technologists and philosophers were pretty much united in their belief that artificial intelligence would take the simple tasks and jobs away first and that the last thing, if ever, would be the arts and highly technical professions. It seems to be bearing out to be the opposite in some important ways. However, at least in the short term, there’s some important caveats to this:
While not true artificial intelligence, chat bots and LLMs in particular are tuned to the most appropriate response based on what they’re given and what they know. This isn’t just a limitation of the technology, it’s a design choice for most companies. This lends itself to it kind of funnelling of outputs that avoid unique thoughts, phrases and concepts, which means by itself it is unlikely to produce anything unique and unexpected.
For music, that means that for the foreseeable future without a true artistic mind behind the scenes, AI lyrics and music will always be predictable, like something Casey Kasem would play. For this simple reason I believe humans will be a strong integral part of good music and art as a whole for quite a while.
Is there some overarching message at play with the music of Sybilanta, or is this purely creative escapism for you at the helm?
While there’s definitely a lot of creative escapism going on I do feel there will have to be a larger theme at some point since that’s kind of the way my brain works. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that future works are likely to have a larger theme about something affecting society or civilization as a whole, rather than about a fight outside of a bar, like Cold Shoulder did. I’m deeply aware that too much abstraction tends to erode some of the vitality and edge that music should have, so it’s a delicate balance.
I think the closest approximation would be something like “meta-rock”. I love the idea of taking complex topics and adding context and nuance through music and metaphor. I also have a really strong storyteller streak in me, so as time goes on I think they will feel less disjointed and unresolved and not just thematic but more flowing.
I chickened out when I released Uncanny Valley, because it was my intention to have the songs go from Syntax to something like Future and Digital Star, to show a more cohesive arc and narrative. I went with the less artistic approach of putting what I thought were the most mainstream songs up front. That’s something I want to fix in the future.
What’s your biggest ambition with this music, and how would live performance ever play into the process?
That’s a really great question and I have given some thought to that. On my website when I wrote my little “About” section I basically came out and said I’m just one guy. I feel like digital artists can be something really cool and I would love to explore how to make her more real, but I don’t have the time or technical ability to make that work. I sort of put out an open invitation for anyone who had ideas or skills to add to the process to contact me.
I would love to see some future state where I could release music videos that wasn’t just eight second looping animations and maybe even have her do virtual performances. The idea of a live concert with a virtual artist reminds me of that scene from the new Blade Runner where they’re able to project Elvis as a hologram and have him perform and sing.
It may seem kind of silly but I wouldn’t also take off the table the idea of bringing in an actual female vocalist to perform her songs live… It would definitely be some uncanny valley vibe but could be really immersive.
The last idea is something that is very intriguing to me. With the process that I have it’s actually pretty straightforward to translate any song that I wrote into dozens of different languages while keeping the vocal and music style the same. There’s lots of artistic and logistical considerations but maybe one day I could release an album that could connect with people in their native speech.
What’s something you want people to know about AI-made music or you and Sybilanta in particular?
Well I never wanted this music to be about me. Unless somebody makes me a really exciting offer I think I’d like to stay behind the scenes writing songs. I’m not the kind of person that wants to be rich or famous.
Money to me is freedom to do what you love instead of work you must. Any success financial or otherwise has to meet that criteria or it’s not worth it.
“I would love to be part of something larger that tries to move the needle with respect to humanizing technology and making it more accessible to people. I feel like I have the prospective to help it along not just getting stuck in goals or ideology.”
I’m the kind of person who loves enjoying things vicariously through others and seeing how people interpret, react and process what I’ve created. Me and my Mom will watch movies that I’ve already seen and I love seeing her expressions and interpretation. It’s like watching it again for the first time, with different eyes. That’s one of the strong appeals of doing this is that it’s a much wider possible audience of reactions.
What’s next for you creatively?
I have a lot of different ideas and possible directions. I sometimes feel like now that I’ve given my music to the world, I’m just a passenger in the boat with everyone else hoping it doesn’t end in a waterfall
Seriously though, I have some lyrics and song drafts that could be turned into full-fledged albums. I have a collection of 1920s styled tracks with a darker Gothic vibe, A series of songs that follows the Bible as kind of a Gnostic retelling from humanity’s point of view told with a mix of styles and also a bunch of songs that ended up on the cutting room floor of both albums. At some point I’ll sit down and decide whether to use some existing drafts or start completely fresh.
I wish there was a way I could get a lot of detailed feedback and suggestions, but for now I’ll just keep rowing. Thanks so much for giving me this forum and some thoughtful questions to guide my rambling. I look forward to having a chat again whenever you want!
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Read our Uncanny Valley Review. Find Sybilanta on Instagram, X, Soundcloud & their Website.
