Projects that simultaneously create both sound and visuals, often end up with end results that look and sound fantastic. This is certainly the case with Onokio‘s new single and music video for “add_slacking”, a brilliant blend of IDM music and futuristic artificial intelligence-driven visuals. Having worked on his new album for around a year, Onokio is ready to unleash his sonic palette and visual ideas upon baying listeners, teasing us with this exciting new single.
“add_slacking” is a brilliantly contrasted song, pairing fast-paced breakbeat glitch with cinematic pieces, very similar to the works of The Flashbulb. The structure of the song revolves around the smooth yet frenetic drum beats, with excellent layers of effects constantly shifting in pitch and depth, giving this very technically-driven piece some natural beauty. You stay hooked in thanks to these smart changes with the track also feeling much longer than its four-minute run time.
The video that accompanies the song is also filled with natural splendour, yet interpreted by artificial intelligence. It plays out like a representation of what an AI is dreaming about as it looks at the world through the eyes of a human at glorious landscapes and cities. Whilst it looks slightly random at times after the breakbeat kicks in, it required a lot of hard work with AI and editing as explained by Onokio:
‘The music video for “add_slacking” in particular took me the longest as it contains two sections with entirely different processes; some involving the hacking of particular image synthesis and deep neural network resources online to automate the processing of frames and others using simple keyframe rendering.‘
The visual piece immerses the listener into the music even more, and as Onokio went on to explain in his briefing, it really is open to interpretation by the listener. For me, it is an very compelling piece that questions the relationship between technology and nature, but we’d love to hear what you think in the comments.
Onokio will release his album Entity Upload Entry on his own record label BufferZone on December 24, 2020. Find his social media links below.
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