WHAT IS REAL ? NOTHING IS REAL.

The HAIL DARKNESS Experiment - ‘Anno Inferni.. Occult Soul of a Machine'

Where to start… because the experiment we put into place, we knew, would not only make us feel uncomfortable, but probably also a whole lot, if not all, the listeners who were charmed by Hail Darkness…

To the people who felt misled, we do sincerely apologise, but in order to test our experiment, we needed to make several decisions that would imply some deceptive moves, we tried to minimise these as much as possible and they will be our little crosses to bear in this experiment.

Why this experiment ?

There are several reasons this experiment was carried out. There have been enough musical projects in the past that have had their own stories when it comes to some sort of ‘hidden hand’ behind the face of a band; Malcom McLaren with the Sex Pistols, Damon Albarn with Gorillaz and even to some extent the make-up hiding the real faces of Kiss or Sleep Token’s unknown identity or the unforgettable drama behind Milli Vanilli. There have been legions of external producers and session musicians in the history of the music industry who have contributed to songs of which the listener has no idea that they where part of, listening to songs they thought were written and recorded by the band pictured on the album sleeve. Now we are facing a new tool on the block… called AI.

We wanted to dive into this new technological tool. to understand and discover even in these very early stages, what it is capable of creating, and we where quite frankly shocked about how good the result was.

We also wanted to push the message that our society is drifting towards an existence of two realities; our physical reality and a digital (online) reality. Posing the following questions; if/when will these two worlds merge ? Or if the online reality one day will become the dominating reality. 

So, Hail Darkness became our AI conceptual art project. 

Would it be possible to pull off creating an AI band and have them ‘infiltrate’ into the physical reality ?

Could we create songs and artwork which could touch the soul of the listener…and also ours as creators ?

Could we create something which could compete with the majority of underground bands ?

The experiment would be set up into a short, a mid and a long term goal. The short being to create the band, a sound, the members, their characters and a creative vision that would touch the listener…basically what any beginning band would do.

The mid term goal was to release a physical album, limited and self-released. This we hope would be come a cult collectors item… either for it being a great album or for the backlash it would get for being exposed as an AI project..or maybe both.

The long term, and this was a goal which we were certain would only get reached if the listener at one point would become aware of the true goal of the project and would still accept/embrace the experiment for what it was… a well crafted concept, made with as much love as musicians in a band trying to please the listener with good music. A plan for creating 5 albums, if possible through an existing label and if the technology allowed to have AI generated live streaming gigs in the future and basically become an established (AI) band.

The concept of the Gorillaz project, their characters, the holographic shows inspired us to develop this project in the form it turned out.

The ethical and moral part of the experiment.

Probably the most troubling part of the experiment where the ethical and moral choices to be made. 

Why would anyone even want to make AI music ? 

When you know how to make music, being a musician and having been part of the music industry being confronted with a new groundbreaking technological tool that opens portals into infinite creative possibilities, its hard not to dive into what these mysteries have to offer, and of course, AI created music has nothing to do with the physical composing of music, its a whole different ball game, and it was not part of the experiment to prove the point that the human craft of creating music can be in any form be related to generating artificially made music.

These new tools are here, if we want them or not, they will shape our world, just as plug-ins, DAW software, etc have shaped composing and recording music over the past decades. 

Yes, it’s scary because it could mean we could even become redundant in the creative processes of human expression.

The experience of creating the Hail Darkness universe.

It strange to admit that the process actually became rather emotional. We put a lot of love, dedication, time and energy into this ‘band’ and the investment of time and energy gave a connection to what was created.

The band characters were fleshed out, their personality and looks carved out as if being characters for a long running Netflix series. The more we worked on the project the more they became ‘real’, a weird thing to imagine, but they became our online team and we could imagine them existing in a future digital reality one day. 

We discussed the film ‘Her’ with Joaquin Phoenix often, because it’s a definitely a scenario that will surely become reality one day.

We made sure to have some clear hints that it was AI… the AI in HAIL DARKNESS, and the term Anno Inferni… AI abbreviated.. ‘the year of hell’ in Latin, meant as a warning to a matrix world we could be slipping into. For us, these developments should be well monitored as they can shift us towards a frightening, dystopian and inhuman society.

Modus Operandi

For the people who have no clue how AI generated music works..in a nutshell… We used a software tool called ‘Udio’, it’s one of the better know AI music generating tools. In this piece of software you write what is called a ‘prompt’, a short description of what kind of song you want. The trick is to fine-tune and develop your prompt to get the exact sound you are looking for, this can be quite a challenge, because 80 to 90% produced for you is absolute garbage… which should still give us some hope for the future.

In this software you can chose for ‘custom’ lyrics or ‘auto-generated’, or ‘instrumental’ for none. We decided on using ‘custom’ lyrics for 90% of the songs, because the ‘auto-generated’ option is pretty childish especially when straying off from the mainstream path.

The software then generates two ±30 seconds starting points of a new ‘song’. This is where what we call the ‘curating’ process starts. In some cases it could take up to 50 generations to come to a 3,5 minute song. With the song ‘composed’ we would then download it in 4 ‘stems’ (drums, bass, vocals and others) and then proceed to edit the composition, add some instrumentation, add effects and then mix and master in our DAW. One song would on average could take 3 full days of work. Sometimes there would be a lucky shot and one full track could be finished in a few hours.

As musicians, there are many creative similarities as to composing songs in the physical world. Obviously the main creative process is done by AI, but as mentioned, the ‘curating’ creative part was extremely interesting, fun and challenging…but mostly frustrating.

We needed to work the hardest to get consistency in the sound, the style, the emotion of the voice, the vintage sound..everything that would become HAIL DARKNESS.

For the images we use Midjourney for the band photos and album covers. For character style consistency we needed to finetune the band members, and this was incredibly hard to achieve. Easily hundreds of generations were made to get one decent band photo resembling the same band members. For album artwork sometimes a style reference was used to achieve a specific vintage look. The designs where completed and fine tuned using Photoshop.

For video we would use Runway and Luma Dream Machine. The ‘With Horns Of A Beast’ video is completely AI generated, not as one clip but all separate videos, the forest story line, the band members, the animations…the 70s effects where later added using Adobe After Effects and edited in Premiere. Basically it would be the same as writing a script / scenario for a film production company and they would piece the parts of the creative demands together. We creative a creative concept, worked on the concept, storyline, curated the video, edited, made post-production additions, color-graded and then rendered the final video composition. Its not possible (at this moment) to have the software create a whole finished videoclip.

Like a musician, in order to make a result that sounds and looks good, skill and taste is still required. It requires a lot of work, knowledge of music and design and the different software.

Why the niche of Occult Doom Rock?  

The choice to dive into this niche was for several reasons ;

We do love this genre, and we don’t want to disrespect the artistry delivered by bands we love, if anything Hail Darkness is (an AI) tribute, a homage to an amazing genre and musical period in history. It’s as much Sabbath Worship as any other bands who worship the riff.

We wanted to see how far we could go with creating and emulating a vintage, organic and somewhat ‘sloppy’ recording through this software. In contrast to bands who nowadays want to sound extremely sterile, over polished and soulless with the over use of technology. If anything Hail Darkness sounds the most vintage any 21st century recording has probably sounded.

(One of our other ideas was to make Hail Darkness a band ‘lost in the vaults’, but we thought this would be harder to pull off.)

The Artificial Intelligence is THE occult tool behind this whole experiment, in addition to using occult imagery, the themes and lyrics this is truly an occult rock project.

Unfortunately we also found that this niche genre had become quite over saturated with what we considered ‘clone’ sounding bands, re-hashed and uninspired copies of Black Sabbath, we can not judge and are not judging the passion or love each individual puts into their craft, but there is/was a lack of originality streaming through the genre. We wanted to prove this point…in a painful way.

The ethics and morals behind the experiment.

The hardest part of this experiment was having to be part of some deceptive moves in order to launch the band, this is the part we had doubts in continuing the experiment. Having to deceive some people who showed enthusiasm and goodwill is an extra lesson learnt, it’s hard having to break personal moral codes. Having to hide the truth is not enjoyable. 

Nonetheless, we were curious to see how or what the reaction or the self reflection of the listener would be, how an initial perception of pleasure (in the music), an authentic feeling generated by the listener, would or could change knowing that the reality behind that pleasure was not what it seemed.

Would there eventually be listeners who would be comparable to ‘Cypher’ (of the Matrix), who know it is all AI, but chose to accept the unreal because it still sounds good.

We also wanted to open the discussion about what art is…and what music really is.

What is the difference between AI generated vibrations and frequencies that give you joy or human created vibrations and frequencies that give you this same reaction ? Is it all in the ear of the beholder ? Or is the human touch an absolute necessity to bring joy to a listener ? And who is to decide which process gives a creator the most artistic satisfaction, if it brings the same pleasure to his listener ?

We are, if we want it or not, faced with these new tools that will reshape our experiences and we gradually find harder to know what is real or unreal… especially if we decide to invest and manifest a large part of our existence into these digital realms.

With this experiment we managed to manifest a (small and personal) reality making people believe it was all real. Smoke and mirrors… ask yourselves how much of a manufactured reality is being forced upon you in this day and age…

When this is posted it will be sure that there will be a group of people who are aware the project is AI, and with time this number will grow. 

We are prepared that there will be some backlash and to then direct anyone to this piece.

If you are reading this and you feel angry and deceived, you are right to feel this, we hope that our explanation will comfort those feelings, and in time realise it was not done purposefully to hurt or deceive anyone.

If you are reading this and you feel informed, then we hope this experiment and everything part of it will add to some extra insight to this quickly changing world we are living in with a technology that is developing at a (much) too high of a pace.

If you are reading this, and you are cool with what we did then hopefully you would enjoy us releasing the material we have left in the future and continue the project with the AI message revealed.

This project is and always has been a non-profit experiment. The money generated has either gone to paying for the software subscriptions, video composition tools (such as vintage grain) and the rest is donated to a good cause…receipts of Paypal donations are available or on the projects Instagram.

Future earnings will continue to be donated to the same cause, so hopefully the experiment will have an overall positive goal to it.

We hope this makes our journey clearer and given some insight into this experiment and our motivation to create Hail Darkness, we have become fond of ‘the band’, the music and its overall vibe. Strangely enough we do see it as an independent entity.

So on that note, thanks for your time, apologies for inconveniences and hello from Jez, Emmet and Joshua.

Hails!