- Music for Ghosted Generation
Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the tracks on Ghoststorm are nostalgic for a past that never existed. Their emotions spring from artificially implanted memories. There is the theme song to an 80’ies anime TV-show that never existed, there is a spaghetti western where obscure characters shimmer on the edge of focus, there are elegant ballrooms filled with dancing dust and the contours of wuxia fights choreographed in the fluttery waves of VHS tracking.
The music is created from thousands of samples from all of musical history, shaped through the deep dreams of artificial networks – the sounds, beats and loops are sampled from cloned memories remade by machine understanding. The result is a sonic maelstrom of cultural fragments, swirling forever in an Escher-like labyrinth on the verge of recognition: “…but isn’t that? …“.
Ghoststorm is the third and final release in Ugress’ dark future trilogy of releases. It is dystopian and cinematic music with a melancholic edge, echoing a subconscious dawning: We live our lives in apps, devices and social media. We share only our edited memories, a filtered life that never happened, and aspire to exist in this reality of manicured stories.
Living through screens, constructing our own fake memories, we are ghosting ourselves. Your replicant is you.