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THE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Experiments in AI-Assisted Cyborg Pop


The Organizing Committee is an attempt to bring artificial intelligence into underground pop music, and do it in a reflexive way.

Sometimes that means an AI is generating lyrics — usually produced by a customized GPT-2/GPT-3 model trained on cybernetics, situationist, and feminist texts. Sometimes it means building tracks around samples produced by generative means, be it from data produced by the GPS drift of a tracked eagle, or output from the OpenAI’s Jukebox. In all cases, the songs aim to push ideologies of computation “beyond the binary.”

I started this project during the Covid year, studying Applied Cybernetics on an abandoned campus in a studio across the street from the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s was a way for me to process what I was reading, what I was seeing in the world, and a platform for making truly “experimental electronic music.” Short of a band, it’s performed with a voice synthesizer (Vocaloid) and a heavy mix of analog-recorded and digitally-produced sounds.

It’s also a way of exploring new ideologies of computing — one that is critical of AI, reflexive about how it might be used, and willing to imagine new uses for what we’re building.

Communication in the Presence of Noise (2023)

The latest release, available through the Canadian No Type Label:

”For Communication in the Presence of Noise, chief architect Eryk Salvaggio crafted eleven brazenly intellectual pop songs that point outward at the world’s problems and lost solutions. A surprisingly grittier and dancier follow-up to the self-released 2020 debut The Central Memory or 2021’s No Type release, The Day Computers Became Obsolete, Communication in the Presence of Noise sees Salvaggio putting more of his human side after trying to push the AI forward for so long. If past albums were collaborations with the constraints of the tools he was working with, this new release tilts the balance towards the artist’s own agency. It’s a return to form after Salvaggio’s solo album Worlding, which saw him collaborate with mushrooms to exquisite effect.”

 
 

THE DAY COMPUTERS BECAME OBSOLETE (2021)

This IS NOT FASCIST DISCO (2020)

THE CENTRAL MEMORY (2020)


Other Projects

Worlding: Sympoetic Mycology (2022)

A cassette release of experiments in mushroom-synthesizer systems, part of an installation at the Michigan State University Collaboratory with Claudia Westermann and Vinny Montag in 2022.


The Absentees: Gaussian Pop (2024)

Sounds produced by applying strategies of creative misuse to commercial sound-generating diffusion models designed to generate pop music. Strategies include diffusion loops (prompting the image for the very noise it is meant to remove in its generation process), impossible texts (lyrics based on punctuation marks, ASCII art images) and shattering the illusion of presence (lyrics which deliberately draw attention to the absence of human performers and emotion in the music, emphasizing the role of training data).

This is also meant to be a hauntological record, steeped in the logic of reanimating an archive of past recordings via abstractions.