Silicon songster: a playlist by Kaj Duncan David

That’s why an imaginative, existential, challenging interpretation of AI’s implications – and of wider technological quirks and quandaries – is an encouraging, worthwhile prospect.

That’s not to say Kaj Duncan David’s poetically titled album ‘Only Birds Know How to Call the Sun and They Do It Every Morning‘ – released earlier this year on Hyperdelia and made with the Danish contemporary ensemble Scenatet – is about AI per se. Instead, it’s a record that encompasses expansive ideas and concepts centred on ‘language, human development, machine intelligence, altered states of consciousness & more’. Nevertheless, it’s a piece of work that speaks to our AI-enabled present, through music which feels fluid, indeterminate and alive.

A British-Danish composer based in Berlin, Kaj Duncan David has a background rooted in classical music, music theatre, and electronic music. Inspired by trance, psychedelia, Brazilian music, as well as specific lodestars including Talk Talk and Alice Coltrane, Kaj incorporates computer music, minimalism, speculative philosophy and science fiction into multi-disciplinary projects across music, theatre and dance.

After his debut 2021 album ‘All Culture Is Dissolving’, Kaj released ‘Only Birds Know How…’ in the Summer and it’s taken us a while to get our heads around it. Described as ‘a psychedelic reimagining of how language develops‘, Kaj defines the record as a ‘a sort of science fiction concept album depicting a consciousness forming and the states this subject passes through in the process of discovering the world‘.

Like hearing cognitive development in real time – with lots of vocoder – it’s a one-of-a-kind listening experience. You might file it next to Laurie Anderson, James Ferraro, Sun Araw, Holly Herndon and Visible Cloaks – if you must – but really this is strikingly unique, curiously compelling music. The sad, beautiful, strange sound of machines learning to speak as we do, set to warped “sci-fi chamber music” of beauty, wonder and melancholy. With ‘Only Birds Know How…’, Kaj seems to infuse AI and machine intelligence with human idiosyncrasies and slippage, while at the same time imbuing human expression with alien, futuristic properties. 

The music of Kaj Duncan David on ‘Only Birds Know How…’ reminds us that machine intelligence can be creatively contemplated and reframed, not merely presented as a harbinger of doom through unemployment, brain rot and tech firm omnipotence. It also serves as a reminder that human expression is shaped by trial and error, ambiguity, and at times, ineffability; valuable qualities that can’t be airbrushed.

We’re flawed and so is the technology we’ve created and cultivated, but the outlook might be better if we embraced the messy imperfections and winding paths of human existence, rather than trying to mask and streamline them in evermore elaborate and ultimately self-defeating ways.

Actually, I’m not sure if this is the best way to phrase all this. Let me just fire up Gemini / GPT / Grok.

While that’s loading, here’s a discerning, conceptual playlist put together especially for us by Kaj, based on synthetic voices, an important facet of his recent work. Read on for Kaj’s introduction and dive in below for an illuminating foray into sounds by the likes of Pete Drake, Holly Herndon, Jennifer Walshe, Ben Vida, Hyperdawn & more.

‘I’m interested in synthetic voices because they evoke the borderland between human and machine, lending an uncanny or sci-fi quality to that intrinsically human activity: singing. I’ve chosen eleven examples of music that have inspired me whilst working on my own albums and projects over the last few years using synthetised and made-to-sound-synthetic voices. Consequently, some of the pieces in the playlist make use of purely synthesised voices, while the rest feature human voices that are made to sound synthetic in some way, either through effects or editing or conceptual conceit.’ 

‘Only Birds Know How to Call the Sun and They Do It Every Morning‘ by Kaj Duncan David & Scenatet is out now on Hyperdelia. Listen HERE.