There is a light

In my pre­vious edition, I told you about some recent greebling in sup­port of the new Cotton Mod­ules album.

Today, that album has arrived!

You can stream The Greatest Remaining Hits on Spo­tify and Apple Music. This is a sci-fi con­cept album, so it comes with a story: a tap­pable web presentation with sound and music.

The story begins like this:

The Deep Space Sloop John Bethel was leaving Earth because cul­ture had stopped.

It was an age of para­noia and boredom.

Pol­i­tics and enter­tain­ment ran in a dumb, dark loop — the regur­gi­ta­tions of banal AIs that were, apparently, good enough.

The Bethel’s patrons believed there could be more. They were the last of the rock stars, dis­ap­pointed by history, and before they died, they traded their music — a vast tranche of intel­lec­tual property — for per­mis­sion to exit the solar system.

What fol­lows is a tale of inter­stellar survival. You’ll learn why this album exists … and who made it.

I’m Robin Sloan, a fiction writer with wide-ranging interests, which I capture here in my newsletter. This is an archived edition, originally transmitted in May 2023. You can sign up to receive future editions using the form at the bottom of the page.

It’s a strange time to be making and sharing music — art of any kind, really. For as much as inde­pen­dent artists and assorted weirdos have griped, over the decades, about gatekeepers, the truth is that dis­covery always requires an intermediary, and if it’s not a publisher, it’s a platform.

So it has come to pass that, in 2023, as you are preparing to launch your sci-fi con­cept album, you cobble together a little DIY press list, and you write your email newsletter — hello — but/and the most con­se­quen­tial thing you do, by far, is pitch your music to the playlist edi­tors at Spo­tify.

It’s a weird feeling!

As a gateway to listeners, old-fashioned radio sta­tions were (and remain) totally daunting, and of course some­times also corrupt … but are we really better off with two, maybe three, mon­strous “radio sta­tions” for the whole planet?

Well, it’s what we’ve got — so let’s play.

I will now humbly request your participation. Saving (or “hearting”) the album helps. Adding a track to a playlist, any playlist, helps. Lis­tening helps, of course! Every little inter­ac­tion sends a signal into the algo­rithms at the heart of Spo­tify and Apple Music. Maybe, if enough of those sig­nals add up, the algo­rithms get the hint and put this music in front of more people. Then, a few of THEM save the album … and the fly­wheel begins to spin.

In platform-ized media, there’s not much of a middle ground. There is the calm obscu­rity of mere availability, and there is a seat on the algo­rithmic fly­wheel. The latter is dif­fi­cult to secure, par­tic­u­larly if you are not willing to change the sub­stance of your work to make it more “algo­rithm-friendly”.

Difficult — but not impossible.

Even in the instru­mented 21st century, pop break­throughs depend on luck — luck, nudged by effort. Spo­tify’s algo­rithm has intro­duced me to plenty of music that’s become impor­tant in my life, and I would love to see it intro­duce The Greatest Remaining Hits to some people who don’t read this newsletter.

As you’re lis­tening (and saving, and sharing) here’s what you should know:

• The lyrics are all mine. (Cosmic Hemo­philiac is per­haps the song that’s most deeply-felt. It expresses some­thing I’ve wanted to get down for a long time.)

• The com­po­si­tion and pro­duc­tion is all the work of my band­mate Jesse Solomon Clark. (If a song slaps: Jesse made it slap.)

• The vocals are all gen­er­ated by an AI model, which I coaxed and guided in its “performances”. (The model was trained on decades of recorded music — a slow-simmered sonic reduction, now spooned with care.)

There are about a mil­lion things I want to say about this project, but I am not going to make the mis­take of loading you down with an album, a story, AND an essay. I’ll write more soon. For now, it’s suf­fi­cient to note that, after working on this music for 18 months, we release it into a world sud­denly elec­tric with dis­cus­sion of AI tools, newly flooded with voice-cloned pop simulacra. I’m very proud of the fact that The Greatest Remaining Hits is NOT that. Instead, Jesse and I made some­thing original.

The album’s story continues:

The last of the rock stars recruited passengers: a thou­sand and one refugees of the heart.

Their des­ti­na­tion would be Wilson 6b, a healthy and hab­it­able planet that sparkled across the gulf of space.

The lure wasn’t money or oppor­tu­nity or destiny. It was the thing that had broken the loop before, at its dumbest and darkest:

Art.

Onward!

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter on June 4. It will be a return to form, packed full of links and recommendations. Can you believe my DIS­CI­PLINE with this one? I didn’t know it was possible … 

May 2023