“A sophisticated AI neural network tracks and selectively erases Telefon Tel Aviv from the transient spaces of the nighttime Los Angeles Landscape…”
TELEFON TEL AVIV – DREAMS ARE NOT ENOUGH – COMING OUT ON 27.SEPT.2019
The return of storied Southern Gothic electronic entity Telefon Tel Aviv is as unexpected as it is impressive. Their three influential albums of the 2000’s— Fahrenheit Fair Enough, Map Of What Is Effortless, and Immolate Yourself—charted an increasingly turbulent and textured vision of post-IDM synthetic songcraft, until the sudden passing of founding member Charlie Cooper in 2009 ceased the project, presumably forever. During the decade since, co-founder Josh Eustis has performed with, produced, mixed, and mastered countless artists, from high-profile institutions (Nine Inch Nails, Puscifer, Apparat) to underground fixtures (Belong, Vatican Shadow, Drab Majesty, Tropic Of Cancer), in addition to his own solo and collaborative work in Sons Of Magdalene and Second Woman. But years of reflection and processing gradually seeded in him a desire to revive TTA and venture a fourth full-length, in the spirit of what they started: Dreams Are Not Enough.
Today Telefon Tel Aviv share the video for “a younger version of myself,” directed by Lance Drake.
“This is sort of a love letter to the lonely places in LA, a city that is overrun with humanity but still full of emptiness and a sort of hard underbelly that isn’t really seen unless it’s sought out. It seemed an appropriate backdrop for the socio-political commentary of the song, since the loneliness resulting from the farce of American individualism and our current post-capitalist dread are consistent daily counterweights to happiness and peace for far too many, while we also grapple with our own personal issues.”
– Josh Eustis
“When the conversation to do a video with Telefon Tel Aviv began with a love letter to the transient spaces of Los Angeles at night and collaborating with an artist who built an AI neural network to track and erase the artist from the video – I couldn’t say no.”
– Lance Drake, Director
“Last autumn I was researching the topic of organism and its environment, and how to visualize the interconnection between the two. After all, we are made of what we eat, where we live, what tools we use as well as all the non-human entities that live on and in us.
One approach I took was to let the machine find and remove human bodies and let it fill in what it thinks would belong there. As a result, a gooey, trembling, impermanent mass would appear instead of a body, a mass full of sticks and stones, clouds and lights, walls and birds and all the other stuff that surrounds us in our daily lives.
In addition, letting the machine decide what constitutes a human body, letting the machine remove what it sees feels… wrong somehow; feels as if Asimov’s three laws of AI are in need of an amendment – ‘You shall not remove those who created you’.” –
Michail Rybakov, AI Artist
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