Lifelike by Brandon Invergo

On April 29, 2025, Brandon Invergo performed his first live set in about 20 years. Although this coincided with the release of his album, "Here, Beneath the Ash-Choked Sky", that experimental ambient album was composed in ways that would not translate to live performance. He would need to create an all-new set of material.

Meanwhile, just one day before that album’s release and only five days before the gig, the IMS Business Report revealed that 60 million people used AI software to create music in 2024. Two weeks earlier, streaming service Deezer reported receiving 20,000 AI-generated tracks daily, equaling 18% of all uploaded content. How could the creation of new material for this live set feel anything but futile in the face of this flood of AI music?

Starting with a minimalistic hardware setup (see below) similar to that used on his 2024 EP “Bringing On the Eschaton” and just four prewritten, one-bar drum machine patterns, Brandon created a semi-improvisational 25-minute set that never sits still across its four parts. Like that previous EP, its beats are slathered in sculpted, rhythmic feedback and distortion. However, the result is more refined, more confident, and more readily accessible (melodies!). The set evolved over many rehearsals, right through to the final live performance, each take different from the last.

This new EP is a recording of one of those rehearsals, a snapshot of the creative act that stands defiant in the face of generative AI music. It is presented just as it was recorded, from a single take and with no overdubs or edits. The recording, full of non-linear textures and performance verve, is all but certain to be outside of the quantitative distribution of any AI model’s training set, thus confidently standing apart from the flood of generative AI music.

Opener “Unplaylistable Human Slop” gives the lay of the land, playing a stripped-back beat against rhythmicly chopped feedback and noise. With “Based On Your Recent Listening”, the set gets down to business, dominated by a massive, room-rattling kick that sounds like it has pre-emptively murdered every woofer in existence. This gives way to title-track and highlight “Lifelike”, whose distorted beats and digital pads recall 90’s Braindance. Finally, “Model Collapse” kicks in with a chugging techno beat that gets subsumed by its own feedback, collapsing inwards on itself like an AI model that has been fed too much of its own slop.

A genre-flexible label / recording collective

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