My interview on Hawai’i Public Radio, the deep state agenda, and AI music
I sat down with DW from HPR to discuss independent art, destructive production methods, ecology, and connection to the land. Later, I reflected on legacy media’s agenda and the AI impact on music.
I’ve been an avid NPR listener since I moved to the U.S. There’s just something about live radio, produced and delivered by human journalists who don’t solely thrive on mainstream sensationalism, questionable exclusivity, and attention exhaustion. Today, being presented with something not “suggested” by Big Brother Zuck’s algorithm feels more refreshing than ever. Similar to fresh whole foods vs nutrient-dead junk food, investigative, critical journalism reflects the complexity of our lives rather than a boiled-down, biased, shallow, short-term stimulant.
When I received an invitation from Hawai’i Public Radio, I felt incredibly honored. This invitation was particularly meaningful given how rarely public media engages with independent, unconventional art. Even though I’ve been working on my electric violin live looping sound art project since 2018, I hadn’t gained much recognition from local media. I had already made peace with the fact that art and music seem to have to follow a very specific (feel-good tourism) pattern to gain recognition in this neck of the woods. After leaving the studio that day, I reflected on the importance of being heard in order not to be forgotten, something artists throughout time have struggled with.
I remember, while living and producing in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I experienced much overthinking in the music industry. Creativity and flow were reduced to a mere probability, while the main focus was on sellability through predictability and reinventing the wheel. In contrast, everything I composed since 2018 happened in the present moment, in deep connection with the land, the space, and the audience. My work remains unpredictable and unrepeatable—like a painting.
As with my work, another unpredictable aspect is the influence of AI on art. We already see the first repercussions of AI-generated music: millions of stolen songs train the machines to spit out something predictable, expectable, and—sellable. In fact, a rapidly growing number of music across all streaming platforms is AI-generated, mimicking the music stolen from human artists. AI is also used to influence algorithms and playlists to increase the number of plays, affecting royalties distribution and steering the unaware consumer away from music made by humans to GMO-music generated by AI.
Don’t get me wrong, I generally have nothing against AI—I use ChatGPT myself from time to time, although I find it increasingly difficult because of its lack of accuracy when it comes to fact-checking. The alien helper is surprisingly good at making up stuff and presenting it as facts, which brings me to my next thought.
How easy does AI make it to trick large numbers of humans into believing what a very small number of humans made up, either as a joke or to trick others into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise? This storytelling effect has a long-standing history among our species, especially the creation of gods helped tremendously to keep peasants at bay, long before smartphones.
We notice an increasing amount of conspiratorial nonsense coming from what can be described as the globally intertwined “deep state”1 of the far-right. Many MAGA devotees and conspiracy theorists claim elites and “the media” run a hidden agenda to control humanity. And yes, there’s an agenda—something that fact-based public media (e.g., NPR, PBS, BBC) and my work have in common. However, unlike today’s mainstream media programming like FOX News, Facebook rabbit holes, and TikTok dumbfluencers, this “agenda” isn’t to indoctrinate you with false narratives and harmful conspiracies but to invite you, the listener, to be curious and think critically—two fundamental tools each of us is obligated to commit bringing to the table to strengthen our democracies and therefore a free world of truly free thinkers and truly free speakers.
While working on Pele’s Fire, I reconnected deeply with the powerful forces of volcanic activity—an inspiring reminder of destruction, creation, and growth. We humans have been showing our potential for the destruction of the land and fellow earthlings, including our own species.
But are we capable of destruction from within—capable of destroying what truly harms us, like our Facebook accounts, WhatsApp accounts, or TikTok accounts? Are we willing to create new “accounts,” maybe more personal with more depth and a capacity to withstand complexity rather than a quick fix and a flight mode whenever facing the slightest discomfort due to a simple disagreement?
After all, our time is limited, and so is our attention. Instead of chopping both into ever smaller pieces for Big Tech to trade among each other, wouldn’t it be more beneficial to our mental health to allow for the growth of deeper connections outside such a sterile, controlled environment instead?
What if we listened more deeply to the land? What if we were to unlink more frequently from the World Wide Web of digital information and relink with the World Wide Web of natural information, take a bath in the forest, in the ocean, listening to the air we breathe, or look into the canopy of a tree while relaxing mind and body in a hammock?
There’s much more to say. But for now, I invite you to enjoy the interview.
The “deep state” conspiracy in the United States is a far-right invention. I’m flipping the term here to offer a different perspective. Learn more from Wikipedia, this academic article, and a Brookings analysis.