Experimental composer, electronic musician, and visual artist Mads Krue Bugge, known as Skarv, has just released his latest album, Polymer Veil. This innovative project showcases collaborations with notable figures from the Copenhagen underground scene as well as interactions with outdated large language models, crafting a sonic experience that mixes synthetic sounds with fragmented vocals. The album interrogates the complex interplay between plastic and artificial intelligence, raising poignant questions about authenticity and our increasingly synthetic existence.
Polymer Veil unfolds parallel narratives surrounding artificiality, with each track probing the implications of being “fake” in a technologically dominated world. The title itself is a nod to the long-chain molecules that form the building blocks of DNA, cellulose, and plastics, mirroring the intricate construction of the album, where each note seamlessly connects to the next. Standout tracks such as ‘Narrative Exploit’ present video game-inspired beats, while ‘Spit Gold Lip Gloss’ features wandering synthesizers that create a sense of exploration. The collaboration with ill and Nemo on ‘Composite A/B’ introduces moments of gentleness, providing a stark contrast to the ominous ‘False Progress’, which warns with the haunting refrain, “don’t trust the industry”, echoing themes found in Aïsha Devi’s ‘Uupar-Theory’. Ambient stretches throughout the album work to balance the intensity present in tracks like the ASMR-inspired sonic journey ‘Nylon Fuses With Skin’.
A significant aspect of Polymer Veil is Skarv’s collaboration with GPT-3, an outdated language model, which influences the album’s lyrical depth. Tracks like ‘Skin Across Deep’, ‘Success’, and ‘Non-Stick Bead Of Insight’ incorporate AI-generated text, creating a disorienting exploration of cognition and creativity. Reflecting on this posthuman collaboration, Skarv shares, “The experience of generating and selecting text shifted how I view my own cognition, my creative process. I slowly began to see the world around me as data, and my nervous system a filter, a constantly updated generative model. I grew up thinking the fake, the plastic, the synthetic were inherently bad – now, I’m questioning if that’s what we all are”.
Skarv’s discography includes the industry-focused A Memory Like Any Other and the tech-centric EP Haptic Feedback, and he is also a member of the electro-acoustic group Første Kvartal. On Polymer Veil, he is joined by collaborators ill, Nemo, LM Madsen, and Alto Aria, further blurring the boundaries between the human and the machine while leaving a void where the “natural” once thrived.
Polymer Veil is out now via Rhizome, a Copenhagen-based label co-founded by Aria Leth Schütze and Mads Krue Bugge in 2020. Rhizome champions experimental music and alternative release formats, emphasizing the vibrant Copenhagen underground scene and adding to its roster of releases with the compilation albums bag/belly/box and Hypersea.
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