Bi-Weekly-ish Newsletter #54 w/ 🎤 Usher, 🧬 Elevenlabs & 🎵 Text-to-Sound Design, 🎻 Emily Harp, 🎙️ Damo Suzuki and 🍕 Prosecco & Pizza.
Oant Moarn readers,
Thank you for joining me in this latest dispatch of the bi-weekly-ish newsletter focusing on culture, music and tech, brought to you by me: Marcel Alexander Wiebenga.
This edition features something about the Super Bowl and the Usher performance, how the company ElevenLabs is opening up the world to text-to-sound design, the YouTube channel of @emilyharpist, which gives a great, fun, and strangely soothing insight into the creative process of music composers, Damo Suzuki who is no more and a get together featuring pizza and mass amounts of Prosecco we're organizing.
Enjoy!
1. Super Bowl 2024
The Synthesis of Sports, Songs and Sales.
Well, that was the Super Bowl again!
The yearly World-Super-Bowl-Cup-Champions-League of football that does not involve an actual ball, but does involve the best of advertising and music used in advertising, as per two posts I did about that here and here.
It also featured a Yenius campaign by the Yenius himself, which supposedly cost 0 dollars to produce but was rumored, by Ye himself, to have cost 7M in media buy, which it later turned out it didn't, but has netted Ye $19.3 million in clothing sales and pushed his new album "Vultures 1" to the number-one spot in 100 countries.
Beyoncé, in a masterstroke at this year's ad fiesta, leveraged a Verizon commercial to sell Verizon's "unbreakable" service by attempting to break it by debuting (read sell) new music during the big game. Not Beyoncé's first rodeo with telecom giants and somewhat reminiscent of a 2007 ad promoting her Samsung phone collaboration that is now a tech collectible.
The unequivocal main musical icon of this year's Super Bowl was Usher, who took care of the halftime show. As part of Apple Music's exclusive content for Usher's 'Road to Apple Music Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show', Apple just released a long-form masterpiece, filmed with over 40 iPhone 15 Pros and Pro Maxes. Crafted by TBWA\Media Arts Lab and HPLA and featuring Lil Jon, Alicia Keys, and Usher himself.
A vivid reminder that today, everything is becoming content.
2. ElevenLabs' Auditory Ambition
Pioneering the Path to AI-Generated Soundscapes
Unless you've been entirely off-grid, you must have encountered two things in the past few days: 1. A meme involving an uncomfortable, out-of-place-looking Mark Zuckerberg as part of a UFC team, and 2. raving Hollywoord-will-never-be-the-same reviews concerning OpenAI's recently released text-to-video AI Generator, Sora.
ElevenLabs, the company leading the way in Generative Voice AI, quickly jumped into the hype to showcase what they're developing, something that can best be described as text-to-sound design. The video below showcases the first Sora demo, but with added sound design. How far in development they are and when they'll release this product is unclear, however there is no doubt in my mind that this will be soon.
These developments reiterate how special this day and age is, how AI, specifically AI around creativity, is changing daily, and how this defines the time we live through with all its challenges and opportunities.
3. Meet Emily Hopkins
Harmonious Harp Harmonics
Moving away from everything digital to something extremely analog. For the past couple of weeks, I've been obsessed with the videos of Emily Hopkins, also known as Emily the Harpist. Emily, as her nickname and social media handle suggests, is a harpist who also ventures into media composition and YouTube content creation.
On her YouTube channel, she remarkably showcases all three talents. In a series she calls "Secret Sauce," Emily unboxes strange instruments, pedals, and other unique music tech. She then incorporates these into an impromptu composition for a video game soundtrack she's inspired by.
What truly resonates with me is not just the showcase of creativity and composition skills, but the insight into the 'why' behind each decision. It's one thing to appreciate a composer's work; it's another entirely to be brought into their world, understanding the rationale behind their choices and the impact of those decisions on their creative output.
Emily's videos do exactly this, making them a must-watch for anyone involved in music production or interested in the creative process of composing music.
4. Damo Suzuki RIP
Street Performer to Krautrock Legend
Damo Suzuki, the legendary singer of the German experimental Krautrockers CAN, has joined the jam session in the afterlife.
Damo Suzuki, real name Kenji Suzuki, was born in 1950 in Japan and moved to Europe in the late '60s. He got around being a street performer in Munich, where he caught the attention of CAN bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit, who then asked him to join the band
Suzuki appeared on three highly influential albums: Tago Mago (1971), Ege Bamyası (1972), and Future Days (1973). The second album featured two “hit” songs, "Spoon," which was used as the theme of a German TV thriller, Das Messer, and "Vitamin C," which has been sampled by countless artists and has appeared in quite some TV shows and commercials.
In his later years, despite battling cancer, Damo dedicated his time to traveling the globe and engaging in countless jam sessions with local musicians (stoners), known as "Damo Suzuki's Network of Sound Carriers." His aim was simple yet profound: "for musicians to communicate with each other and with the audience. No egos involved! Just musicians sending smoke signals to each other and responding in kind."
In 2005, I was one of those sound carriers playing congas in Rotown, Rotterdam. The experience was odd, to say the least, and the session wasn't great... also to say the least. A reminder from a fellow sound carrier that day revealed Damo's frustration with our group for having "practiced" before the session—a deviation from the spontaneity he cherished.
Reflecting on Damo's legacy, I see him as a circumstantial genius, perfectly aligned with CAN's ethos and the broader musical landscape. My personal experience, though not what I had hoped, underscores the authenticity and artistic integrity that Damo carried throughout his life. Something that is shown by the hundreds of sessions on his website that he meticulously chronicled as a testament to his enduring commitment to artistry.
Below is a glimpse of CAN live with Damo Suzuki.
Let his legacy live on while he Rests In Noise.
5. Prosecco & Pizza-Palooza
Ain’t No Party Like an Office Party
There's nothing better than a good office party! That's why we at Ringo and our landlords at Audentity are hosting a get-together to celebrate life, the joy it brings, and the progress we're making at Ringo.
Believing that being on this newsletter list makes you a fun person, consider yourself invited to our Prosecco and Pizza-palooza on February 29th at Blankenstraat 404-406 here in Amsterdam.
This is come one, come all, but do give us a little RSVP/heads-up for Prosecco buying purposes by emailing me at marcel@thisisringo.com.
Thats it for this edition. Have a great weekend, perhaps see you the 29th and as always….
Marcel