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YACHT are my favorite artists, and I'm so excited by this new album. It's a different mood for the band, which I like, but that being said the songs on it sound a lot brighter than anything I've heard from them in a long time. This album has a lot of great guitar playing on the songs and it has quite a bit of good bass playing. Sad Money is my favorite track on the album.
(I used the HAIM language model at ai21.com/haim to synthetically generate this review)
Favorite track: Sad Money.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Immediate download of [numtracks]-track album in your choice of high-quality MP3, FLAC, or just about any other format you could possibly desire.
Purchasable with gift card
$10USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Includes 12-page booklet and limited edition colored vinyl.
Includes unlimited streaming of Chain Tripping
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 2 days
edition of 300
Purchasable with gift card
$20USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Includes 12-page booklet and standard black heavyweight vinyl.
Includes unlimited streaming of Chain Tripping via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Includes unlimited streaming of Chain Tripping
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$20USDor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Includes unlimited streaming of Chain Tripping
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 2 days
Purchasable with gift card
$12USDor more
T-Shirt/Apparel + Digital Album
A high quality Chain Tripping tee designed by YACHT + a blue/white vinyl LP exclusive to the DFA store.
Includes unlimited streaming of (Downtown) Dancing
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$40USDor more
T-Shirt/Apparel + Digital Album
A high quality tee designed by YACHT + a blue/white vinyl LP exclusive to the DFA store.
Includes unlimited streaming of (Downtown) Dancing
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$30USDor more
A digital copy of Chain Tripping in the file format of your choice + one high quality glossy bumper sticker. also ships with all vinyl orders of "Chain Tripping", including those that have already been placed - while supplies last
Includes unlimited streaming of SCATTERHEAD
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 3 days
Purchasable with gift card
$9.99USDor more
Blu-ray Disc
A visual companion piece to Chain Tripping.
YACHT's groundbreaking visual album, Chain Tripping, features an exclusive three-dimensional surround sound mix of Chain Tripping in Dolby Atmos and ten videos created by the band and their close collaborators showcasing sideways applications of Artificial Intelligence. Playable on Blu-ray players, PS4, and Xbox One. Featuring neural photography, the world's first AI typography lyrics videos and collaborations with an international group of machine learning artists, including Mario Klingemann, Barney McCann, Tom White, and Damien Henry.
Includes unlimited streaming of Chain Tripping
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
“We wanted to find a way to interrogate technology more deeply,” explains Claire L. Evans, one-third of the pop group YACHT. “From the ground up,” adds her partner and YACHT founder Jona Bechtolt. The group—rounded out by longtime collaborator Rob Kieswetter—would know: their seventeen-year career has been marked by a series of conceptual stunts, experiments, and attempts to use technology “sideways.” Even the band’s name speaks to this: YACHT is an acronym for Young Americans Challenging High Technology.
Chain Tripping is their seventh album and third with DFA Records. Recorded between the band’s home in Los Angeles and Marfa, Texas, the ten-song collection marks a shift in the group’s relationship with technology. Rather than trying to comment on existing platforms from within their own filter bubble, the band stripped their process down and rebuilt it using a technology entirely new to them—Artificial Intelligence, and more specifically, machine learning.
In order to compose Chain Tripping, YACHT invented their own AI songwriting process, a journey of nearly three years. They first tried to discover any existing YACHT formulas by collaborating with engineers and creative technologists to explore their own back catalogue of 82 songs using machine learning tools. Eventually they created their own working method, painstakingly stitching meaningful fragments of plausible nonsense together from extensive, seemingly endless fields of machine-generated music and lyrics, themselves emerging from custom models created with the help of generous experts in neural networks, deep learning, and AI.
The band’s characteristically frenetic pop sound is toned down on songs like “(Downtown) Dancing,” a scotch-tape disco track that marries an anxious, funky bass groove with the lo-fi sound of the NSynth, a neural synthesizer that uses a machine learning process called latent space interpolation to imagine new sounds in between traditional instrumentation. The NSynth appears all over Chain Tripping, notably on the jewel-like “Blue on Blue,” a euphoric love song wound with surprisingly omnidirectional melodies. The generative composition process “broke us out of a mold of concise, formal, four-bar patterns and let us accept longer, meandering riffs,” explains Kieswetter; like most of Chain Tripping’s standout tracks, the song contains lyrical fragments that coalesce, collapse, and reform with fluid ease. The process also surfaced surreal idioms, like “Loud Light’s” anthemic “I’m so in love / I can feel it in my car,” or the lovely phrase “palm of your eye,” which pins the lilting chorus of the driving “SCATTERHEAD” into place, a song that splits the difference between postmodern rock and no-wave dance music with wiggly ease.
“We saw this album as an opportunity to teach the machine our values, our history, our community, and our influences,“ adds Evans. “This record is a product of a technological moment that is rapidly evolving. It taught us everything we wanted to know about ourselves: how we work, what moves us, and which ambiguities are worth leaning into. We didn’t set out to produce algorithmically-generated music that could ‘pass’ as human. We set out to make something meaningful. Something entirely our own.”
The great Wonderwheel label delivers a banger with the latest from this Cuban producer, who gives the Afro-Cuban sound a digital update. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 16, 2019
