Damon Albarn has confirmed that he is writing the score for a new Luca Guadagnino movie, which centres around the founders of ChatGPT.
The Blur and Gorillaz icon first shared that he would be working with the director on a new film at the start of the year, when he confirmed that he was joining up with the Challengers and Call Me By Your Name creator for a film called Artificial.
Speaking to Uncut at the time, he said that the upcoming movie is about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and he would be “singing some songs and writing some electronic and orchestral backing” for it.
Now, he has shared more updates about the project, and said to The Needle Drop that working on the film has made him more convinced than ever that artificial intelligence is unable to make meaningful art.
“I’ve been quite involved with AI because I’ve been making a score for a movie called Artificial at the moment, which is all about the founders of ChatGPT,” he told the outlet.
“So I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Music and art should not be easy.”
“Once it becomes easy, it’s meaningless. In a way, it’s the things you don’t see or hear that make it art,” he added. “It’s a weird intuition that the listener has that picks up on the journey that the artist has been through to make that particular thing with the tone of the voice, etc. You can’t replace that.”
He continued: “I think there was a foolish moment where the big corporations thought AI was going to make their life easier and more money,” he explained. “And well, that is not the case. I don’t think it’s possible for AI to make soulful music.”
As highlighted by Consequence, Artificial is set during the five-day period in 2023 when Altman was fired and rehired as CEO of the ChatGPT company. The film is written by Simon Rich, and it stars Andrew Garfield as Altman and Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk.
It will see Albarn and Guadagnino join forces for the first time, following on from Nine Inch Nails icon Trent Reznor composing music for the director’s previous films, Bones and All, Challengers, Queer, and After the Hunt.
Outside of his work with Blur and Gorillaz, Albarn has written music for the 2015 Alice In Wonderland musical, scored Abderrahmane Sissako’s opera Le Vol du Boli, and made an opera based on the Elizabethan scientist John Dee.
Gorillaz shared their star-studded ninth studio album ‘The Mountain’ on Friday (February 27) via their own Kong label.
In a four-star review, NME wrote: “‘The Mountain’ is an album that celebrates the love you leave behind, the people you touch, the spirit of giving more than you take, how we’re all the same when it’s done. As Albarn puts it ‘Orange County’: “I’m not your enemy, your atoms gone, you stand alone, and everything you gave to someone you love – that’s the hardest thing”.
They recently played the first show on ‘The Mountain’ tour in Los Angeles, and up next, Gorillaz will head out on a UK and Ireland tour that includes a one-off headline show at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on June 20 – something that Albarn made a recent quip at.
Before that gig, the band will also play some warm-up shows in Bradford, and from there will make stops at numerous European festivals over the summer, including Electric Picnic, Primavera Sound Barcelona and Porto, and Rock Werchter. Visit here for tickets.
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