The Velvet Sundown: A ghost band with no proof of life

Have you heard of the sunset in velvet? It’s a bit like the velvet basement, except that the velvet basement is definitely real, and the jury has always been released for sunset in velvet.

The photos of the group seem remarkably generated by AI – too clean, not textured enough, strangely inhuman, but it has accumulated more than 372,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. Their organic indicates that they are “quietly captivating” and use these strange and non -specific metaphors so common in a text generated by AI, as comparing the music of the group to “a perfume that suddenly brings you somewhere that you did not expect”.

Their organic claims that he was trained by the singer and player of Mellotron Gabe Farrow, the guitarist Lennie West, the synth Milo Raines and the percussionist Orion “Rio” Del Mar. None of them has ever been interviewed. And not that a social media account is necessarily proof of life, but none of them has an Instagram, Tiktok or Facebook account – and the group itself either. In fact, none of the members of the group seems to have a single shredding of an internet presence.

The song credits on Spotify are also a bit suspected. Most of the artists will have several people in the credits, but the credits on Spotify for each of their songs are “interpreted by”, “written by” and “source” by the Sundown Velvet. No producer is listed.

“The sunset in velvet is not trying to revive the past”, reads their spotify. “They rewrite it. They look like the memory of a time that has never really happened … but in one way or another, they make it feel real.”

Do they play with us? Listening to the group myself, it seems generated by AI-the words lack specificity and the music itself lacks depth. But it’s also a bit … good music? Suno and Udio, two of the music generators most used by AI, have “produced soulless slops” for about two years, as Music Radar reported, and if the velvet sunset uses these tools to create music, it could be one of the first uses of platform technology to “capture the imagination of the public in the way most of the criticism of technology had feared”.

On YouTube, there is an entire ecosystem of music generated by AI. A star is the AI ​​for culture, a chain that reinvents rap and R&B tracks as vintage Motown or Blues cuts – with fictitious artists and organic generated by AI to correspond. A particularly notable example: a coverage rendered by the AI ​​of “Turn On The Lights” by Future, which was then sampled by rapper Jpegmafia on his latest album.

Although the group did not confirm that it was generated by AI, it did not do much to prove that people are wrong. Music Radar says that “undoubtedly carries the Lo-Fi of a Suno creation”. A Reddit article says that there is no “unleashing of evidence on the Internet that this group has ever existed”.

But, in the end, there is no real evidence that the group is generated by the AI, and this is where the fight resides. When music has also becomes difficult to catch, which consists in catching it? The problem led some users to publish their disappointment in Spotify for not having informed listeners that the group is or not generated by AI. “We should boycott Spotify now,” said one person on Reddit, and another person responded, stressing that the group is also on Apple Music and Amazon Music.

Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comments from Mashable.