In the past you had to be able to play to create any kind of music – but the arrival of AI has overturned that completely. Now you can go from a standing-start to streaming audio without touching an instrument or performing a note. So once you take away the mechanics of music creation, what’s left?
UK guitarist and songwriter Charlie Cunningham is not your typical AI protestor. He’s no technophobe; he has long blended tech and technique in beautiful acoustic-centric songs that interweave subtle synth and soundscape elements in a stunningly evocative fashion.
He’s also not a rock star with a goldmine back catalog and regular royalties to protect. But he’s still concerned about AI’s ever-expanding role in music, and the questions it asks of our own creativity and humanity. That idea central to the minimalist, emotive left turn he’s taken with new album In Light.
“I feel like we've almost got desensitized to these colossal moments,” reflects Cunningham. “They just seem to be coming one after the other – it’s normalized the scale of this stuff.”
The album’s almost intentionally fragile charm is a reaction to a host of factors beyond AI, from the wild swings of the political landscape to our waning attention spans and the technical arms race that pervades in music.
“The dexterity at the moment is fascinating, isn’t it?” he says of the guitar scene. “YouTube is allowing people to make huge technical strides. But what stands out is the stuff that’s really close to the emotion. The wow factor of technicality has been diluted somehow.”
Cunningham is no slouch on the fretboard. He spent a year in Spain learning flamenco technique – It’s detectable in the warmth of his acoustic playing – but believes that, against the backdrop of AI production and social media stunt playing, complexity counts for less than ever.
“I’m trying to have fewer variables: to not use plugins, not play to clicks, or isolate guitar and vocals to give you options – to just be liberated,” he says.
“I used to give myself a hard time about imperfections, and it's funny because I didn’t even like listening to perfect music! I think it was not wanting to be rumbled; that imposter thing where you're like, ‘If I let that one in there, they’ll know I'm actually shit!’ But now it's like, ‘Well, that’s the stuff!’
“The challenge now is finding out what makes it human. I don’t completely know yet, but I think discovery is quite a cool thing.”
If making In Light was about trusting your instincts and removing reliance on the tech, what helps you get the right performance as a player?
“Luke Smith, my producer, made a really good point. He said I seem to get to the emotion much quicker when it’s just the guitar. So it’s about if I believe the lyric. That’s where I’ve come unstuck before – it doesn’t sound right until I believe what I’m saying. Then the guitar gets to come into its own because it’s supporting an emotion.
“It’s not letting the critical conscious mind undermine the subconscious. The subconscious is often the direct access – and then we doubt it. With the guitar we start after the fact, going, ‘What was I doing there?’ You start really spoiling a pure idea or thought.
“I’ll say things in lyrics and be like, ‘Okay, now I've got to try and tie them together.’ But if you have the confidence to let that stuff just be there, it tends to then turn into something. Similarly, with the guitar, you don’t need to tech these things up. If you get the pass that connects, you’ve done it really.”
Your guitar technique has a solid grounding, thanks to your period learning flamenco styles in Spain. Do you still have much interest in pushing yourself as a player?
“Yeah, I’m really into that – I always want to progress on the guitar. A big part of me is really into heavy music. I enjoy hearing the different ways you can get that kind of weight. One of the reasons I got into the whole flamenco thing was that rhythmic weight.
“I’m always listening to Converge and what Kurt Ballou, their guitarist and producer, is working on. Heavy music doesn’t have to be just distorted and chuggy. It’s interesting hearing bands like Lankum coming to the fore. You wouldn't call it heavy music, but there’s such weight to it.
“Then Meshuggah and these types of things, just for the drive. That stuff, to me, feels very old, like there’s a real tribal aspect. I’m interested in old folk music too, and I think that does pair up with the heavier stuff. Like Chelsea Wolf – that Blood Moon record that she did with Converge, there’s something that binds all that stuff together.”
At the same time, on this record, you’ve got a track like This I Know, which is whisper quiet. It requires a lot of dexterity to perform at such low volume levels; you’re one twang away from disaster.
“Definitely! It can be frightening when you’re delivering something like that and you’re not using reverbs. It’s pretty exposing; it was tricky. Ulitmately it’s just prep, though.
“Luke has a Martin D18-E from 1959 – it’s one of those guitars where you just start playing it and it feels very special. God knows the last time the strings were changed, but it meant it didn’t have that toppy spank thing, and it gave a lot back. That helped me get into a headspace, especially as I’m used to playing my nylon all the time.”
There’s space for music from machines. The machines-pretending-to-be-humans thing is when it gets a little bit tricky
Did you play much electric on this one?
“A tiny bit. Leo Abrahams, an amazing guitar player, played on a few songs. He’s a producer, writer, composer – all sorts of things. He played on Brian Eno’s last tour and he’s playing with Anohni. He’s very emotive. So, yeah, there’s some electric, but it’s mainly the Martin or my Antonio Bernal nylon-string.
“A lot of the aesthetic came from the Audio Kitchen Big Trees preamp. We fed it through a vintage ARP desk. We definitely cranked things, so it felt like things could break and were kind of precarious.”
The song This House seemingly explores how physical spaces influence music. I think every musician knows how much a room can change a song’s sound and feel.
“Yeah; you just feel it sometimes. I ‘d moved house and bought this little place in Dorset, right next to a 1,000-year-old church, by the graveyard. I think that song's alluding to trying to be perceptive to that stuff. I started writing it and had the lyric about 15 years ago, but it was in my new house that it allowed itself to be finished off.”
The physical space is another frontier of the AI/tech debate too, given the prevalence of IRs and virtual social spaces. Instruments, locations, people – music is a process of vibrations traveling through physical bodies.
“It’s energy. Maybe, as an English person, I find it difficult to talk in those terms, but it is a real thing – that’s what we’re listening out for, and that’s what we’re trying to capture. It’s like how no two gigs are the same. Instead of fighting it, it's about embracing all of those things now.”
Is it wrong to enjoy the music of machines?
“I don’t think so, necessarily. But I think when machines are trying to convince us they're not machines, that’s a different thing altogether. We can enjoy mechanical sounds – sonic art, vibrations, energy, textures. There’s space for music from machines. The machines-pretending-to-be-humans thing is when it gets a little bit tricky.
I’m definitely optimistic about people’s inherent need to hear real stuff and be connected to someone
“We’ve got to be mindful about what the special aspects of humanity are, and where they lie. We should pay a little bit more respect to ourselves as creative beings and be a bit more humble with our approach.
“AI music is more about patting ourselves on the back for how clever we are, how quickly we can do it. We’ve got to make sure we’re not just doing it to congratulate ourselves. Music is very expensive. People have come up with these things because it’s difficult to be a recording artist nowadays. I can see how and why these things have turned up.”
Is there a future for the guitar-wielding singer-songwriter in the AI age?
“The electric guitar came in and revolutionized the whole thing, but people still enjoy listening to an acoustic guitar. So I don’t think AI is the most extreme thing that’s happened in the journey of the instrument – but let’s see.
“I’m definitely optimistic about people’s inherent need to hear real stuff and be connected to someone. The acoustic guitar is very direct and that's one of its big strengths. Ultimately it depends on who’s playing it!”
- In Light is out now.
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