“It’s marketing. It’s trolling”: AI band The Velvet Sundown are an ‘art hoax’, confirms 'spokesman'

It’s been confirmed – The Velvet Sundown are an AI band and their music was made using the AI tool Suno.

According to (someone claiming to be) ‘band’ spokesperson and 'adjunct member' Andrew Frelon, the whole thing is an ‘art hoax’. Speaking to Rolling Stone, Frelon said: “It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?'”

• Read more: "There's not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed": This apparently AI-generated artist is racking up hundreds of thousands of Spotify streams

Pushed on how the actual music was created, Frelon, in the end, conceded that 'at least some' of the songs were created in Suno, and utilised Suno's Persona feature, which creates a consistent vocal avatar across different tracks. That's the same tech Timbaland has used in the creation of TaTa, the "living, learning, autonomous music artist built with AI" the star producer revealed last month.

When their (its?) music started gaining traction on Spotify last month, many observers caught a whiff that something was not right. The band seemed to emerge from nowhere, with no prior online presence or social media presence.

Their publicity shots looked like sepia-tinted AI creations and the music was a simulacrum of late '60s Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter fare.

Perhaps most obvious of all was their lineup blurb. The Velvet Sundown comprise ‘mellotron sorcerer’ Gabe Farrow, ‘free-spirited percussionist’ Orion “Rio” Del Mar, ‘synth alchemist’ Milo Rains and guitarist Lennie West.

Anyway, the AI cat is out of the virtual bag. “Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” Frelon told Rolling Stone. “We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now.

"So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?”

Of course, there is nothing new at all in the idea of a fake band. The practice of creating them was standard during the era of late 60s/early 70s bubblegum. The Archies? Josie And The Pussycats? The Wombles? None of them real – all their music recorded by session musicians.

The difference with Velvet Sundown is a) the music, we now know for sure, was created by AI and b) the ‘band’ appeared to be harking back to a scene in which authenticity was a prized commodity.

And unlike Timbaland’s controversial AI creation TaTa, there was subterfuge in the whole Velvet Sundown creation, and whilst Frelon is unlikely to be the last person to try and fool the Internet that an AI-generated artist is real, the stumbling point for any future ‘art hoax’ is surely when a fake band gains so much traction that the demand is there to actually see them live.