We got new music for you. A month off the release of Los Believos, Starholder is back and deep in the hyperpop slop of AI music, maxxing Suno out and dropping a 9 song, 25 min EP of schizo tracks on the sonic frontier.
Our last release, Los Believos, was about songwriting, capturing a lost sound and rendering up a band which could have existed out in the hills of Western, MA. For Microtech, we head in the opposite direction and place the music squarely in the latent space of AI pop possibility. The focus is on production, remixing, playing with the new dials and seeing what comes out.
Microtech hyperpop is the best description of the sonic stew on the EP. Hooks abound, fragments catch you for a moment, and then get pushed under an accelerated beat before spinning off in new directions.
Driving this was new control tooling from Suno. We got the ability to direct prompt adherence, model temperature, and audio fidelity to input clips, along with the ability to speed up or slow down a track. All of that was put to work here. Dovetailing with this was the release of Claude 4.0 which showed a big improvement in songwriting, and recognition of Suno prompting as an output form factor. If you are wondering where the fuck a lyric block like this comes from, look no further than the LLMs:[Section A - paranoid confession]
Pentagon monitors our orgasms
Generator sweat tastes like surveillance state
Your mouth transmits CIA frequencies
Through my lymph nodes through my—
There's no overarching formula for the tracks on this EP, but walking through a few of them will demonstrate techniques I'm using.
Note: When I say remixing below, technically I mean covering a song in Suno, changing the prompt and pushing the Weird Dial (model temperature) up to see what comes out. By balancing that with adherence to the original track, you can change the style while holding the underlying song structure in place.
Going Under - Everything here is built off a single vocal hook:
[Sample from a film, female actress]
I think I'm going under going under going under
[Timestretch Bass Drop]
[Chopped and Screwed track mixing]
I like to lead into songs with imagined samples and then spin them out into more than that. In this case, we got a retro, female powerhouse vocal belting this out as a sample and then I just stretched and looped it knowing the model would run with that. From there, we remixed it into an electro clash french house style and fired it.
Code Z - This came from remixing a genre hopping big beat track I made last year, maxing the temperature on the model and getting a majorly strange stew which was like spinning across a liminal radio dial. Within that there was an 11 second clip with huge favela soundsystem vibes that I pulled and rendered a full song out of, employing [jibberish] as my lyric prompt. Not a single word of vocals was written for this, the model just made it all up. Sped that up, remixed, sped the remix up, remixed it again and you got pure liminal global hyperpop:
Anti-Language Love - The only track on the EP that I wrote as a full song. Sonically, this was about deeply interrogating a sound (the Colombian cumbia dub stew Sidestepper put out way back) and then tweaking that in the model.
Lyrically, this is a bit of clever word play around the idea of Anti-Language, which is a special form of language used by a minority group within a broader society to exclude outsiders or create a sense of solidarity. Here we shade the meaning of anti-language using the notion of a safe word as a lover's code only two people understand. Simply put, their love is not safe until they speak a language all their own.
Drone (4gb small remix) - This song originated as an 8 minute space rock epic holding a single droning note for over two minutes in the open. We sped it up, remixed, sped it up, remixed and turned it into this beautiful and compact harmonic pop ballad.
Agent Orange - Think Primitive Radio Gods (from the 90's) meets the Avalanches mashed into a collage that's half social media relationship anxiety, half fragments from the set of Apocalypse Now.
There are certain checkpoints that I use to evaluate how far AI music has come, and this sound has been out of reach until now. Better to listen to this on Spotify in full fidelity, but here's the YT for convenience:
Anyways that's Microtech, 9 tracks clocking in at 25 minutes to deliver a wholly original mixtape for your summer enjoyment.
Listen and share it with friends, gang:
Microtech on Spotify
ChrisF | Starholder
