Description
The final single from Spectres channels the Anima, which Jung defined as "an archetypal image of woman in the male psyche... a pervasive influence in a man’s life. The anima is the archetype of life itself."
Comprising 13 experimental tracks produced over the last seven years, Spectres is the 28th release in my discography but my first ever completely solo full-length album. While working on this record, I delved deep into Jungian psychology, concepts from which became central to the project. All 13 tracks are named after archetypes—innate, universal forces that shape our experience of the world.
Spectres is also a visual art project. For each track, I crowd-sourced images associated with the corresponding archetype. These image collections were used to train bespoke Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), simulating the complex interplay between individual psyche and collective unconscious. A further GAN was trained on selected outputs from all the previous GANs, uniting the various archetypes to form an integrated Self.
By limiting the training time of these AI models, I found I could achieve results that mirrored the formation of archetypal symbols as I imagine them deep in our collective unconscious: elusive yet powerful forms emerging from abstract swirls of colour. From thousands of outputs, I selected and manually edited one per archetype to create unique artworks for each track. A collection of 144 further images from this project dropped under the title Spectral Shadows.
Ultimately, Spectres is more than a collection of WAVs and JPGs; it is a dialogue between the personal and the universal, a multidisciplinary exploration of the forces that connect us all. The album has taken me on a transformative seven-year journey through sound, imagery and psyche. In the process, individual and collective experience harmonise, casting a light into the profound depths of human interconnectedness.
