Jonathan Wilson channels Magritte and the Muppets in his new AI-created video ‘Marzipan’. “AI” may as well mean “Acid Inspired” as the entire video is a colorful stream of conscious trip. The song starts softly with a gentle piano and brushes on the drums and then builds to a string fueled crescendo before it builds even further with a blast of horns and swing drums before descending back to the comfort of the piano that starts the song off.
Wilson describes the songs origins, “With my new single ‘Marzipan’ I wanted to break out of any and all comfort zones I may have lapsed into as a writer, narrator, producer, or player,” says Wilson. “I discovered a little-known song called ‘Warm Rumours’ from the early 70’s that was playful, risky, experimental, and took no prisoners. I wrote the string and horn arrangements for Marzipan myself, and it was a pleasure to have these wonderful players put my melodies on this recording, and into the gentle listener’s ears. I wanted a Walker Brothers’ ‘The Electrician’ string moment at some point in my life, that degree of beauty, and I think this gets me close.”
The technology used to create the ‘Marzipan’ video was AI stable diffusion, a latent text-to-image diffusion model. This technology is conducive to illustrating the vivid, psychedelic, dreamlike lyrical journey of the song. The story and the technology used in the music video also pay homage to the great psychedelic warrior Terence Mckenna.
You can find Wilson touring with Roger Waters as guitarist and vocalist on the ‘This is Not a Drill’ tour.
