Post-Post-Vibe Cassette. Is That A Thing? I Guess It Is Now.

I still have one more post left to write for my cyborg music series, to which, should you need to refer back to it someday, unlikely as that seems, I have given the quasi-ironic label "Home Taping Is Killing Music". I slay me! 

Also, I remembered to call it a "Label" not a "Tag" - and early on a Monday morning, too. Yay!

The last post, if I get around to writing it, is going to be all about setting up the YouTube channel and how pointless it's going to be, other than as a very convenient place to enjoy my own work. Before I get to that, though, here's an odd little bonus post I wasn't expecting to write at all.

This is a hard post to quantify. Is it about A.I.? Cultural identity? Serendipity? Or maybe it's the new, fast, automatic supernatural.

I suppose I'd better just get on with it so we can all find out together what I'm talking about.

Here's the background for almost everyone reading this, who doesn't use Suno (Hi, Tipa!) To get a song at all, the software, which I suppose we're beholden to refer to as A.I., requires you to enter some kind of description of the sort of music you'd like it to replicate. 

The FAQ, which I didn't even bother to look at until long after I'd stared using the app, tells you virtually nothing about how to do this, referring almost only in passing to "Style of Music", a phrase whoever wrote the article chose to enbolden but not to explain.

The relevant box into which you type your instructions in the app itself is called "Styles" and has the bland instruction "Enter style tags", clearly assuming this is self-explanatory. And it kind of is, although for quite a while I conflated "style" with "genre" in my mind and stuck fairly rigidly to terms I was already familiar with, like "Twee" or" Janglepop" or "Psychobilly".

Fairly soon, however, I started to extemporize, adding descriptive words and phrases indicating moods or techniques such as "sad" or "sweet" or "staccato" or "driving". Then came specific instruments or arrangements - "strings", "cello", "hand-claps", "clean production", "wall of sound" and so on until eventually I was writing mini-essays in note form. There's a 200-character limit but that gets you a lot of description.

Some of this seemed to work, some of it didn't. The software mostly seemed to treat the whole thing as a smorgasbord of suggestions from which it was free to pick and choose as it liked. I noticed that placement of the words and phrases seemed to have some impact so I started putting the most important elements at the beginning and there were always a few instructions, like the gender of the vocalist, that Suno would follow 99% of the time, no matter where they appeared.

Even with experience and care, there was always a significant RNG element to the process. It was impossible to predict which attempt would give me exactly what I'd asked for and which would veer off in some entirely unanticipated direction. Even with the uploaded audio to act as a template, Suno absolutely has a mind of its own and not always a sane mind, either.

The combination of wild unpredictability plus the possibility of hitting the jackpot with a perfect rendition of the song exactly as it was playing in my head made the whole process thrilling, addictive, entertaining and satisfying. If the results had always been what I was looking for first time, I'd have been done with it weeks ago but the randomness keeps me coming back, even though I now have a "finished" version of every song I've uploaded.

Getting back to the style tags, at some point I noticed Suno provides an unlimited number of suggestions in a little box below the input window. For a long time I thought these were from its own Style Library but eventually I figured out they're just examples of things users have actually typed in. The spelling mistakes gave it away.

I found those quite useful on occasion but mostly only because they reminded me of sub-genres I already knew but had forgotten about, like "progressive folk" or ones I'd not heard of but immediately understood, like "emocore". I did discover a couple of well-established but new-to-me genres that I really like that way, too, though. Both "futurepop" and "kawaii future bass", are actual, existing sub-genres and I'm very happy to have been introduced to them.

And then I ran across post-post-vibe cassette.  Say what, now?

The strange combination of words jumped out at me the moment I saw it. It seemed both bizarre and contextually meaningless so I guessed it had to be a micro-genre I'd not happened upon before. Hardly surprising. There are an awful lot of micro-genres now. No-one can be expected to know them all unless they write about the subject for a living.

I was curious so I googled it. There were no relevant results. After some finessing, I finally got google to spit out one link. It went back to Suno, where I'd begun, and even then all it was was a song someone had made using the tag. Trying again today, I don't even get that much.

As far as I've been able to tell, there's no such genre as post-post-vibe cassette. It's just a bunch of words that don't appear to have much in the way of semantic value. Still, I wanted to know what it would sound like, if it sounded like anything. 

So I gave the tag to one of my most throwaway songs, along with just one other instruction, "supercute kawaii female vocals" because I'd just been playing around with some kawaii future bass. I didn't know what to expect. 

What I got was something quite lovely. Considerably better than the song, which is really not much more than a draft for another, better song I wrote afterwards, deserved.

I thought it was probably a fluke so I tried again, And again. And it kept working. I add descriptive notes to all the covers of my songs as I first hear them, so I can easily find the good ones again. Here are some of the descriptors I've appended to post-post-vibe cassette versions so far:

• Lovely
• Also Lovely
• Really Good And Very Odd
• So Weird, So Good 
• Very Odd But I Like It
• Astonishing
• More Astonishing
• Pure Magic

and finally...

• PPVC Never Fails.

Because, so far, it never has. Out of more than a dozen tries I have yet to have a single failure. The nearest was that one time it skipped almost the entire lyric and gave me an instrumental with a vocal coda - and even that worked!

If I had to describe the post-post-vibe cassette aesthetic I guess I'd say it has elements of vaporwave and futurepop but with a focus on melody, rhythm and coherence. It's very cool and restrained, yet also very welcoming and approachable, contradictory though that sounds.

It needs almost no other tags to do its thing. All I've been doing is specifying the vocal style and leaving everything else to chance. Usually, that's a disaster but here it seems to work every time. I've also been having the best-ever results in terms of the vocals sticking pretty much exactly to my melodies and phrasing, as per the uploads. And for once, on the rare occasions where it improvises, it comes up with something as good or better than my original guide vocal. Usually that is very much not how Suno works.

Maybe I've just had a great run on the RNG. Or maybe there's something going on I don't understand. Someone made this tag up, after all. Perhaps they knew something.

Either way, I'm going with it as long as it lasts. I plan to make covers of all my songs in the post-post-wave cassette style, whatever the hell that is, just so I can have the very great pleasure of listening to them myself.

And if they keep on turning out as good as this, I may very well make another YouTube channel just for them. If post-post-vibe cassette isn't a real genre, it damn well should be.

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

All the pictures. All done at Nightcafe using FluxSchnell on default settings. All using prompts taken directly from the text of the post. In order of appearance:

"Post-post-vibe cassette"

""terms I was already familiar with, like "Twee" or" Janglepop" or "Psychobilly""

"the randomness keeps me coming back" 

and "no such genre as post-post-vibe cassette".

I had to use more credits than usual to get anything useable because the post offers very few tangible, visual examples to work with. The output from FluxSchnell using such abstract phrases really is very unpredictable,  unlike the results from the equally abstract post-post-vibe cassette tag on Suno, ironically.