This collaboration by sound artists Chad Mossholder and Mark Amerika marks their first attempt to play with AI technology to produce an original soundtrack. In the early days of the pandemic, before the explosive growth of large language and diffusion AI models, there were some very kludgy voice clone models that Amerika and his studio collaborators could finagle. Training an AI on Amerika’s voice and then feeding it the opening lines from his COVID novella, “C-19,” something weird happened. Listening to the voice of a distant doppelgänger not unlike himself was uncanny. The AI had produced a series of sounds reminiscent of Amerika’s grain of voice but that still felt alien. In many ways, the quality of the AI’s sound output was mediocre at best, but the voice clone had created something even better than a perfect replication of Amerika’s voice (something that can now be easily achieved with any number of online programs): it produced a sense of defamiliarization, taking Amerika’s spoken word and mother tongue and making it strange. For Mossholder, none of this mattered. This was prime source material to manipulate and remix into one of the first vocal tracks to be performed by an AI voice clone and, as always, he turned the voice into something otherworldly, accompanied by his original electronic sounds and composition. The lyrics are mostly illegible, but if you listen closely, you will hear an agitated poet sampling from the opening lines of the “C-19” novella: Being a poet in a pandemic requires liquidity. Not just cash flow but language flow. Not just language flow but words that flow like electronic currency. Not just electronic currency but continually hackable versification in a viral vernacular. Not just hackable versification in a viral vernacular but syntactical maneuvers that cancel your last best thought before you can even reflect on it. This is what it means to be a pandemic poet: you can never get away from it. This language, its viral tendencies, patiently waits you out. It’s everywhere, on your pen, your drawing pencil, your laptop keyboard, your digital stylus, even on your fingertips before you swallow them whole. There’s no escape and yet you can’t forget where you’re supposed to be, where you were destined to travel, where the unexpected places at unexpected times were programmable training routines to learn how to exponentially increase the chaos value of being a nomad. And yet you’re always going there anyway, there being anywhere, since it no longer matters where you want to go. You can go there and experience what it’s like to not be there anymore. You can go there even when you’re restricted from traveling. Even when you’re no longer able to live the way you used to live before the pandemic. Even when the mission creep of the unsaid is starting to take over your life. Even when your body is slowing down taking it all in. Even when the unsaid, a pliable version of ____, is pulling you into a ruckus of questionable ethical dimensions. Should you lose your moral bearings and let ____ happen, then who is to say you, as in we all, didn’t have it coming to us. Oblivion is the only cure for agony.

MILLIONS OF TEARS So far, with no end in sight, more than eight thousand kids were killed in Gaza, with complete impunity and indifference. Two thousand three hundred and seventy-five blocks. So many little beings under the rubble. And millions and millions and millions of tears, facing hatred while mourning the dead. They’re not safe at home, not safe on the streets, not safe in the hospitals, not safe in shelters, not safe in «safe» areas. They’re not safe anywhere not safe anywhere not safe anywhere not safe anywhere …