Stems available for Remixes!
Contact me via linktr.ee/itskelpmusic

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But, why do the robots sing in Latin?

Before I began writing it, I knew I wanted the finished song to sound like robots chanting in a cathedral and that itself brought up a lot of ideas that drove the lyrics.

I couldn't imagine the lyrics being in any other language than Latin, because I had set out, initially, just to write a Gregorian chant in its purest form.. but with a talk box. The main problem with this was, other than some rudimentary and absolutely forgotten classes from school a thousand years ago, I don't speak a lick of Latin. So, I had to develop a failproof technique to write in Latin, at which I did not succeed. Instead, I wrote the words in English and fed them into Google translate. The resulting Latin translation I then reverse fed back into Google translate to see if it came back making the same sense I'd initially intended it in English. If it did, I kept it. If it didn't, I had to slightly edit the original English sentence so that it would survive the "rigorous" translation process. I still have no idea if what I've written qualifies as grammatically accurate Latin, and if it doesn’t, I can always just claim poetic license.

I didn't end up using all the words I'd written in the final recording, possibly in some act of preservation for damages to a language I am extremely unfamiliar with, either way, you can find the full poem below of what I think I mean in Latin, followed by what I actually wanted to say in English

As I mentioned above, imagining the finished song before I'd written it, kind of drove the lyrical direction. I had pictured robots sporting traditional Gregorian cowls, in a cathedral-esque setting with dystopian, futurescape (steampunk?) connotations. These images coupled with the liturgical tradition, and general sound, of Gregorian chanting pointed the tone towards solemnity and the subject matter to be sombre, grievous and melancholic; it, as well, gave the song its title 'Lamentation'. The problem I had created became: without saying where AI will get to in the future, so far, machines are emotionless. By Gregorian chanting into a talk box, I had asked the question "what does a robot have to be sad about?" The paradoxical answer became the lyrical theme, which is the perspective of a robot who (which?), through some developed self-awareness, grieves, or laments, over the idea that not being able to feel the negative emotions associated with a life of servitude, is the tragedy upon the tragedy of his (its?) servitude.


The artwork is a painting called 'Tornado in an American Forest', 1831 by Thomas Cole. It is an open access image made available by the National Gallery of Art www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.195574.html

I chose it, initially, because it just captured that bleak, destituteness associated with lamenting, but also it had that sort of ecclesiastic feel I get from paintings in that style. The original features a man standing near the trunk of a tree, sort of weathering the storm. I cropped him out to remove the human element from the painting, and I thought doing that was almost the visual equivalent of Gregorian chanting into a talk box.