On June 28th, Sub Pop will release Washed Out’s fifth and most audacious album to date, Notes From A Quiet Life. The music of Washed Out has always levitated over a timeless frontier. You can sense it in his immersive, amorphous vocals, expansive soundscapes, and wistful storytelling. In 2021, Washed Out’s creative force, Ernest Greene, left Atlanta to return to the countryside he knew growing up. Where escapism once flooded his thoughts, today, he is preoccupied with the universe of wonder in the reality around him.
 
He named the former horse farm he moved to “Endymion” (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd — its opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”). It has shaped all that he’s created there, from his music to his albums’ creative direction to his planned large-scale visual-art experiments. That purity of vision is what makes Notes From a Quiet Life so potent. It’s the first album Greene wholly self-produced, with mixing assistance from Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine).
 
Unabashed and unafraid to pioneer and incorporate new technologies within his art, Greene enlisted multi-disciplinary Artist, Writer, and Director Paul Trillo to direct the music video for the album’s lead single, “The Hardest Part.” Created using OpenAI’s Sora, “The Hardest Part” marks the first collaboration with an artist and filmmaker to be generated entirely utilizing this technology.
 
Director Paul Trillio shares:
“I had the seed of this video concept 10 years ago, where we do an infinite zoom of a couple’s life over the course of many decades, but I have yet to attempt it because I figured it’d be too ambitious for a music video. While the technology is experimental and cutting-edge, I wanted to do something that also felt like a classic music video that would hold your attention no matter what tech was being used in the process. I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn’t quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology. The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of.  Using AI to simply recreate reality is boring. I wasn’t interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal. The fluid blending and merging of different scenes feels more akin to how we move through dreams and the murkiness of memories. While some people feel this may be supplanting how things are made, I see this as supplementing ideas that could never have been made otherwise. Many artists in this industry are constantly compromising and negotiating their ideas with the reality of what can be made. This offers a glimpse at a future where music artists will be given the opportunity to dream bigger. An overreliance on this technique may become a crutch and it’s important that we don’t use this as the new standard of creation but another technique in the toolbelt.”
 
Ernest Greene says about the song & video: 
“‘The Hardest Part’ is a story about nostalgia and love lost.  With the video, I wanted to bring this narrative to life in a sincere way that was also exciting and unexpected. I’ve been a fan of Paul for a long time and he is amazingly skilled at incorporating cutting-edge visual effects that elevate a story instead of simply supplementing it with shock and awe. He was at the top of my list of potential collaborators. 
 
What he’s come up with is nostalgic, sad, uplifting, and often quite strange.  However, he still manages to make you feel for the characters and invested in the journey of how their lives progress.
I think that Paul is right when he says that this video could only be made using this new AI technology.  In my opinion, the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feel like the beginning of a new genre unto itself - one that is surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to traditional cinema or even animation.”
 
About Sora/OpenAI:
OpenAI’s Sora is an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative videos from text instructions. Though the model is not yet released, OpenAI is working with a number of visual artists, designers, and filmmakers to gain feedback on how to advance the model to be most helpful for creative professionals. 
 
About OpenAI: 
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. 
 
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