Not only fashion has positioned Copenhagen on the global creative scene, but many artistic disciplines, including music. The Danish capital, which has been attracting the attention of professionals for the past few years, presents a diverse range of proposals, each with its own unique identity and refined aesthetic. Experimental composer, electronic musician, and visual artist Mads Krue Bugge, under his moniker Skarv, is a good example of this. The multidisciplinary creative, who has previously released the industry album A Memory Like Any Other and the tech-EP Haptic Feedback and is part of the electro-acoustic group Første Kvartal, presents today his new album, Polymer Veil.
Making experimentation and collaboration with artists from the Copenhagen underground scene two of the central pillars of this project, Polymer Veil weaves parallel narratives about artificiality, with each track exploring what it means to be fake in a world increasingly shaped by differing technologies. The sound leaps to the next level to create an immersive atmosphere full of nuances, complemented by fragmented vocals that delve into the intersecting worlds of plastic and artificial intelligence, asking questions about the nature of authenticity and synthetic existence.
From Composite A/B, featuring collaborators ill and Nemo, to Narrative Exploit, featuring video game-esque beats, and Skarv’s collaboration with GPT-3, an outdated LLM that plays a pivotal role in shaping the album’s lyrical landscape, this thirteen-song project also includes collaborative tracks with Alto Aria and LM Madsen. “The experience of generating and selecting text shifted how I view my own cognition, my creative process. I slowly began to see the world around me as data and my nervous system as a filter, a constantly updated generative model. I grew up thinking the fake, the plastic, and the synthetic were inherently bad—now, I’m questioning if that’s what we all are,” Skarv tells us.
