This is NOT a Prompt

An archive story / First-person account

A mashup of ourselves

This is one of the more recent Happü pieces, with Henry on guitar and me on drums. What you hear isn't three minutes and thirty-five seconds of something we played from beginning to end. We probably played for forty minutes. Afterwards I went through the material, looking for a musical story I wanted to hear, and moved passages around until they became something else. A kind of mashup of ourselves.

Musically, I was trying to understand drum and bass. The recording starts with rimshots, and Henry is trying to figure out what to play against them. That rhythm might not be his natural territory, but of course he finds a way. I deliberately left his searching in the beginning. If I had cut straight to where everything worked, something important would have disappeared. Then the music opens out again before exploding into the next section.

I was trying to combine fast swing in the spirit of Tony Williams — which I can't really play — with the intensity of metal. I was also playing with very heavy drumsticks, the Gavin Harrison signature model from Vic Firth, and using traditional grip for the first time on one of our recordings. That changed how I played the snare. The rimshots were less brutal, and much more of what I played landed in the middle of the drumhead.

Henry plays a repetitive guitar figure while I'm trying to make those different rhythms fit together. It isn't a matter of one of us following instructions from the other. We're trying things and responding as we go.

There is another sound behind us, too. With just guitar and drums the room can sometimes sound rather thin, so Henry and I made a background loop together during the session. We recorded his guitar into a Boss RC-505 and let it run as a sort of drone behind our playing. We also use an ordinary guitar loop pedal sometimes, but then the loop remains mixed into the guitar sound Henry is playing over. With the RC-505 we could keep the drone on its own channel in the Soundcraft Ui24R and Henry's direct guitar on a separate, clean channel. The loop was part of what we made together in the room, not something I added afterwards.

The editing came later. I moved pieces of Henry's guitar playing to places where they hadn't originally occurred. I also worked with where the guitar sits between the left and right channels. Those changes are part of why the finished track doesn't simply document the session: it is a new arrangement of music we had already played.

The video came from something completely different. I was driving from Delsbo towards Hudiksvall, on my way to Gävle Hamn for work. It was about half past five in the morning, the sun was coming up, and there was fog as I passed Forsa Church. I filmed the road from the car. Later I cut the footage into lots of little pieces, put them out of order and layered some of them with transparency. The journey in the video never quite happened in the sequence you see.

The opening image has a pipe with a turquoise wireframe and the words Ceci n'est pas un prompt. It is a deliberate play on Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe. I used AI-generated material and then continued to work on the picture myself, including trying YouTube's own suggestions. It has something rather Warhol-like about it.

The title says that this isn't a prompt, although in one sense a prompt was involved. So I'm lying. But at the same time, what the viewer encounters isn't a prompt at all. It's an image that someone has chosen, changed and placed in a context. The music was played by Henry and me; the image has a different, partly AI-assisted history. I find that contradiction interesting.

At about 1:30, Henry plays one of those wonderful improvised melodies that can colour an entire recording. That passage originally happened somewhere else in the same session. I moved it here to give the track some balance before the next section.

And that's where I made a mistake in the edit. Instead of lining up the drums exactly with Henry's entrance, I ended up a little ahead. I tried fixing it so the timing was right. But then the nerve was gone.

So I left it.