The truth about Cirdan

Hopefully anyone into classic progressive rock has listened to the recent post from Cirdan, so it's now time to come clean about this band. The idea for this album came to me a few months ago, while I was trawling Youtube and I found that a number of people were posting songs created entirely by AI. I searched for progressive rock songs made by AI and found a number of tracks which were quite impressive - apart from some unconvincing lyrics, some of them could have passed for an actual 70's prog rock band. I downloaded my favourites, and visited Youtube regularly for new posts, and before long I had 40 minutes worth of music, so putting it together as an album was a no-brainer. With a bit of editing and tweaking of the running order, I had quite a nice-sounding album, and I named it after the best of the tracks that I'd found online. All I needed now was a name for the band, and so where do a lot of prog rock bands look for their names, but 'Lord Of The Rings'. A quick search of names mentioned in the books found that Cirdan the Shipbuilder had never been picked for a rock band, and so all my album needed now was some cover art. I searched online for AI-generated prog rock album covers, and one Reddit post had a dozen to choose from, so I picked one I liked the look of, and my album was now complete. After playing it for a few weeks, I sent a copy to a mate in the US, longtime fan of the blog Fredrick Beondo, and between us we knocked it into shape, until we had a really convincing prog rock album. Eventually, I thought that it was too good to keep to myself, so I decided to post it on the site, possibly on 1st of April, as that seemed the perfect date for it, but for that I would need a biography of the band. Logging onto ChatGPT, I asked for a biography of the fictitious prog rock band Cirdan, and in less than 10 seconds it had produced a history of a band that never existed. With just the slightest of editing, I was able to post my album of progressive rock, where no human was involved in the either the making of the music, the artwork, or the history of the group, other than a few prompts to the AI that made them, and my choosing of the band name. As an example of just what AI can do, this is an extremely interesting experiment, and while I am still in two minds about whether AI is going to be a boon for mankind, or eventually rise up and take us over, the musical side of it is progressing in leaps and bounds, as it stores more and more information from the entire history of music. The worrying thing is, will there soon be a time when a song is released with no human involvement, and no-one will actually be able to tell the difference?

Track listing

01 Nautilus
02 Eternal Wanderings
03 Age Of Wonders
04 For The World Outside
05 Eclipse Of The Mind
06 Where Dreams And Hope Once Danced
07 Just Hold On

Music posted by:
01 NeonCube's Song Factory
02 AI Generated Mega Hits
03 Quadrivo
04 VFOLD
05 Satoritei
06 A-Eye Musix
07 NeonCube's Song Factory

Album cover from Reddit

Biography by ChatGPT

Band name from J. R. R. Tolkien