SKYGGE a.k.a Benoit Carré, is at the vanguard of musicians who are attempting to unlock the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). With his first album Hello World, released in 2018, he became one of the first artists to produce pop music using the technology globally.
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Shadow, Benoit Carré invented this avatar SKYGGE (shadow in Danish) as his own shadow revealed by his musical work with the A.I .tools which he contributed to create alongside researchers teams since 2015.
In his new project, Melancholia, (release in March 2022), SKYGGE interacts with a Shadow-A.I. in search of an identity which takes the shape of changing vocal tones, as well as so many other characters around SKYGGE's voice. The “retro-pop joker” in the track "Sad Song" becomes a robotic touch in "Ego Song" and almost fades away in the unstructured opera chorus of "Melancholia".
The lyrics written by SKYGGE are exploring the game of identities, the melancholy of Andersen's character (Knowing Man) and the fantasy of his shadow which sets free thanks to the poetry. The fruit of this human-machine relationship is performed live, with an hypnotic and immersive art visual show created by the artistic collective OYE Label.
Far from the cliché of the A.I as an alter ego for the musician, SKYGGE masters the incredibly creative potentials of those tools, as well as their limits, considering them as "intelligent instruments" that generate new musical materials while still reflecting the artist's identity.
