Digital Spiritual is a bold journey into the essence of identity in the digital age. Released in August 2024, the album is a product of the ongoing collaborative project between electronic musician Delay Grounds and visual artist & programmer Will Irving.

The album uses an eclectic array of sounds, sourced from months of social media audio and personal music archives dating back to his childhood. The result is a complex and vibrant tapestry that questions and celebrates the notion of self in a world increasingly dominated by technology. The album features isolated vocals from an lifetime archive of unreleased tracks, manipulated through a "MIDI Soul Imprint" that converts key melodies from his musical past into new, AI-generated content. The track "Everything I Ever Made" is a masterful collage of all Delay Ground's unreleased material, while "Algo Selfie" ingeniously converts spectrograms of his own face into a droning bass line.

The project's visual counterpart, created by Will Irving, further blurs the lines between the digital and the physical. Using fine-tuned diffusion models, the cover art merges every photo of Delay Grounds on the internet with thousands of selfies, resulting in the ultimate "Algorithm Selfie" designed to exploit social media's facial recognition algorithms for maximum exposure.

Commentary by Delay Grounds, collecting thoughts around the concept of selected tracks from the album, can be found below.

Algo Selfie

Did you know that on Instagram, the posts that include a picture of a face or selfie get around 38% more engagement than those that don't. Pretty mad eh? It certainly feels daunting to consider the consequences of this on an individual level, but thinking bigger picture, it gets pretty scary 😵✨️🤳.

Most people who are trying to promote themselves online these days seem to be painfully aware of this, at least to some degree. I see the phrases "selfie for the algorithm" or "algo selfie" mow ubiquitous amoung my peers. Seemly feeling like they have to excuse themselves from the utter nonsense of it, while making their genuine and heartfelt offerings to the universe.It's a nice feeling when it works, but it's an elation with an itch. Like a really distracting noise in the background of an important conversation that only you seem to be effected by, or that everyone is just ignoring.

I can't help but feel like you trade a modicum of soul each time you have to present yourself in this way online. With algorithms tracking everything we do now online, it can feel like a futile time to be an artist / human. The commodification of the self and the individualisation of the market is a sobering thought when you put into perspective the way we currently operate within our relationships to our digital selves. Gaslighting ourselves to oblivion. It's very hard to be truly authentic as there is always this second self you are playing into.

The title of the track, Algo Selfie, pays homage to all this. The bass sound and a lot of the atmospheric sounds are made using spectrograms of my own face (a picture converted to audio). I also used AI to extract vocals from old band recordings to layer into the track.

I Miss My Old Mates

It's a weird one innit? Flicking through stories on Instagram can conjure up some strange feelings. Old friends you have haven't spoken to properly or seen in years, or that person you had a great time with for 5 minutes at a rave once and will likely never see ever again, now up to date with whatever the they are doing forever. In touch as an observer and connected only by fingertip.

Watching the part of people they choose to present online grow and change is odd. Especially as we often only share the better bits of our lives on social media, which I think can make the feeling of missing old times and friends more complex. Like an uncomfortable transient FOMO or something, a fleeting and bittersweet sentiment that's sub concious but most definitely there.

There's quite a mad disparity between the depth of this feeling and how easy it it to dismiss, a simple flick of your finger, and you're onto the next snippet of thing and so on.

'I Miss My Old Mates' is built around this idea. It's as cyclical as a scrolling session, happily bopping along innocent and minding its own business all the while being bombarded with noise and interference. There is an underlying tone of longing that feels like the elephant in the room throughout this tune, building gradually and eventually erupting into a climactic release of emotion. 🧘‍♂️😭🤳

All made using sounds sampled from scrolling Instagram stories and decorated with vocals A.I extracted from my old band recordings.

Big Things Coming Soon!

Yeah okay if you say so mate... and errr... who exactly are you talking to?

Managing expectations of yourself can be hard enough. Managing the expectations of others can be even more challenging, especially when your livelihood depends on it (and now everything is insanely expensive). We live in a time where, as well as getting our heads around actually making and selling our art, we now also have to somehow sell the idea that it is going somewhere. The commodification of our own potential, god help us.

There is a lot of insecurity in developing artists and humans alike. This bastardisation of becoming is fundamentally toxic and generally unhelpful to anyone looking to engage in any kind of creative practice or growth that doesn't involve self-flagellation. You do not have to justify your own future or engagement with the act of creation, just enjoying doing it is enough.

Music was never a commodity, cast your mind back hundreds and thousands of years ago. People we just sat about banging stuff like yes mate that sounds tight check out this dope reed that makes a noise too, let's listen to them both together okay nice this is fun. People used to just do stuff cause that’s what they did. It is as if we are all holding ourselves at gunpoint in the mirror with one eye twitching, held hostage to the ransom of “one career + validation”.

This attitude of “wow look at this massive thing it's gonna be so incredible and huge you should definitely pay attention to it (and buy it)” has permeated a great deal of dance music (if not all western) culture and is psyching everyone out. I see it on an individual level but also en masse, used to foster an ideal and inflate everyone's expectations to sell tickets. People gotta get by, and the scene has to survive somehow, but I can’t help feeling we’ve backed ourselves into a corner. After all, you only need a few people to have a party. Bigger almost never means better.

There is an implication in the name of this track; the arrangement and sections are built around this idea of expectations and build to a monumental moment of elation that is soon cast into a dysphoric ending. The feeling is headstrong, erratic and layered with melancholy.

It's Gonna Be Emotional

I do hope so, for all our sakes…

The irony is that “It's gonna be emotional” is probably the least emotional statement you could ever make, what's more is that you could argue deploying this phrase actually acts to detract from an experience being so. Like when your mate tries to show you something they think is amazing but hype it up way too much.

It's not that the thing isn't amazing, it's just that they are asking you to match their enthusiasm through only what they are able to convey in exuberant chat. It is an honest enough expression of excitement but can usually sour the experience of digesting whatever they are trying to show you. I guess at base level it is an effort to connect with someone and have your feelings confirmed, an attempt to share an emotion together. Misery loves company.

When used online, “it's gonna be emotional”, (regardless of how they are actually feeling) can perform as a way for artists to play on expectation, only this time the words harbour the sale of an emotional promise. I've experienced this in myself when playing some of my bigger shows.

For the debut audio-visual performance of the record, the tens of thousands of images generated for the album are run through a processing algorithm designed by Will Irving. Utilising a combination of machine learning and shader programming, the result is a awe invoking visual data-haze, accompanying a deconstructed live remix of the album tracks.

See the debut AV performance at The British Academy, London on Thursday 30th January, 2025.