“The 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.”

This quote from late writer Mark Fisher was on my mind as I wrote this piece. I like the idea of taking something cold and mechanical and imbuing it with human qualities, making it more broken and empathetic. I imagined the performer here not as some slick, high-tech thing, but as a little animated GIF, stuttering, stalling, glitching out, prone to self-doubt and distraction. Like an AI that's too self-conscious to carry out the task of generating its own music, the piece starts and stops, goes off on tangents, arrives at dead ends and never really gets going.