Verloop

What is this now, a 2-hour long music piece? Can you play this in the club? Or is it more suited for your mom? Is this music meant to help your plants grow faster? Do you need to sit at precisely the right resonating earth frequency to enjoy it? Is this what Qbical has been teasing all year long?

YES!

Above all, 'Verloop' is an audiovisual piece of art. An experiment about the use of social media and algorithms. At the end of 2023, I came up with the idea to ‘design’ a generative piece of music based on phrases no longer than 30 seconds. This was inspired by the fact that the average reel or clip on TikTok and Instagram also lasts about 30 seconds. The generative piece turned into a 2-hour composition, which I then sliced into 239 individual fragments. Besides the music, I also generated a video to accompany it—not through AI or anything like that, but just through programming with some logical logic.

Anyway, 'Verloop' is a Dutch word with multiple meanings. A 'color gradient,' as seen in the video. A 'transition,' like in the music, which gradually shifts into different sounds, depths, and genre twists. But it can also refer to entropy, the decline of everything back to ‘nothingness.’ Kind of like all the nonsense we generally post and watch on those silly TikToks of the world.

I enjoyed doing this experiment, and as you might guess, the algorithms of the different platforms didn’t care for it at all. Instagram didn’t like it because I didn’t pay for ads. On TikTok, each clip got about 300 views, but only for 1 second. So yeah, a glorious social media influencer career isn’t in the cards for me.

What was a big success, though, were some of the reactions. I’m especially happy that one of those reactions resulted in a real remix. Ai Ai Ai! took elements from the piece and transformed them into a booty-shaker of epic proportions, with some spacey and trancey influences that are really nice to listen to. Plus, it doesn’t last 2 hours, so if you’re looking for something to listen to between TikTok sessions, this is the one to go for!

'Verloop' is now out on my label Qbism