Edwiin Augustine - Idiot Knows

I’ve been assembling off and on a Spotify playlist of female-centric music from 2024 (called ‘Binders Full’ b/c I am an idiot) and the algorithm started pressuring me to add songs from this.

Shit, you're not kidding. Tried googling to find out more about it, this thread is the top result, and aside from spotify there's... nothing?

― emil.y, Monday, September 9, 2024 3:41 PM (two days ago)

Ha, there's one reddit thread with no replies from a few months ago asking if this is AI generated due to the complete lack of other information.

ILX first mentions! I have this bookmarked but have not yet listened, sounds right up my alley

listened to “who needs sleep tonight?” and was enjoying it - but thought it strange that there is no other info about this group anywhere online. decided on a whim to google the song title in quotes and…the plot thickens!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCHAliA8b4U

this was recorded in 1981, per discogs

whaat

listening now, this totally has actual 1981 vibes

WHAT

omfg

thought this mesmerizing on first listen

https://somestrange.com/siliconsoul/index.html

lmao wild

so…how on earth did this happen?? and are there other examples of this on spotify?

Looks like “Idiot Knows” was the b-side to the original release of “Who Needs Sleep…”

It does seem rather counterproductive to release this under a different name, but maybe there were issues due to the original moniker’s similarity to the house group Silicone Soul.

This all makes sense of a lot of things about the music - e.g. I had assumed the lyrics to “Soho” were being deliberately anachronistic, but they make more sense from a 1981 perspective (and maybe the singer really did grow up listening to the Cabaret soundtrack!).

But at the same time I totally bought the idea of the arrangements trying to recreate a certain post-punk vibe without literally being from that era or period-piece recreations - they feel very modern, sinuous and amorphous at times.

the silicon soul album is on spotify,

https://open.spotify.com/album/1jIerJDkX2f6E0lNyCxhBV?si=OZpNNQwwTlWvv2_rRy9K_A

aside from some slight changes to song titles ('in soho', 'the fig', 'every idiot knows') and the addition of a 6 minute extended mix of 'who needs sleep tonight' it's identical to the edwiin augustine album

my guess is some kind of ai slop?

oh what really? I have to be worried about fake music now?

So is this a re-release of the Silicon Soul stuff under a different name, or is it someone passing off old music as their own, or is it an automatic AI data-scraping and republishing it just slightly wrong?

very good questions