за/обложкойza/oblozhkoy

The whole za/oblozhkoy project — and everything that came after it — started at the end of 2023, when Gosha, my boss at the time, showed me some little thing he’d made in Suno. I decided to try it too, and it blew my mind: I’d expected a robot voice laid over MIDI-style music, and got something else entirely. Only later, digging into Suno, did I learn it was nearly the same technology as Jukebox — just at an unthinkably higher level (for the time).

Like everyone, I started with other people’s poems. The first to come out was the single version of “Listen!”“Listen!”, which never made the album.

Then I started writing words of my own, and an image came with them at once: a boy and a girl — teenagers, though of age — both redheads, both blindfolded. I knew from the first day that their names were Maya and Kirill.

The blindfolds were a decision that came about somehow on its own, and they stayed on every cover, za/oblozhkoy’s and The Half-Alive’s alike. There is something about AI in them too: the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Does AI have a soul? We leave the answer behind the blindfold.

Almost everything I write for this project comes out in one go; I don’t sit over a single word. Hence the verb rhymes, the clumsy words, the naivety — “young and awkward, painfully naive,” like me in “Onto Fingers,”“Onto Fingers,” a song written much later for another project.