We hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence these days. It has pervaded the music industry like everywhere else. I just read recently online about a little hand held AI box that is on sale. Type a few ideas for a song into it and – hey presto! – it comes up with one just like that and you can publish it straight off as it stands as your own or you can play around and ‘remix’ it as you wish.
Jeez, even I could do that. See you at the Grammys. Not.
Hannah Schneider takes a different view. Let’s just call it intelligence, and put the artificial in the trash can.
We featured her recently, in October, with the single ‘Lighthouse’ the first from an album, ‘In this Room’, co-written and produced with Christian Balvig, and which will be released on February 27th, 2026.
It was like a tour of world music, encompassing the Middle East and Indian sub-continent, Spanish flamenco guitar, and percussion strokes that sounded like sporadic machine gun fire across a ceasefire line.
I was hard pressed to think of anyone who sounds remotely like her.
Now comes the second single from that album and it is the title track. What she did this time was to invite a number of musicians she admires to her residency at Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen to engage in a musical experiment, where organic soundscapes, electronic beats and strong melodies meet in a dialogue between man and machine.
Arnold, are you listening? Du-du-dum du-dum.
According to the press release the track is “a reflection on the stories we carry with us, the spaces we return to, and the moments that shape us — even when nothing seems to change.”
Now that’s quite deep for me, hinting at quantum physics, Schrodinger’s “is it alive or dead?” cat and the rest of that scientific paraphernalia at one end of the scale and the humdrum lives of television soap opera characters at the other
“Nothing’s changed since forever/what happens here stays here”, Hannah intones in a line that unwittingly mocks the principle of the ‘What happens in Benidorm stays in Benidorm’ mantra in the British TV comedy series of that title. In other words you can hump your best friend’s wife in your holiday hotel room; no-one will ever know. It’s the code, you know.
But there’s more to it than that. The strings and synth based music together with her haunting vocal take me immediately to the Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Deckard traipsing from room to room in gauche apartment buildings in search of replicants. You can hear the swish of flying vehicles outside and the occasional two-tone sirens of the police.
Stylistically here there is some of Kate Bush and a little of Wildhart’s marvelous but relatively unknown ‘New Beginning’.
And AI could never do that.
(Continues after the Spotify link).
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