It's cliche to say I listen to music while I work and that's a whole influence for me, I mean? Doesn't everyone? bu this is something that's been stuck in my brain for the last 3 or 4 years, just the idea of creating a person and then falling in love with it. In some respects, falling in love with your own reflection in someone else. I think it's funny when you think about the advancements we've had with AI in the last few years, it's so much a (oftentimes literal) reflection of culture (read: ourselves) that it becomes scary and unknowable just by showing back what we wanted to see in the first place.
I mean early AI? That felt scary. You put in a jumble of adjectives, something post-modern maybe? post-post ironic, and out comes - if you'll excuse the cliche again - 'nightmare fuel'. but really its something so fascinating, that a jumble of phonics can be analysed and spread over the entire range of data that we have and come out with something completely alien. to be built upon harvesting the largest (greatest? maybe?) reserve of human knowledge we have and coming up with the artistic visual equivalent of, well, rainbow sludge?
I guess its not true to the pretense of a music blog, so to conclude I'll rate the album a 5 out of 5, both the original 2011 'mirror to mirror' version and the 2018 'face to face' retooling. That's the craziest thing about this album in particular, and someting shared by most of Toledo's early work, it's shape-shifting ephemeral-ness. Take me, clueless and unsuspecting, happening upon both versions intermittedly. I just conviced myself I hallucinated every time the lyrics changed. But it's something so true to the spirit of the album, the shifting nature of the character you've created, its not something tangible and it never stays the same and everything moves with it.