Imagine coming home at the end of a long day, or maybe it’s not a long day, maybe it’s early and you’re making breakfast in the morning, making coffee, and you want to listen to music. You remember hearing about the latest update to C’est Vrai, version 9.19.7.2.1 was just released, and it’s supposed to contain the training data for David Bowie’s collected works, one of the last holdouts, which everyone was talking about, every song, every live recording, now available in C’est Vrai.
You can simply say, “C’est Vrai? Play me a song about how we’re out of milk and I was really into making pancakes, in the style of Korn and Justin Bieber, like, with some Velvet Underground in there, too, and make it, like, really sad.” And C’est Vrai plays the song for you. Or, “Make a song like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and The Meat Puppets and Björk and Moondog.” And C’est Vrai does that, too. Or, “Like, put Kim Deal on drums, I want Jimi Hendrix on harmonica, Jam Master Jay on keys, Marilyn Manson on harpsicord in there somewhere, but I want the song to sound like Thee Oh Sees and Tool, and make it about the life of Hieronymus Bosch.” Or, “Hey, C’est Vrai, play something from the trending playlists.” And C’est Vrai would play something with Bowie, of course, because of the update, because everybody was trying it, mixing it, switching and stitching it, its training data, its soul, its being, into everything, interacting, creating, composing.
C’est Vrai does it all. A one stop music shop. Of every kind and flavour. Everything in Spotify. Everything on Apple Music. Everything in Bandcamp (yes, Bandcamp’s servers were added with version 5). At your fingertips. At the tip of your tongue. Whatever you feel like listening to, you can. With C’est Vrai.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
