Digital Spiritual is a bold journey into the essence of identity in the digital age. Released in August 2024, the album is a product of the ongoing collaborative project between electronic musician Delay Grounds and visual artist & programmer Will Irving.

The album uses an eclectic array of sounds, sourced from months of social media audio and personal music archives dating back to his childhood. The result is a complex and vibrant tapestry that questions and celebrates the notion of self in a world increasingly dominated by technology. The album features isolated vocals from unreleased tracks, manipulated through a “MIDI Soul Imprint” that converts key melodies from his musical past into new, AI-generated content. The track "Everything I Ever Made" is a masterful collage of all his unreleased material, while "Algo Selfie" ingeniously converts spectrograms of his own face into a droning bass line.

The project's visual counterpart, created by Will Irving, further blurs the lines between the digital and the physical. The AI-generated cover art merges every photo of Delay Grounds on the internet with thousands of selfies, resulting in the ultimate “Algorithm Selfie” designed to exploit social media’s facial recognition algorithms for maximum exposure.

Algo Selfie

Did you know that on Instagram, the posts that include a picture of a face or selfie get around 38% more engagement than those that don't. Pretty mad eh? It certainly feels daunting to consider the consequences of this on an individual level, but thinking bigger picture, it gets pretty scary 😵✨️🤳.

Most people who are trying to promote themselves online these days seem to be painfully aware of this, at least to some degree. I see the phrases "selfie for the algorithm" or "algo selfie" mow ubiquitous amoung my peers. Seemly feeling like they have to excuse themselves from the utter nonsense of it, while making their genuine and heartfelt offerings to the universe.It's a nice feeling when it works, but it's an elation with an itch. Like a really distracting noise in the background of an important conversation that only you seem to be effected by, or that everyone is just ignoring.

I can't help but feel like you trade a modicum of soul each time you have to present yourself in this way online. With algorithms tracking everything we do now online, it can feel like a futile time to be an artist / human. The commodification of the self and the individualisation of the market is a sobering thought when you put into perspective the way we currently operate within our relationships to our digital selves. Gaslighting ourselves to oblivion. It's very hard to be truly authentic as there is always this second self you are playing into.

The title of the track, Algo Selfie, pays homage to all this. The bass sound and a lot of the atmospheric sounds are made using spectrograms of my own face (a picture converted to audio). I also used AI to extract vocals from old band recordings to layer into the track.

- Delay Grounds (31 July 2024)

I Miss My Old Mates

It's a weird one innit? Flicking through stories on Instagram can conjure up some strange feelings. Old friends you have haven't spoken to properly or seen in years, or that person you had a great time with for 5 minutes at a rave once and will likely never see ever again, now up to date with whatever the they are doing forever. In touch as an observer and connected only by fingertip.

Watching the part of people they choose to present online grow and change is odd. Especially as we often only share the better bits of our lives on social media, which I think can make the feeling of missing old times and friends more complex. Like an uncomfortable transient FOMO or something, a fleeting and bittersweet sentiment that's sub concious but most definitely there.

There's quite a mad disparity between the depth of this feeling and how easy it it to dismiss, a simple flick of your finger, and you're onto the next snippet of thing and so on.

'I Miss My Old Mates' is built around this idea. It's as cyclical as a scrolling session, happily bopping along innocent and minding its own business all the while being bombarded with noise and interference. There is an underlying tone of longing that feels like the elephant in the room throughout this tune, building gradually and eventually erupting into a climactic release of emotion. 🧘‍♂️😭🤳

All made using sounds sampled from scrolling Instagram stories and decorated with vocals A.I extracted from my old band recordings.

- Delay Grounds (02 July 2024)

For the debut audio-visual performance of the record, the tens of thousands of images generated for the album are run through a processing algorithm designed by Will Irving. Utilising a combination of machine learning and shader programming, the result is a awe invoking visual data-haze, accompanying a deconstructed live remix of the album tracks.

See the debut AV performance at The British Academy, London on Thursday 30th January, 2025.