Blackbirds & Thrushes

A short video and a short text about a traditional song and an AI video

(En version française sur mon site)

I ended my last post by promising not to take as long to post as I did last time: promise kept, with a shorter video and text content, but one that's close to my heart.

It's a video I've entitled "Blackbird & Thrushes", after the lyrics of the old English song that a version sung by Shirley Collins accompanies.

The images

The 40 images that make up this video were generated via AI. Those of you who follow me on Instagram may have already seen them pass by in a preliminary form in stories, in a vertical 9:16 format.

I realize that I've been regularly posting my work online for 20 years now. I think it's not just a tool for showing your work, but also a place to do your work in the public eye, because knowing your work is in the public eye helps you make decisions. The images went through several distinct generation sessions, were posted, then selected, underwent a further generative stage, photo processing and finally video editing.

I don't want to say too much about their theme, because the whole point, in my opinion, is not to verbalize too much what doesn't need to be verbalized, but what I can say is that they show my interest in both certain cultural movements of the late 19th century and my undying love for photography, and particularly early photography, which I can reimagine, in a phantasmagorical way, with the artificial intelligence tools at my disposal today, as well as my passion for brief forms.

The song

The song used in "Blackbirds and Thrushes" is "Hares On The Mountain" in the version recorded by Shirley Collins and Davey Williams in 1965. "Hares on the Mountain" is a traditional English song that has survived the ages. Of precisely unknown origin, it's one of the great classics of English folk, on an eternal subject of pastoral and seasonal love between  boys and girls, and in which there is, it seems to me, always a subtle connotation of Celtic myth.

I have great admiration for the work of Shirley Collins, who is 88 years old and considered by many to be the queen of English folk. The life of Shirley Collins, marked by the loss of her voice following a heartbreak and her triumphant return after decades of silence, is itself like a traditional song.

It was with trembling hands that I decided to edit the song, but I reassured myself that I was, at my humble level, only using my modern means to continue the great line of modifications and variations typical of traditional music.

For the soundtrack to "Blackbirds and Thrushes", I chose to concentrate on the three central stanzas of "Hares On The Mountain", which I felt best captured the visual essence of the song. I decided not to include the first two sections, which deal with the story of Sally's kiss, nor the final section, which focuses on the moral of the story.

I've also kept the beautiful instrumental coda by Davey Williams, which also corresponds to a form of coda in the video.

This video is designed for looped playback, reflecting the song's cyclical and timeless character.

The lyrics

If all you young men were hares on the mountain
If all you young men were hares on the mountain
How many young girls would take guns and go hunting

If the young men could sing like blackbirds and thrushes
If the young men could sing like blackbirds and thrushes
How many young girls would go beating the bushes

If all you young men were fish in the water
If all you young men were fish in the water
How many young girls would undress and dive after

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this publication. If you have any feedback, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

I'd like to take this opportunity to tell you that at the moment, I'm trying to refocus my activities around two main areas: art projects as such and image education, with a specialization in AI-generated images. I've had some great experiences and have some exciting projects in both areas. If you'd like to follow my activities or get in touch with me for collaborations or professional questions, I encourage you to subscribe to my Substack, if you haven't already, or follow me on Instagram where I'm now fully active, as well as on LinkedIn, why not?

Thanks for reading! See you soon.

Alain