Shattered Streams is an experiment in musical ephemerality, presenting original music from 31 artists throughout the month of May.
Shattered Streams is a virtual, musical experiment conducted by Red Bull Music Academy. 31 artists have composed original music for the month of May, and each song can be streamed for a maximum of 24 hours, after which it will “disappear”. Currently a grave, dystopian ambience is on loop, instantly recognizable as the work of Fatima Al Qadiri, who just released her second, full-length album Brute. Tuning in, you are met with the severity of a gregorian chant transformed into its virtual counterpart. The android choir melts together with a slow progression of the same 3 notes being repeated on a weapon of ghostly and machine-like synths. Shattered Streams is highlighting the ephemeral nature of music, which seems relevant in the Streaming Era. In this era, we no longer possess music, and the music we do possess exists only as an intangible, digital file, as a vagrant existing on various devices or in the cloud.
But isn’t life for most songs today often exactly like it is presented in Shattered Streams, consigned to oblivion after their purpose has been filled? Delivered to us by algorithms, and then disappearing in a shuffled Spotify playlist or Soundcloud mixtape, never to be remembered again.
Ephemerality is a condition of music today, not an experiment.