""I'm really into this idea of authentic fakes," Tim Boucher tells me over Zoom in early October. He's sitting in a cluttered but sunny garage, surrounded by hand-woven baskets he made himself. His oceanic blue eyes are alert, regularly darting across the room, up to the heavens, then back to the screen. We're about halfway through a lengthy and verbose conversation about AI, and I'm struggling to keep track of his names."
""Absolutely crazy that so-called 'journalists' keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is 'AI-generated' with zero evidence," Boucher tweeted. "Not a single one of these 'writers' has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm." Rolling Stone was first on the scene, which unfortunately meant being the first dupe. As it turns out, Boucher tricked the magazine into running a story that claimed to verify his position within the band."
"When I initially reached out to Boucher, he was transitioning from the Frelon character - a self-proclaimed "spokesperson" of the psych-rock AI "band" The Velvet Sundown - to "talent" himself, as the generator of 40 albums released in 30 days under the name Sutem Min. Over the summer, The Velvet Sundown took streaming services by storm. The outfit garnered over 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners and released two full-length records in a single month."
Tim Boucher, who performed under the persona Andrew Frelon, cultivated multiple identities tied to a supposed psych-rock AI band called The Velvet Sundown and an output-heavy alias, Sutem Min. Sutem Min released forty albums in thirty days while The Velvet Sundown attracted hundreds of thousands of Spotify listeners and brief peaks above a million streams. Boucher amplified attention through a theatrical online presence and provocative tweets denying AI involvement. He successfully deceived at least one major music publication with fabricated claims of band membership and later revealed the ruse. He framed his project around the concept of "authentic fakes."
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