Charli xcx used an AI-powered plugin on at least one track from her new album Music, Fashion, Film.
The Von Dutch singer and her collaborators A. G. Cook and Finn Keane have broken down the making of several songs on the follow-up to Brat, released today (24.07.26), including No One Lasts Forever.
They worked with an “audio mosaicing” plugin called Concatenator, created by DataMind Audio, who describe their mission as “building an ecosystem of expressive instruments that treats creators as partners, not raw material.” The software analyses large batches of audio and tags each sound by timbre, pitch and amplitude, displaying the results as a visual mosaic. When new audio is fed in, it reconstructs the signal in real time by pulling together micro-fragments from its library that most closely match the incoming sound.
Cook used Concatenator to turn the “bits and pieces” from his jam session with Keane into a full drum pattern, saying the loop was built from “pretty much all of those files”.
On the human side of the process, Charli told the Tape Notes podcast: “This song has made me change the way I think about my life and my art. That was the journey I was going on while I was writing it.”
Explaining the technical approach, Cook said: “The biggest difference compared to so many tracks Finn and I have done together is this is so audio-heavy. There’s pretty much no MIDI. Any MIDI that’s in there is chopping up something we actually recorded or edited. A lot of the guitars, bass, all that, we’re playing it in — drum kits and drum machines.”
He added: “We have all these little sounds throughout the track, all these little bits and pieces. It’s funny because we’re literally running around the studio with as many things plugged in as possible and just doing the worst sounds.”
Keane said they were deliberately “trying to find the ugliest things”, but ended up creating something “kind of cool with the drums”. He explained that the entire second half of the track uses fragments from their jam session, and that Concatenator was the key tool for bringing those elements to life.
