Participants 2025
Ceremony Shadows
AI Song Contest 2025 / participantsTEAM / Ceremony Shadows
SONG / Future Past Collapse
About the TEAM
Ceremony Shadows is a Darkwave band based in Portland, OR.
Our music is influenced by our diverse geographical upbringing across the USA, Germany and Poland, and lifelong immersion in alternative music scenes and cultures.
Visual presentation is very important to us, and our live performances are unique experiences across sound, light and space.
Artists like Boy Harsher, The Knife, Depeche Mode, Kite and Coil have been mentioned as occupying similar sonic territory.
About the SONG
We were wondering if we will come to feel (or are already feeling) nostalgic towards human technology, especially as AI technology rises and displaces much of what has made us human up until this point in our history as a species.
Humanity is about to be augmented, if not replaced in certain ways, by AI technology as we move towards what some predict will be an “AI Singularity”.
So, with AI as a band member, we wrote our song “Future Past Collapse” to examine this sense of nostalgia.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
Ralf Hütter of the German band Kraftwerk understood well before the age of AI that while machines are useful as creative tools, the most interesting art emerges when machines are treated as creative equals.
With that in mind, we embarked on our creative journey for the 2025 AI Song Contest and decided to use ChatGPT as a band member and collaborator in crafting our contribution to the contest.
It was important to us to not treat AI technology as “just a tool”, or, on the flipside, as a novelty to create something that feels more like a technology showcase rather than, well, art.
At the same time, we wanted to push AI technology to its limits to test how much of a true creative collaboration is possible, given its current state, and how much human “babysitting” is necessary to create something that passes our litmus test as a piece of art that we feel represents us as a band, and something that we can feel proud of as artists.
We hope you enjoy listening to our track “Future Past Collapse”, and we hope it evokes the same sense of nostalgia in you as it does in us.
Lyrics
Verse 1
What sleeps in a drop dreams of stars
Each breath a cycle turning worlds
Our voices trace memory electric
Fold light into shapes of questions
We know the taste of the ground
We claim the earth as our body
Temple built in echo
Memory veiled foundation
Chorus
Future past collapse in presence
Awe in the depths of the light
At the heart of the void
Bridge
Dreams of dust
Crowns aflame
Verse 2
Flickering pulse in the ever-after
Space between shock and surrender
All moments held in this breath
Hunger for transcendence
Learning time through hesitation
A loop of absence and longing
Gave memory a mirror
Archived sorrow, awe compressed