Tech

APP OF THE MONTH: The Synthetica app rebuilds Metric's songs

by Knar Bedian

Around 70 years ago, philosopher Walter Benjamin grappled with the idea of how to determine what sets an original work of art apart from its copy; photography had shaken the art world, and differentiating the two seemed a difficult task. Decades later, artists and critics are still struggling with those same concepts, and Metric is one of them. Their album Synthetica deals with identifying the real from the fake, and their recently released app of the same name has brought up these questions once again.

Synthetica, which allows users to remix and rebuild each of the album’s songs, gives fans a lot of control: from changing the tempo and adding instruments to adjusting pitch and altering the echo.

“I’m really excited to see what kind of feedback we get, the things people want to add or things that they want to be able to do that they can’t, and the idea of constantly evolving it,” singer Emily Haines says about the freedoms and limitations allowed by the medium. Fans will create their own experiences and interactions, and the band will be able to change the app over time, making the identification process of what is the “original work” difficult. “The whole point of it is that it’s an experience between us and the listener and people can be more involved. I’m really excited that we can just constantly upgrade it.”

Indeed, the app serves 0as a way for artists to have constant and more direct access to their fans – to provide them with new content simply requires an update. For today’s artists, this direct line to the attention of their audience can serve as an important asset, and while Emily noted that this was not the point of the app, it is a feature of note of the medium.

“It’s kind of a gross time, like we’re ‘driving for eyeballs’ or whatever. It’s pretty crass and pretty lame,” Haines says of today’s attention economy. “The fact is, we’re a prolific group of people and we’re constantly working on music and constantly looking for ways to create cool shit and try to get some stuff in the world that we really love. Obviously it’s great if it means people remember that we exist, but to me you’ve clearly missed the point if you’re just there to remind people and you just stand there. We wouldn’t make an app just for the sake of making an app, sort of the same way we don’t make records just to make records. We feel like when we have something to say, we say it, and if we don’t have anything to say, we generally disappear.”

In some ways, the app reflects their sincere approach. While a lot of other artist apps simply regurgitate content from websites (lyrics, photos, biography information), or are a platform for fans to connect (think Lady Gaga’s “aura”-driven app that allows her Little Monsters to connect with each other), Metric’s Synthetica is an art form in itself, a work that combines their music with particular images to convey additional meaning. For instance, you’ll see works from Italian architecture group Superstudio paired with Metric’s songs.

“I’m always looking for art, looking for things to be inspired by and connect with,” says Haines about what prompted the decision to include the images in the app. “I just found myself drawn into this world of those drawings that are abstractions of future realities, but in this case they took the conventional model of those kinds of conceptual drawings and really made a movement.”

The themes that the works of Superstudio dealt with were in fact many of the same that are found on the album.

“The way we view what is natural, what is artificial—those were all themes we’re really pursuing on Synthetica, even to the point that the image kind of matched songs that we wrote,” says Haines. “It really fits. And I love those moments when you feel as though you’re not just toiling away in the darkness, there are other disciplines, other artists, other ideas in line with what you’re thinking.”

While visual immersion is certainly a strength of the medium, the current version of Synthetica leaves something to be desired in terms of social sharing. But, as Emily noted earlier, the app is just a start; Metric already has ideas for how to expand its functionality.

“That’s an important distinction to make,” Haines says. “We’re not going to preload it with all this stuff without knowing [what users want]. They can communicate to us what they want and we can just exactly get it right.”

Overall, its pretty clear that Metric has gone one step in the right direction—we’ll watch for new features, but for now, you’ll find us floating in the ethereal world Metric has created for us, somewhere in between the extraterrestrial bedroom of “Artificial Nocturne” and the mountainous landscape of “Dreams So Real.”