Het zesde album van Konstantin Gropper peinst over de woorden terwijl hij nadenkt over de op handen zijnde release van AMEN, zijn laatste volledige release als GET WELL SOON. “It’s the pandemic album, of course!” Hij is niet de eerste, en het zal ook niet de laatste zijn, maar AMEN – veel ervan is geschreven en opgenomen sinds de wereld werd gedwongen stil te liggen in zijn privékelder en een afgelegen vakantiehuis tussen de wijngaarden van de Duitse Rijnland-Palts deelstaat – neemt zijn verantwoordelijkheden serieus. Veel artiesten gebruikten natuurlijk de tijd om nieuwe muzikale benaderingen te gebruiken of diep in zichzelf te graven, maar Gropper ontdekte dat deze zelfanalyse hem ook ertoe bracht na te denken over de grotere maatschappelijke vragen die de afgelopen twee jaar – en het bijbehorende isolement – hebben opgeroepen: de voor- en nadelen van individualisme, het goede en slechte dat ons bindt en verdeelt, het nastreven van geluk en het doel van hoop, en de wijsheid van Chinese gelukskoekjes. Hij kwam naar voren met een cruciaal besef, een dat voor hem net zo verrassend is als voor anderen: hij is eigenlijk een optimist.

Dit soort zaken domineren deze schitterende plaat, maar uiteraard in echte Gropper-stijl. AMEN koevoeten in referenties aan filosofen, romanschrijvers en therapeuten naast citaten uit zelfhulpboeken, een verhandeling over tech-miljardairs en toespelingen op enkele van de meer extreme doctrines die de ronde doen. Dat dit allemaal onder toezicht staat van een heerszuchtige, anonieme AI-assistent is een indicatie van zijn wrange aard – “OK”, eist ze aan het einde van de grandioze ouverture van het album, ‘A Song For Myself’, “this needs to stop right now” – en het extravagante muzikale karakter zal degenen die nu al in verrukking brengen zowel bekend met het geïnspireerde werk van de 39-jarige als met zijn altijd geestige, geletterde kijk op zijn thema’s. “I called my musical project Get Well Soon,” herinnert hij ons droogjes. “You mustn‘t forget the service aspect of the whole thing.

AMEN is echter constant verrassend: ‘This Is Your Life’ past krautrockritmes toe op strakke synthpop, ‘My Home Is My Heart’ ontwikkelt zich tot een Hi-NRG-meesterwerk dat Pet Shop Boys’ ‘It’s A Sin’ een aanloop zou geven op zijn geld, en ‘Mantra’ sluit af met luxe dreampop; ‘I Love Humans’ is een steeds luxer georkestreerde episch, ‘One For Your Workout’ biedt glinsterende up-tempo pop waarvan de drums degenen die zich ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ van Pat Bena tar zullen herinneren, zullen bekoren, en zowel ‘Chant And Disenchantment’ als ‘Golden Days’ brengen een liefdevol eerbetoon aan de grote producenten uit de jaren 60 en 70, waaronder Serge Gainsbourg en David Axelrod. De kers op de taart blijft echter een van de grote stemmen van onze tijd, een uitbundige croon doordrenkt met een wereldmoe gevoel van bitterzoete compassie, zo geruststellend als een arm om de schouder. Voor velen van ons was na de afgelopen jaren niets meer welkom.

“If there’s anything positive to be gained from this global tragedy,” zegt Gropper, it’s that it’s brought truths to light. Mostly in a painful way, unfortunately, but this pandemic has nevertheless been instructive. Even in their wildest dreams, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists and ethicists could never have imagined such a case study, such an experimental set-up, for their papers, and they’ll certainly be drawing on these textbook months for a very long time to come. Questions have arisen that, in normal circumstances, would be far too melodramatic.”

On his second album of the year, Konstantin Gropper, aka GET WELL SOON, set out to explore whether AI could become part of the creative process rather than simply be dismissed outright. Fortunately, the experiment failed, and SÉANCE became an album about artificial intelligence—not one made with it. The title says it all: for Gropper, conversations with ChatGPT, Claude and their peers have much in common with a séance. As a result, the album is steeped in an eerie, ghostly atmosphere. “SÉANCE is my
gothic album,” he explains. Given it was only May this year when GET WELL SOON released their seventh album, Minus The Magic, you might be speculating how Konstantin Gropper can be ready with an eighth so soon. Sure, it’s a while since 2022’s Amen, which left time to build up a backlog. And, with 2026 marking the project’s 20th anniversary, celebrating with two albums the same year seemed like a worthwhile challenge. Still, it’s easy to wonder whether he might not have had some help. Intriguingly, if not for the reasons you’d think, you’ll turn out to be right.

“I believe that artists shouldn’t go looking for themes,” Gropper says. “Themes should find the artist.”
Given, however, the multi-instrumentalist’s reputation as one of his generation’s most accomplished songwriters, not to mention one of its most versatile producers, SÉANCE’s theme is unexpected. Then again, it’s impossible to avoid. “SÉANCE is about Artificial Intelligence,” he explains. “The topic is omnipresent, and often unsettling. I needed to face it head-on. Despite certainly justified criticism from the arts community, ignoring the issue or rejecting it outright won’t solve anything. It’s not going away.” Nonetheless, this isn’t a routine ‘AI album’. “It’s a document of working with a non-human sparring partner. It’s an experiment that fortunately failed.”
Although its grandeur is familiar, SÉANCE might be – quite possibly due to the nature of the aid he sought in the absence of studio companions – Gropper’s most intimate LP. Unlike Minus The Magic, which pursued youthful thrills live with his band, SÉANCE features only three additional musicians: Verena (his sister) and Alex Mayr on vocals, as well as drummer Paul Kenny. As for the mixing, Gropper handed a couple of songs each to five enduring “partners-in-crime”: Marcus Wüst, who’s worked on all of his albums; Philipp Schwär, who mixed the first two; Markus Ganter, who’s mixed and produced songs in the past (and with whom Gropper produced Casper’s Hinterland, a chart-topping album in his German homeland); and Philipp Hülsenbeck and Fritz Brückner, live sound engineers, long part of his touring crew. “It seemed like the right moment for a little reunion,” Gropper reminds us. “It’s the anniversary year!”
SÉANCE, while retaining his trademark drama, epitomised by Gropper’s luxurious voice, is very different to its predecessor: more studious, solemn and atmospheric. There’s the menacing ‘Goth 101’, the affecting ‘Arthur And Harry’, and the sensational ‘Hallucination’. There’s the spooky ‘Holiday in Lily Dale’, the epic ‘Nothing Is Lost’, and a thrilling shanty, ‘The Wreck of The Deutschland’, not to mention the synth-drenched ‘Siri, What Ruined The West?’ Scattered throughout are shorter pieces: the nostalgic ‘Human Potential Advisor’, the otherworldly ‘The Undead Choir’, the cinematic ‘Khaleesi’. Concluding with ‘Witness Impact’’s melancholy and ‘You Need Me’’s quiet threats, Gropper contends it’s his “Gothic album”.

SÉANCE began as an exploratory exercise in using AI, but quickly became something else. Indeed, Gropper’s approach was ultimately defined by an unanticipated yet strangely comforting epiphany. “Almost every attempt to let AI do the creative work led nowhere,” he says. “It only created more work for me. The most interesting results came from its mistakes. That’s why this turned into an album about AI rather than one made with it.”
This, as its title hints, is not all that SÉANCE is about. “When you’re dealing with the most discussed topic of our time, you’re always late to the party. That’s why it was necessary to bring an unusual perspective to the table.” Gropper’s, unsurprisingly, is again unexpected: AI has far more in common than you might think with the Spiritualism movement that evolved in the mid-19th century. “AI is literally a supernatural force,” Gropper explains, “and summons the most existential questions of philosophy, psychology and sociology. That’s precisely where things become interesting.” To some, it might seem a leap of faith to associate AI and communing with the dead. The Mannheim-based musician has, however, given this plenty of thought. To reinforce this, he raises the ghost of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who coined the term ‘hauntology’, a blend of haunting and ontology. “This is how I understand it,” Gropper elaborates. “The present is always haunted by the past. Every supposedly
new insight carries traces of what came before. To me, that’s the major contradiction concerning AI: the technology that claims to represent the future can only draw on the past. It can never be genuinely creative. It’s a monster stitched together from dead parts.”

Mirroring this in its music, SÉANCE embraces sampling, or what Gropper refers to as “found footage”. Any déjà vu is thus intended, whether the eerie interpolation of ‘Daisy Bell’ on ‘IBM 7094 & HAL 9000 & Me’ – which conjures Stanley Kubrick and The Shining’s ballroom finale – or, on Gropper’s own ‘Unanswered Questions’, Charles Ives’ ‘The Unanswered Question’. These aren’t random choices, of course. When the IBM 7094 became the first computer to sing, Arthur C. Clarke witnessed its debut performance. Seven years later, Harry Dacre’s 19th century hit was repeated by HAL 9000 as the sentient computer unravels in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ives, meanwhile, came to mind as Gropper contemplated the music industry’s ongoing decline, with AI yet another threat. “Ives himself never gave up his day job. There’s this famous quote, ‘My children should not starve on my dissonances.’” Or, as Gropper’s song now puts it, “None of this noise feeds the kids.”
SÉANCE starts with a short instrumental recreating “what the AI process feels like to me: an undefined, chaotic murmur, then bing! The answer appears! And every time, I find myself wishing it had taken longer.” ‘Goth 101’ addresses conflicting views of the controversial tech as either the dawn of a golden future or the harbinger of humanity’s downfall. ’Hallucination No.4’, meanwhile, arose from failed attempts to encourage his AI to hallucinate. “I wanted a feverish, incoherent, poetically useful language, but,” he shrugs, “it didn’t work.” Only the climactic ‘You Need Me’ adopts truly AI-generated lyrics after instructions to “write a song about why I need you.” Even these had to be heavily edited. “What struck me was how much revolved around warnings, veiled threats and a lack of responsibility. None of that had been part of my prompt.”
With a title borrowed from Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of The Deutschland’ followed another unsuccessful AI effort to transform the poem’s text into singable lyrics. “So, it became about a different question,” Gropper says. “What can or should humanity, and therefore AI, learn from the past? Germany – or rather, the wreckage of the ‘old Germany’ – ought to stand as the embodiment of ‘Never Again’, yet a lot of people don’t seem to have learned that lesson. This leads to a larger question: if humans are capable of drawing the wrong conclusions from history, what conclusions will an intelligence without morality or a conscience draw? Of course, learning from the past is fundamentally the right thing to do, but drawing the right conclusions – the moral ones – requires something we call ‘humanity’.”

In search of answers, he shaped ‘Arthur and Harry’ from the odd friendship between Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and the great Houdini. The writer was a champion of Spiritualism, but the magician’s later life was devoted to denouncing this clearly questionable movement. Their story, Gropper says, “reminded me how Elon Musk and a lot of his peers repeatedly warned about the risks posed by the technology their own companies were helping to develop.” In particular, he refers to an unlikely meeting where Doyle and his wife conducted a séance to contact Houdini’s late mother. “Houdini’s central objection was simple: the spirit supposedly dictated a letter in English, a language she had neither spoken nor understood. Who better than the world’s greatest illusionist to recognise when something is an illusion?” Behind further songs lie similarly curious – one might even say ghostly – tales. ‘Nothing Is Lost’ debates ‘dead bots’ (virtual replicas of someone who’s died) with a couple, one at death’s door, and ‘Khaleesi’ was stirred by a 14-year-old American’s suicide, provoked by a romantic relationship with an AI avatar. ‘Witness Impact’ was sparked by another real life episode, a murder trial where, after his family created their own avatar, the impact statement was given in court by the deceased victim himself. There are even more such
phantasms, too, in ‘The Undead Choir’, based on Johannes Brahms’ setting of the German folk song, ‘Die Trauernde’. Gropper’s apart, every voice here, however heavenly, is entirely artificial. He’s brought the undead to life.
More curiously still, ‘Siri, What Ruined The West?’ emerged from conversations exploring the title’s question with celebrated figures on the Hello History app. “Among them were George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Dante Alighieri, Rasputin, Karl Marx, Leonard Cohen, Jesus and Kurt Cobain. I couldn’t help notice they all seemed to agree on one thing: capitalism and social media are to blame. At the very least, they suggest today’s widespread sense of injustice and dissatisfaction stems less from having too little than from having too much.”

Perhaps wary of this, ‘Human Potential Advisor’ and ‘Holiday In Lily Dale’ return to his original theme, confronting more qualities – constant affirmation, people-pleasing – that AI undeniably shares with spiritual mediums. Neither will deliver bad news, Gropper points out, and to him this presents another significant problem. “During a creative process,” he argues, “it’s comforting to be told you’re on the right track and all your ideas are great. But something important gets lost: the artistic struggle. You outsource self-doubt and, in doing so, you erase it. Doubt is essential to art.”
Here, there’s no room for doubt. Twenty years after launching GET WELL SOON, Konstantin Gropper remains vital as ever, perceptive, inventive, an artist still hungry for ideas as much as answers. Crafted, witty, challenging and heady, SÉANCE’s intelligence is far from artificial. In contrast – quite naturally – this is the very real deal.

Credit: Oskar Felix Funke