Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Kodiak Arcade.
Kodiak Arcade is the electronic-pop art and music project by Graeme Cornies, an award-winning composer best known for his film and television work with Voodoo Highway Music and Post. As a generative artist, Cornies filters his ideas through the lens of modern AI, generating imagery that venerates nature, personal reflection and the power of imagination.
The new song, “You and Me,” is about meeting someone new and coming to the realization that this new person might just become a main character in your life. It’s about feeling a generalized excitement for the future because you can picture them in it.
Stream and share the head-bopping, mood-propelling, and optimistic “You and Me” now:
“The style of this song is loosely based on my fandom for Daft Punk, Diana Ross and OutRun on Sega Genesis,” explains Cornies. “It’s celebratory, danceable and filled with the kind of live instruments and synths that blend disco and the sound of retro video gaming in a unique way.”
The cover art for this single was generated by an AI, iterating on the lyric we’ll walk on into the twilight of the long night.
To listen to:
Bijork: “All is Full of Love” from her album “Homogenic”
I’m listening to All is Full of Love from the album Homogenic by Bijork. Her work has been a key artistic inspiration for me for almost 30 years. She has a clarity of artistic vision that seems almost unmatched, whether she’s collaborating with great animators and directors for her memorable videos, proving her acting skill like she did in Dancer in the Dark, or creating musical soundscapes that are uniquely her own, she sits at the pinnacle of my personal artistic pedestal with a handful of others. Usually, when someone has had the kind of success that she has, a small army of sound-alike acts follow, but she has such a one-of-a-kind aesthetic that I’ve rarely heard anyone even try to sound like her. No one does Bijork like Bijork, and that seems like a real badge of honor for an artist. Her love for electronic textures somehow blends seamlessly with the rest of the uncommon cinematic textures in this track and her vocal performance travels between fragile a ferocious. I like to revisit her work for inspiration – especially when I feel like I need to muster the courage to be myself artistically.
To watch:
Glenn Marshall’s “The Crow”
Glenn Marshall has been on the cutting edge of image synthesis and neural-network-oriented art since the beginning. “The Crow” is a dance piece where Marshall has used artificial intelligence to transform a dancer into a crow to create an otherworldly performance. Artistic tech is being innovated so fast this will soon look dated despite it being less than a year old, but I think it’s an important piece because it’s a proof-of-concept for filmmakers everywhere about human-led, human/Ai collaboration. Glenn Marshall is bringing neural network art to major film festivals, and is continuously pioneering with his imagery. It would be hard to overstate how many times I’ve been inspired by his work.
To drink:
Lemon Ginger
I’m drinking Yogi’s Lemon Ginger Tea, a tea that I enjoy when I’ve hit my coffee maximum for the day, when I need to rest my voice or otherwise unwind before bed. It’s a simple tea that has a rejuvenating freshness to it. When I’m sick I often drink hot water with lemon and honey, but this is what I reach for when I want something with a similar vibe, but a more complex flavor.
Tea + Me 