Destructured Bach

Back in 2021, Artificial Intelligence in music was still a niche topic. There had already been a few experiments, of course: Sony CSL had generated a Beatles-style song called Daddy’s Car, Google was developing the Magenta project, and OpenAI was just getting started with Jukebox. Some independent artists were beginning to use algorithms to generate loops or melodies, but most of these were semi-automatic tools — AI assisted the creative process, but never fully took the lead. These were prototypes, lab experiments, curiosities for insiders. Nothing that resembled a fully-formed album.

Then came Destructured Bach. Released on October 6, 2021 after more than a year in the making, it is an LP entirely composed by an unsupervised neural network, developed from scratch by musician, engineer, and university researcher Oberlunar (the pseudonym of Francesco Bardozzo). No off-the-shelf frameworks, no commercial AI platforms: everything was custom-built, with one goal — to train an AI not to replicate Bach, but to forget him. To learn his musical grammar only to dismantle it, creating something entirely new, unheard, alien. The result isn’t a tribute. It’s not a remix. It’s a transformation.

And that same sense of transformation is echoed in the album cover, conceived and created by Rafz (pseudonym of Raffaele Iannello). In 2021, generative AI for images didn’t exist yet, so the artwork was crafted entirely by hand: conceptually, photographically, symbolically. Rafz bought a pasta machine, photographed it in a studio against a neutral background, and quite literally fed it a faithful reproduction of a Bach score, which it physically shredded. In post-production he added 3D-modeled musical notes, appearing to float out of the machine. The result is both ironic and evocative: the pasta machine becomes a sort of Turing Machine for music, transforming classical compositions into something unrecognizable, yet still alive.

Watch the full interview broadcast on Radio Stay Rock, where Rafz and Oberlunar share the story behind the project