Evan King

“My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread” is a cozy, hazy art-pop exploration of the interplay between everyday human life and the natural world. I released this EP as Olivia Nowadays in 2022 along with my frequent musical collaborator, Kent Carson.

Blending field recordings with lush instrumentation, warm rhythms, and lyrics imbued with the whimsy of magical realism, the five songs on MPAHOBAT dip in and out of the experiences of different people, animals, and automatons to explore this fraught relationship between human lifestyles and nature. The EP’s art features the machine-generated outputs of a StyleGAN model I trained on thousands of illustrations of mushrooms, plant diseases, and insects – uncanny specimens which have the simulated quality of natural life, but have no home in the natural world. As a whole, we hope this EP speaks to the struggle we each face in finding our own slice of coziness and community amid the perpetual motion of technological progress.

Below are a few specimens taken from a Twitter thread where we asked friends for seeds to use as model inputs.

Thanks for listening.