Local musician Kgfreeze and his audio engineer friend, Andrew Mead, have made an album entirely with AI. The whole process took about 45 minutes.

“Interludes” would be the eighth solo album from the Saco-based musician whose real name is Kyle Gervais. But is it?

Even the album art isn’t real. A photo of the cover of the 2014 Kgfreeze album “Volunteers” was fed into an AI program that generated something new: an older, more serious-looking Gervais.

Although its 11 songs only reach the 16-minute mark, the music of “Interludes” is indie pop rock that is easy on the ears and entirely fleshed out. These are legitimately good songs. Mead chose to keep them short because longer songs required a bit more human involvement on the back end, and his goal was keep the process simple.

When Gervais shared the songs with some of this friends, they piled on the praise, not knowing that they were listening to something generated by AI.

Here’s how it happened.

Mead likes to keep up with the latest technology, and a couple of weeks ago he found an AI model called Suno. Because Mead produced an album in 2021 for Gervais’ band Grand Hotel and had plenty of his vocal tracks on hand, he reached out to Gervais and suggested a Suno experiment.

Gervais was game and sent Mead 11 song titles that comprise “Interludes,” including “Suddenly, Susan” and “Sneak Attack.” Mead said that once the Sono program had samples of Gervais’ vocals, all he had to do was tell it the song titles and that he wanted the genre to be quirky indie pop rock with male vocals.

“The robot did a better job of me than me,” Gervais said with a laugh.

Before Suno created “Interludes,” Gervais thought AI was out of his reach. “It very much seemed like it was something that was not going to be utilized at a level like mine. It was more of a Hollywood thing or a major label thing where it’s out of the realm of possibility and something that’s beyond a regular person to be able to utilize.”

Mead is equally floored.

“I still can’t really believe that it was that easy and is that good.”

He also thinks that the existential shock he’s feeling now will level out, and in a few weeks, it will feel normal to say that AI can make an entire album, including the songwriting, performing, mixing and producing.

Releasing an AI album meant that Gervais and Mead both had to push aside, at least temporarily, the ethics and morality questions that AI raises.

“What this means, I don’t know. But it’s kind of like we’ve hit this moment in AI relative to music that I thought we were a couple of years out from,” said Mead. “With all the folks that reached out to Kyle or that I heard from, it’s pretty clear that it did pass the music test.”

Mead added that music is especially conducive to AI and saw that unfold with “Interludes.” “It was taking those standard pop conventions and then adding a couple of chords or extending a line further than you thought it would go.” To Mead, that is the mark of a brilliant songwriter, and one of the things he loves about Gervais’ work.

Right or wrong, Sono seemed to understand the assignment well.

Listen to the entire album.

STEVIE WONDER TRIBUTE

For some honest-to-god live music by real humans, head to Portland House of Music on Thursday night.

Higher Ground: A Tribute to Stevie Wonder starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 in advance and $15 at the door for the 21-plus show. Doors open at 8 p.m.

The entire show will be performed by 14 Maine musicians, including percussionist Marc Kaplan, who is also the show’s producer. Others include keys player and vocalist Dawson Hill, vocalist Jennifer Kosinchuk (Neon Gypsy), Tom Douglas on guitar and vocals, drummer Shawn Boissoneault, and Kevin Roy on bass. Lead vocals will be handled by a total of 10 singers. Kaplan said that the massive set list will include the Wonder songs “Uptight (Everything’s Allright),” “Living for the City” and “I Wish.”

UP FROM BOSTON

On Saturday, Boston-based singer-songwriter Antje Duvekot has a show at One Longfellow Square in Portland. Tickets for the 8 p.m. show are $25 in advance and $30 at the door.

Duvekot’s latest album, called “New Wild West,” was released last fall and was produced by singer-songwriter Mark Erelli, a Bates College graduate.

At the moment, she is working on her next album with a working title of “Fight, Flight, Freeze.” “It will be an exploration of those three modes of surviving as it pertains to animals and humans and all of the figurative parallels of how people relate to one another while coming from different backgrounds,” said Duvekot.

Opening for Duvekot in Portland will be a fellow Bostonian, multi-instrumentalist and singer Micah A. John.

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