GHOST (2023-)
1 hour 40 minute performance for four performers/musicians, a custom Natural Language Processing AI system, & a horn band; a website, & a vinyl record. Since 2025 also a band touring in music, visual art, and performing arts contexts. THE SAVED NIGHT PART II.
After my father died, I gathered 151 books on death, loss, archives, and memory. With the help of Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant and Alejandro Calcaño, I trained a custom Natural Language Processing AI system on these books. I used the system we designed to generate fragmented, broken text, full of ghosts. I set this text to music with Carmen Quill and Ariadne Randall. Later we invited my uncle Wayne Horvitz to join us. This music became the core of GHOST.
The first part of the performance is a lecture on grief, AI, the dead, Talmudic philosophy, language, and family history (read a version here). The second part is a choreographic concert: 70 minutes of singing and speaking AI-generated text in a bed of synths, piano, viola da gamba, shimmering metal gongs. Also: gestures, naps, eating round food, an interruption from a band of horn players conducted by Wayne.
GHOST is an attempt to use the structure of an NLP AI system (text archive, text input, text output) as a way to play with the permanent presence of the past. An intervention into the conversation around AI and something like music-theatre. Speaking and singing as a way to be with the dead, singing as listening. The room fills up with memories, the dead aren’t gone. And for a moment we’re all just a lot of words from the past, arranged in a new order.
Alongside the performances, Het HEM commissioned a website version of GHOST for The Couch, with audio recordings from 2017-2023, text, video, images, AI system, essay, and a longform interview. A vinyl record of the music was released on Celestial Excursions (US) / Het HEM (NL) in January 2025.
Presentations:
Microscope Gallery, New York, May 18, 2019 (first version)
DAS Arts/DAS Theatre, Amsterdam, January 30, 2020 (workshop)
deSingel, Antwerp, November 20 2021 (try-out)
SPRING Festival Utrecht, May 24-25 2023 (pre-premiere)
brutWien/Musiktheatretage Wien, September 19-21 2023 (premiere)
Zone2Source, Amsterdam (part of Ghosts in the Machine), 26 September 2023
deSchool, Amsterdam, 27-28 September 2023 (presented by Het HEM and Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ)
Credits:
Artistic direction: Asa Horvitz
With and by: Asa Horvitz, Wayne Horvitz, Ariadne Randall, Carmen Quill
Musical direction: Asa Horvitz & Carmen Quill
AI system design: Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Alejandro Calcaño
AI programming: Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant
Horn band: Pablo Nicolas Rojo Anguita, Lezaam Beets, Michael Moore, Ada Rave, Gonçalo Soares, Fie Schouten, Felicity Provan (NL) Anna Tsombanis, Thomas Wiesinger, Phil Yaeger, Christina Baumfried, Max Nagl (AT)
Advice: Oneka von Schrader & Joachim Robbrecht
Collaboration on stage and costume design: Evandro Pedroni
Shirts & Flags: Le Van Hung
Ceramics: Jacob Bartmann
Hat maker: Monica Gamberale
Booklet design and selected images and collages: Nica Horvitz
Lighting assistance: Theo Emil Krausz
Production: Sophie Menzinger, Theo Emil Krausz (AT) / Waffa al-Attas, Nora Duijf (NL)
AI UX Design for performance: XandraDave Cochran
Previous versions of GHOST included contributions from Bryan West, Martin Brans, Esy Casey, David Bruin and Pawel Szubert
Group (band) photo: Erika Kapin
The Couch:
Web development and design: Simon Dirks
All other texts: Asa Horvitz
Curators: Orpheu de Jong & Maia Kenney
Archival photos: Ann Horvitz, Wayne L. Horvitz, Lee Horvitz, Philip Horvitz, Wayne B. Horvitz, Asa Horvitz, Bill Horvitz, Nica Horvitz, Patti Trimble, Robin Eschner, Josh Gaster, unknown. Kawah Ijen/homepage photo by Esy Casey, ceramics photos by Jacob Bartmann.
Video documentation of performances: Sergio Gridelli (NL) / Ines Bacher & Magdalena Fischer (AT)
Production: Golden Trout Wilderness (NL/USA), in association with Celestial Excursions Wien (AT) and SHOW MACHINE (NL). Co-production: SPRING Performing Arts Festival, Het HEM, Muziekgebouw Productiehuis, Frascati Producties, Musiktheatertage Wien, brutWien. With the kind support of the City of Vienna Culture Department, and the Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sports Austria; Amsterdam Fonds voor Kunst; Gemeente Utrecht; Amsterdam Zuid; KlavierLoft Wien. Residency/development: Goethe Institut Hong Kong, Bâtard Festival / wpZimmer, deSingel, Microscope Gallery NYC, Camargo Foundation, MacDowell, DAS Theatre, ELIAS 2069.
With thanks to/impossible without: Carmen Quill, Ariadne Randall, Wayne Horvitz, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Alejandro Calcaño, Bryan West, Robin Eschner, Oneka von Schrader, Joachim Robbrecht, Nica Horvitz, Martin Brans, Esy Casey, David Bruin, Cara Hoffman, John Tarrant, Silvia Bottiroli, Edit Kaldor, Andrea Bozic, Scott Gibbons, Mala Kline, Gary F. Brown, Robert Bosnak, Sabine Cmelniski, Eliza McKelway, Mazlum Nergiz, Andrej Nosov, Grzegorz Reske, Marta Keil, Mark Timmer, Joost Heijthuijsen, Orpheu de Jong, Maia Kenney, Simon Dirks, Julian Hetzel.
For Bill Horvitz (1947-2017)
PRESS
“None of the new releases in January 2025 were stranger than GHOST, a series of songs that meditate on loss, grief, mourning… collages of elliptical imagery, a weird poetry to it… really, really striking and unusual.”
John Schaefer, WNYC’s New Sounds (NPR), January 31, 2025
“… manifestations of loss and grief, spirits caught just at that edge between life and death – a piece about memory and loss, precipitated by the death of [Bill Horvitz]… a multimedia work built around a website, with an AI program that generates seemingly random, repetitive, elliptical, fragmentary texts which strangely fit the way we respond to loss, a memory here, an emotion there, a practical thing that needs to be dealt with right now… a series of strange and uncanny meditations.”
John Schaefer, WNYC’s New Sounds (NPR) – on a full-length GHOST centered episode (“Ghosts, of A Sort”, February 4, 2025)
“An all-star, all-art ensemble”
Iggy Pop, BBC Radio 6, February 7 2026
“GHOST is something eerie, revelatory, and cathartic… you’ll probably never hear anything like [it]… the honesty and fearlessness with which this project is approached is palpable, infectious, and appreciated and loved more with every listen.”
Chris Ingalls, PopMatters (8/10)
“The best sort of experimental music challenges our understanding of what we think we know, and GHOST stands as crucial new work, sparking discussion of what grief and creativity are amid the evolving relationship between human and machine intelligences.”
Ernesto Aguilar, Treble Magazine
“Cryptic, Singular, and Emotionally Unguarded.”
Attic Magazine, Album of the Day
“…featuring fractured lyrics derived from a custom-built, grief-text based generative AI, GHOST is the latest album to use the nascent technology in an attempt to create something surprising and new. The work of Asa Horvitz / Carmen Quill / Ariadne Randall / Wayne Horvitz, the album is sure to cause discussion.”
A Closer Listen
“[To Understand the Story] is… a beautiful prayer which transforms into a ghostly vocals amid a bare electronic rendering.”
Gonzo (Circus)
Additional coverage:
Old Grey Cat | Italian National Radio | Creative Audio Newsletter | Interlocuter Interview | Stereogum Album of Note |I Heart Noise/Cosmic Church | The Moderns | Brooklyn Vegan Honorable Mention | Everything is Noise | Rosy Overdrive | Polish National Radio