Sveið


James Mainwaring - Federico Reuben - Emil Karlsen

Sveið is a new UK-based power trio, powered by AI, featuring Mercury Prize-nominated saxophonist James Mainwaring, British-Costa Rican laptop improviser and live coder Federico Reuben, and Norwegian improvising drummer Emil Karlsen. Sveið are not interested in using AI by tech-bro oligarchs to dominate us and replace creativity - instead we train, hack, negotiate, and challenge AI in an entangled process of co-creation.

James Mainwaring - saxophones / Federico Reuben - laptop improvisation and live coding / Emil Karlsen - drums


Debut album Latent Imprints out on 577 Records 27th June

Latent Imprints blurs the lines between free jazz, improvisation, electronic music, and artificial intelligence. We use and train AI models to generate sounds (neural audio synthesis) that are created and manipulated in real-time. The unpredictability of these sounds, influence the intense and energetic musical performance captured in a single recording session.

The album explores the uncanny, mythological qualities of AI-generated outputs, it imagines AI as a contemporary, post-digital myth: a repository of glitched, shape-shifting creatures whose uncanny sounds both disrupt and extend human music-making. Each track is named after mythological creatures from diverse traditions, glitched and reimagined by AI.