“I’m really into this idea of authentic fakes,” Tim Boucher tells me over Zoom in early October. He’s sitting in a cluttered but sunny garage, surrounded by hand-woven baskets he made himself. His oceanic blue eyes are alert, regularly darting across the room, up to the heavens, then back to the screen. We’re about halfway through a lengthy and verbose conversation about AI, and I’m struggling to keep track of his names.
You may know him better as Andrew Frelon.
When I initially reached out to Boucher, he was transitioning from the Frelon character — a self-proclaimed “spokesperson” of the psych-rock AI “band” The Velvet Sundown — to “talent” himself, as the generator of 40 albums released in 30 days under the name Sutem Min.
Over the summer, The Velvet Sundown took streaming services by storm. The outfit garnered over 500,000 monthly Spotify listeners and released two full-length records in a single month. It quickly became apparent that something was afoot, whether uniquely game-changing or suspiciously manufactured.
As the unofficial mouthpiece for The Velvet Sundown, Boucher (as Andrew Frelon) began generating even more attention by way of a rambunctious Twitter account, temporarily increasing streams to over 1 million monthly listeners (it has since fallen down to 200,000). “Absolutely crazy that so-called ‘journalists’ keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that The Velvet Sundown is ‘AI-generated’ with zero evidence,” Boucher tweeted. “Not a single one of these ‘writers’ has reached out, visited a show, or listened beyond the Spotify algorithm.”
Rolling Stone was first on the scene, which unfortunately meant being the first dupe. As it turns out, Boucher tricked the magazine into running a story that claimed to verify his position within the band. He then published a lengthy Medium post that revealed his ruse.
“I expected to get bored and walk away after a couple of days,” Boucher says of his initial plan. “Instead, I suddenly was getting all of this media outreach from Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard. All the top magazines were reaching out and being like, ‘Let’s talk.’”
More than once, Boucher has admitted that he was “falsely pretending to be the band.” “The Rolling Stone interview, at first I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to pretend to be something I’m not,’” he says. “It’s one thing to joke on Twitter and be a jerk on Twitter, but it’s another thing to cross that line. And I did. I didn’t want to do it at first.”
Boucher has worked in content moderation — what he calls the “problem side” of technology — for a decade. He says he is also a traditional artist, musician, and writer who couldn’t break through with conventional tactics. “Before using AI, I was doing all kinds of different storytelling across different media,” Boucher says. “And my experience was, nobody cared. Just another face in the crowd.”
I got the sense that Boucher has arrived at an all-or-nothing position of marketing himself when I had my first email exchange with him. As we worked to find a common time to speak, he sent me additional context about the way he uses particular AI tools, like the divisive AI program Suno. (Warner Music recently signed a landmark deal with the platform, after settling a lawsuit.)
“A couple other items that may be of interest,” he began, before sharing links to AI songs and videos he had generated, along with descriptions of each. He signed off with, “Much much more to say here!” That was an understatement.