this episode runs a little under 1hr. i was dealing with a cold so enjoy the extra seasoning on my voice

They are offering a one week free trial as of now. Relay also shows other places you may find the work if you prefer, though its not conclusive on all the titles listed.

liner notes:
written, produced & mixed by amir motlagh
instrumentation, programming, & vocals by amir motlagh
performed as mirs
mastered by shawn hatfield at audibleoddities
art direction by amir motlagh
dedicated to rp
special thanks to arash m
℗ ANIMALS Publishing Worldwide
© 2025 ANIMALS / Amir Motlagh

he was surrounded by friends just a few nights prior and many midway to see him. we all expected more time.

ray was my collaborator. he was also one of my closest friends during our personal fervent years. he was a fixture of the Orange County art/music scene at the time, sharing a lock-out at the infamous Bassland Studios in Santa Ana, CA for a time. a haunted place in hindsight, yet one that emanated an orb of creativity from its foundations into its inhabitants.

ray ray co-produced my first album, A DAY LATE: INSTRUMENTALS FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS, at 36 Summerfield, in a messy little room upstairs in the family home, next to a small man-made lake with sparkling water.

we had rudimentary digital recording gear, but mixed as much analog as possible using those early digital converters. something I had forgotten was that he also recorded the soundtrack for my first festival film, STILL LOVER. when I had festival screenings, he would make sure to come.

we were a great team because he was incredibly charismatic, able to connect with everyone & a perfect counterpart to my quiet and observant nature.

he played jazz fusion at the Temple Bar across the street from my Santa Monica apartment. he played flamenco punk. he studied with a master to learn the tabla. he genre-swapped because he loved sound, and also because he could play any instrument that he wanted. this was pure god-given talent and anyone that had met him would attest to this.

he made a movie, a terrible one, but he did it and had all of us help him because of that chaotic charisma and vision to see things through. I got on camera for it, and that might have been when I truly figured out that I preferred it behind the camera.

we had a gallery show at Star Shoes in Hollywood. after the show, Heather Graham had a private party in there, and he handed out his flyers to Adam Sandler and Fiona Apple, plainly not giving a fuck about their stardom, while PT Anderson smiled at his fearlessness. we hung out for a bit, but it soon got boring so we got into mischief elsewhere.

he released a handful of records (SOUND WOMB PROJECT, UNFAMILIAR OCCURRENCE, JAHLOBI JONES, JHANVIEH, etc.) under different project names. at some point he changed his performing name to Sam Oak for a few years. when you go back to listen, you realize that he was channeling the future. he mixed rock guitar with 303 acid basslines. always enigmatic.

he wrote two books, as far as I know, and of course both were dense. one was fiction, the other a philosophical one that integrated his core understanding of the world. a latticework of reference that was his original language, a codex of ray’isms. he would meet me at the coffee shop always with a handful of notes, full of diagrams, sketches, and arrows. his world was interdimensional, a pure autodidact.

he got a PhD and became a therapist.

he was a mad scientist, an artist, a musician, a poet, and a legendary figure. he was also a loving son, who truly cared for his friends and would die for them if necessary.

he was fiercely one of a kind, eccentric & infinitely curious about the world, life, people, art and science. the world doesn’t know how to handle this type of presence. too much love outward, too bright a light, too in love with the sensory life offered.

he was an abstraction.

rest in peace my brother.
we shall all meet again at home.

luv
am

Software ate, and ate well, as we shift from ape-eat-ape survival to a kind of post-scarcity culture where abundance is just assumed, baked into every phone. You want something from the matrix? Just ask. Just type. Just click. It’ll appear, as an amalgamation, from a simulacrum. Yet it passes the smell test for millions and appears as real as necessary, partly because our lives are now locked into a rolling feed. We have been trained on good enough.

With this ease, we’re promised the entering of a golden age of creativity. No more gatekeepers, no more struggling with the nuisance of craft. Just infinite music, essays, art, stories, code—all from your fingertips, or your voice, and soon, just passing thought. It's everything you ever dreamed of, vibed into existence. Every cycle oscillating faster as the machine feeds into itself as output, churning mid-level human endeavor 100x’d.

And like everything else online, this rather radical and sudden shift has calcified into two sides of the terminally online megaphone class. A PvP between the accelerationists and the Doomer archetype—one championing the augmented existence and the other, championing the human with its internal limitations—each writing take after take, while the rest of the world, the NPCs (people that actually touch grass), go about their days knowing something is different, but not able to point a finger at this difference just yet.

However, this is not why I’m writing this. Cat’s out of the bag, it’s not going back in. And for me, a couple things have happened of late that caused me to think through this thing and wrestle insight from emotion. First, the Ghibli AI takeover of the web—a grand theft out in the open—is where it hurt. Seeing forty years of painstaking craft taken so for granted, with so much cynicism and entitlement surrounding it, was where I witnessed firsthand the erosion of the social trust layer between art, artist, and the audience. Turning what we deemed sacred into slop—that thing that AI does so well. The soulless output that looks good at first glance but fades into nothingness as quickly as it’s churned out, simply as a matter of its abundance and its uncanny valley-ness—a nothingness behind the eyes, a facsimile of feeling.

The other moment for me has been more gradual—witnessing artist friends create slop to speed up workflows but confide in a feeling of hopelessness. Receiving wordy slop letters from family. Seeing friends use perfect English slop for captions when they still harbor a heavy accent in the physical world. But it’s clear: except for my artist friends, who can’t quite articulate it but feel a sense of loss, most don’t mind. In fact, most prefer this convenience for any tradeoff yet unseen.

But let’s forget the larger debate for a second. Let’s focus instead on a subgenre of this culture war—the way people talk about AI image generation, and with that, the ungrounded or sloppy arguments used to justify its legitimacy as art. I’ve seen three main ones, and I think each of them misses the mark in a big way.

First is the digital photography analogy—the idea that AI image generation is no different than going from film to digital, or from brushes to Photoshop. But this analogy doesn’t track. Digital photography is still photography. While film became file, the medium stayed intact—point and shoot, light, lens, subject. AI image generation doesn’t evolve a medium; it detaches from it entirely. It’s language into a rendition of a photo, a digital simulacrum dithered into existence. You’re not making an image; you’re prompting one into existence. It’s not painting, drawing, or photography—it’s medium-agnostic, trans-media.

Second is the idea that AI art is “something else”—a new category. Adjacent. Not in competition. While this is true in a micro sense (self-labeled AI artists exist and so does a history of programmed art), it’s not in a broader one. This is why every AI tech CEO pitches it as a better, faster, cheaper way of doing the old thing. While the old thing could be a spreadsheet, the statement is a blanket. AI is not marketed as a parallel tool but one that’s a direct replacement. Pretending otherwise is either naïve or dishonest.

Third is the democratization claim—that this technology makes art accessible to the masses for the first time. But art has always been accessible. The tools are everywhere—cameras, tablets, music software, free drawing apps. If you have something to say, you could say it. The reality of this statement isn’t access for the first time—it’s results. Output without input. The dream isn’t to make art—it’s to skip the part where you have to become someone capable of making it.

So this is the shift—and the break. Art, in either an academic lens or a layman’s sense, is a proposition, a form of communication that centers around—and has enhanced—human culture. Clicking a button and getting a Ghibli-style rendering of your dog may be fun, but it’s as distant from art as a 1099 form. As is the anime cat girl or the millionth cornball dystopian futurescape ripped straight from Blade Runner and Akira. It is, as predicted by philosopher Charles Baudrillard some forty years ago, a Xerox of a Xerox, repeated ad infinitum.

But barring some real culture shifts—maybe the forming of a post-luddite culture, where the youth treat these new tools as antithetical to human life, or rebel as an anti-boomer (not age, worldview) agenda takes over, like a new punk movement or the hippie, antiwar movements of the 20th century. In any case, these will be short-lived in the grander cycles as this technology dominates every inch of human life.

Two things stick out to me at this seismic moment. One is that we have not had time to mourn this feeling of loss of human craft. Our pursuits, our vision, our dedication and detail—those are losing essence day by day. Not everyone feels this yet, but my feeling is they will shortly. This transition, the sense that we are speedrunning the end of culture—a heaviness not fully realized. So let’s mourn. Give humanity this space. We will all need it.

The other thing that magnifies the first is our sense of entitlement to subvert our very own culture. Let’s ease this—for all our sakes. Let’s not pretend that we are artists for prompting a soulless image, or that we are sudden developers because we can craft a website or simple game in mere seconds, when we can’t read a simple Python script.

We are staring out over the cliff, nearing the end of culture, where everything is a perpetual remix of something that was a remix of an amalgamation, iterated out of our own human creativity. Let’s pause to mourn. And after we have given respect, let’s create again, with a newfound respect—from the cave to the now.

Let not the computer take our purpose, for if it does, we are dead.

he went back to his graf roots to blend between our aesthetic & story considerations. you can see some designs really signal an authentic early 90’s socal graffiti style. in the end, we chose a design that had just enough flavor of that style, without it dominating, and showing transformation of time in the details.

the persian version had additional challenges that had us consulting some experts in the language to seek a proper translation.

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some words about the picture below:

"WHALE is beautiful in ways I never expected. Lyrical and delightfully lo-fi" -Lucas Mcnelly -Filmmaker (Blanc de Blanc)

"A debut well worth catching.... the film, especially in its quieter moments, has a dream-like quality that rewards the viewer with its insight into just trying to be able to juggle life's hardship with an innate desire to just enjoy life" -Sam Ippolto Pittsurgh Examiner

"An exquisitely handmade exploration of holding onto one's spirit in this world....sublime imagery finds transcendence in the ordinary...WHALE manages to feel timeless, yet particularly relevant for this moment in history- a crystallization of the widespread longing for something beyond what modern society has to offer us all" -- Steve Bagatourian Writer IFC's American Gun

"WHALE is what Truffaut called the cinema of the future.... It has talent and ambition to spare; Motlagh knows exactly what he wants and he knows how to get it. He's not afraid to be personal, to be slightly obscure and elliptical, to use the freedom that independence gives him. whale is definitely worth seeing and considering for filmgoers and filmmakers alike." -Tom Russell- Turtleneck Films

"Pulsing with a restlessness of purpose and Vision" - Alejandro Adams -- Braintrustdv

"The acting/non-acting is so flawless Whale appears to be a blend between documentary footage and a foreign/art house project....I can very comfortably say that Whale is one of the most exciting & well made indie films I've seen in a while...creating an interesting/reflective image of ethnic & economic diversity in America." -Sujewa Ekanayake -- DIY Filmmaker Blog

"Writer/Director Amir is a fresh cinematic voice from the west coast. Distinctly schooled in technique yet has a unique approach to aesthetic over narrative. The film was more of a poem then a traditional story and I love that!" -Ryan Balas- One Way Community

"First, let me start off by saying that Whale, written and directed by Amir Motlagh, is a visual masterpiece. It is shot and edited in my favorite style of dynamic camerawork done with an amazing flare for composition and coverage, and immediately draws you in.......Yes, I love Whale. I love it because the characters and dialogue are more natural than 99% of Hollywood movies made. I love it because the scene between Cameron and his ex is one of the best and most realistic scenes I've seen in a long time." - Reid Gershbein -- Royal Baronial Theatre (#2wkfilm)

"An unassuming, soulful debut feature..."I was quite taken by Whale...Motlagh's eye for composition (I knew I was in good hands from the film's very first shot) and ability to flirt with indie film clichés without becoming entrapped by them mark him as a director to watch.." - Andy Horbal

just a little before covid hit, i had an idea that i presented to my father. my baba jaan, an incredibly talented man, who is, above all, a phenomenal cook. his cooking is a bridge for me—a connection to a culture i’ve always felt in between, that of my birth country and my origin country.

this was my value add: to document the incredibly vast, sophisticated, and ultimately delicious cuisine of iran for the world. and here, we had the perfect vehicle—a man who has spent countless hours perfecting a traditional craft, in the time between working to provide and being an extremely caring and wonderful husband and father.

i asked if he wanted to showcase his talents to the world and help people like me learn the art of iranian (persian) cuisine.

in my mind, the audience wasn’t those already familiar with the food, but people like me—those who have always felt caught between two cultures—and, of course, anyone who simply wanted to learn how to cook what, to western eyes, might seem like an exotic cuisine.

so, “cooking with yousef” was born. now, we have thousands of viewers from all over the world, and it keeps growing.

this was just an impulse, but it had agency. and so, it grows…

thank you to everyone who watches, who sends beautifully kind messages to my father, and who shares the videos so that more people can discover the beauty of iranian cuisine.

this is our bridge, and we welcome you to cross it.

you can subscribe to his channel on youtube here, you can follow him on tiktok here, or instagram here. and if you want to support above and beyond, you can pick up some fantastic “cooking with yousef” baba merch.

Limited engagement starts in December.

(for more info, click on link above or image below)