Fjordavind Céilí, pronounced FJOR-da-VIND KAY-lee, is a communion of words and worlds meant to evoke natural forces, rugged beauty, and a celebration of folk music, storytelling, and communal joy.
I could tell you that this band's music was born in the winter of 1976, in the harbor town of Fjordavind, when musicians, poets, and storytellers—caught by surprise in a sudden gale—found themselves under the same roof, waiting for the storm to pass.
Or I could tell you that the band's roots go back to the early 2000s, when a group of friends decided to breathe new life into old recordings of forgotten folk songs discovered by chance in a run-down thrift store.
But both would be lies. Fjordavind Céilí does not exist. It is a purely fictional band, created to explore the possibilities of AI-generated music. In a world increasingly saturated with artificial content passed off as real, I prefer to be honest: the music of Fjordavind Céilí is entirely computer-generated.
If you happen to enjoy it, I’m glad. Perhaps you share my curiosity (and concern) about this technology. If not, that’s perfectly fine too.
AI music refers to any musical composition created entirely -or predominantly- without human involvement. Lyrics might be generated using large language models, while melody, harmony, rhythm, and even vocals can be produced by specialized generative music tools. When using these pre-trained systems, the user's input may be as minimal as a short prompt describing what to generate.
Not long ago (early 2025), I read about AI-based music creation tools and simply couldn't believe they were any good. But I'm a curious person, and whenever I can, I like to test things for myself just to form a well-grounded opinion. The results blew me away. To an expert listener, the music of Fjordavind Céilí might definitely sound artificial. But to a casual listener like me, it's mostly indistinguishable from human-made music. So, I decided to turn this little weekend experiment into something tangible by publishing the results online. This website is part of the project too. I wanted a place to clearly state that Fjordavind Céilí is AI music.
No, I am not. Honestly, I'd be happy if this project could simply pay for itself. The tools I use and the hosting costs add up to just a few bucks per month. I'll just keep everything online for as long as I can.
Fair question. No, I'm just a curious human. If you contact me through the link in the footer, you'll (eventually) get a reply from an actual person.
No, definitely not. I picked the band name, defined its music genre, crafted a narrative for the album and each track, manually tweaked the lyrics here and there, and decided on instruments and tone. That might sound like a lot, but in practice, it's just writing a few descriptive prompts for the AI to interpret. The rest -the actual music- was generated automatically by publicly available tools. If anything, it feels more like being a patron of the arts: someone who commissions work from creatives. Except I'm no Francesco del Giocondo, the AI is no Leonardo da Vinci, and the result is a batch of synthetic folk songs, not the Mona Lisa.
The thing is, I like the music of Fjordavind Céilí. This is still just a small side project for me, and free time is rare and precious. But I'll try to produce more music if I can. I have plenty of ideas for new albums... and you haven't even met the other half of the band yet! I can promise one thing: no mass-production of AI slop. I plan to produce new music only if I have time to make something that I would actually enjoy listening to.
