This Winnipeg band finished an album they had abandoned in 1979 and after their frontman died. How? AI.

There are a lot of legitimately scary stories about how AI is going to be the death of music. But there are also situations where AI is a good, benevolent thing. For example, country star Randy Travis lost the ability to sing after a stroke. But with the use of AI, he was able to complete a new song called “Where That Came From.”

Here’s another example. Go Jetter was a punky Winnipeg band with dreams of making it big. In 1979, they started work on an album using some very basic equipment in a house with complaining neighbours. The results were raw, unpolished, but loaded with punk rock energy.

Unfortunately, they never managed to finish it. Life got in the way.

The tapes from those sessions were put in a box and left on a shelf somewhere. Frontman Bob “Ig Nition” Morningstar (Iggy to everyone who knew him) moved on to another band in Ohio. In 1983, he took his own life. What may have happened with him and Go Jetter went unrealized.

Recently, surviving members Chris Maxfield and Lloyd Peterson went through some old reel-to-reel tapes and uncovered the Go Jetter recordings. But the audio quality wasn’t there. Plus because the album was never finished, there were gaps. The solution? Artificial intelligence.

Using AI to surgically extract Iggy’s voice from these old tapes, Chris and Lloyd were able to rebuild everything using newly recorded parts. The results are pretty awesome.

Forty years after Iggy died, the band is back together again. That lost album has been found and completed. Listen to the full album here. There’s also this short doc on the project.