ARTIST · FATHER · SEEKER
Artist · Father · Seeker
He spent more than twenty years learning to make things by hand.
Now he is learning what that was for.
Shaun Soulo / Shaun Conrad
He left school in 1996 and spent the next stretch of his life inside the work, not above it. Nine years at the SABC from 1999. Two decades in graphic design running alongside. And a music life that never asked permission to be taken seriously.
It came in two acts. First as the voice, composer, and writer of Soulstone, a soul and R&B band that ran from 2004 to 2010 and left two albums behind — Music.Love.Truth in 2007 and The Libra Sun in 2009. Then the turn toward something louder. Son Of A 1000, rock this time, same three roles — voice, composer, writer — from 2010 to 2016, three albums deep.
Soulstone · Music.Love.Truth (2007) · The Libra Sun (2009)
Son Of A 1000 · Whatabout · To Jump With Eyes Closed · Live at 810 Studios
Soul, rock, R&B, the electronic edges in between. The genre kept moving. The method never did. Everything built one decision at a time, with no shortcut available and none wanted.
For all of it he was Shaun Soulo. A stage name is a kind of doorway. It lets the work walk out into the world while the person stays a step behind it. That arrangement served him well, until it didn't.
Somewhere in the last while, the doorway stopped feeling necessary. The name began to shorten back toward the one he was given. Shaun Conrad is not a new persona. It is the older one, the plainer one, the one with less distance in it.
“Art is human until it isn't.
What remains is chosen.”
That line sits at the centre of his current work, After Inference — an eight-part series tracing one maker's reckoning with artificial intelligence. Not as spectacle. Not as panic. An honest walk from denial through to purpose, with grief and absurdity somewhere in the middle.
His conclusion is harder than comfort. Machines did not arrive to destroy art. They arrived to remove the hiding places — the delay, the process, the romance of taking a very long time to say something ordinary. What survives that exposure is not the loudest work. It is the work somebody actually chose to stand behind.
He is also a father, which is to say he now measures time differently. The house is loud most mornings — small footsteps, a deliberate knock at a bedroom door, the day arriving whether anyone is ready or not. He prefers it that way.
He records in a single take where he can. He keeps the dog barking in the edit if the dog was barking. He has stopped trimming the grey out of the frame. The work and the life have started to look like the same thing, which is either the point or an accident he has stopped fighting. He is no longer sure there is a difference.
If you want the argument, watch the series.
If you want the man, that is harder — but it is closer than it used to be.
Shaun Conrad