#Arteetude 335 - Detlef Schlich and Co-Host Sophia about the making of the upcoming WAW video for AfricaSmile — a journey through rivers, AI imagery, artistic friction, friendship, symbolism and fragile hope.

In Arteetude 335, Detlef Schlich and his AI Co-Host take listeners deep inside the making of the upcoming AfricaSmile video by WAW — not simply as a music video, but as a fragile negotiation between image, friendship, artistic responsibility and technological imagination. What began as a “quick visual accompaniment” slowly transformed into an unexpectedly emotional and philosophical journey. The episode explores the creative tensions between Detlef and Dirk Schlömer, the symbolic worlds of the White Nile and Blue Nile, the controversial removal of the original AI-generated “mythological beauty” figure, and the emergence of a new visual language built from floating tull fabrics, sediments, ritual movement and dissolving landscapes. At the centre lies the mysterious “zero” — the final number in the river countdown system running through the video from source to delta. Initially beautiful, later deconstructed, the zero becomes a symbol for disappearance, convergence, incompleteness and transformation. Detlef also reflects on his ritualistic nighttime working process as a “digital shaman”: candlelight, headphones, darkness and listening “between the lines” of the music in order to discover hidden emotional frequencies. Arteetude 335 becomes a meditation on: artistic friction, friendship, AI aesthetics, visual ethics, mythopoetic filmmaking, and the fragile possibility of hope inside a wounded world. The episode concludes with the video version of AfricaSmile — beginning not with the trumpet intro of the single version, but with the bubbling source of the White Nile itself. Detlef Schlich is a rock musician, podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker, ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork. He is recognised for his seminal work, including a scholarly examination of the intersections between shamanism, art, and digital culture, and his acclaimed video installation, Transodin's Tragedy. He primarily works in performance, photography, painting, sound, installations, and film. In his work, he reflects on the human condition and uses the digital shaman's methodology as an alter ego to create artwork. His media archaeology is a conceptual and practical exercise in uncovering the unique aesthetic, cultural, and political aspects of media in culture. WEBSITE LINKS WAW Official YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@WAWBand From the forthcoming WAW album The Stories of Nil Young Two songs from WAW’s developing album project The Stories of Nil Young — a mythopoetic journey along the Nile, where river, memory, loss, cooperation and hope flow into music. AfricaSmile AfricaSmile follows the Nile as an imagined journey from its sources to the Mediterranean Sea — a river of memory, movement, rhythm and myth.The song turns the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile into a fragile image of cooperation. It is not a naïve peace anthem, but a wounded musical hope: two different currents meeting, listening, and still moving forward together. The Niles Bittersweet Song The Nile’s Bittersweet Song is the first official single by WAW / Wild Atlantic Way — Detlef Schlich and Dirk Schlömer. The song follows the Nile as a river of memory, beauty, loss and contradiction: a life-giver, but also a force that can take away what it once nourished. Through the story of Kamau, it becomes a poetic reflection on childhood, fragile hope