Peng Like’s debut full-length album, 献给 AI 的思考 (Thoughts on AI), arrives with the weight of a year-long artistic journey — one shaped by cultural displacement, intellectual curiosity, and creative experimentation with artificial intelligence. The Russian-born musician and software engineer, known in everyday life as Aleksandr Podkhaliuzin, channels his experiences living in China into a concept album that fuses human vulnerability with machine precision. It’s a record grounded in narrative — nine tracks arranged like chapters of an unfolding story — exploring foreignness, forbidden affection, and metaphysical wonder, all wrapped in a sharp blend of classical instrumentation and AI-assisted production. From the first track to the last, Peng Like invites listeners into a world where love and logic coexist, where the laws of physics are as emotional as memory, and where cracks — literal and symbolic — reveal rather than destroy.
The opening track sets the tone with the perspective of a stranger trying to understand a world that feels close yet unreachable. Peng Like describes his early years in China like being a “kitten” — cared for, watched over — but always marked as someone who does not and will never belong. This alienation becomes the emotional foundation of the album. The arrangement leans toward cinematic textures — pensive piano leads and minimal guitar that wrap around the story like mist over a neon skyline. There’s honesty here, the kind that doesn’t exaggerate struggle, but instead reveals it in quiet details: train stations, business trips, broken sentences in a new language, the echo of loneliness among crowds.
As the album progresses, the narrative shifts into the realm of impossible love — a theme born from an uncomfortable yet eye-opening truth. In China, Peng Like discovered that many assume foreign men are interested in transactional romance — “second wives,” fleeting thrill, colonial desire. He recoiled from the stereotype, and from that discomfort sprung a different kind of love story: one built on respect, cosmic misalignment, and the tragedy of two hearts divided by culture. Songs in this middle section feel intimate yet large — melodies rise like confessions you whisper into a void, and AI-generated production flutters around them like glitching fate. Even without speaking a word of Chinese, listeners feel the longing, the admiration, the ache of affection that cannot survive reality.
Smack at the center is the album’s crown jewel: “Crack.” This is a thematic fulcrum. Rock energy bursts through restrained elegance, as if emotion finally spills over after being held back for too long. “Crack” reflects the album’s cover art — a golden fracture splitting a perfect white shape — referencing the Japanese concept of kintsugi, where brokenness becomes more meaningful than perfection. Before this track lie four songs; after it, four more. The number four, associated with death in Chinese culture due to its pronunciation, emphasizes the collapse of hope. Here, the love story doesn’t simply falter, but shatters. When guitars roar and drums tighten, it’s grief translated into vibration, a rupture listeners feel in their bones.
The post-“Crack” material explores what remains after romantic death: drifting memories, parallel timelines, fantasies where things might have worked out differently. Peng Like’s fascination with quantum physics — entanglement, multiverses, the idea that emotion might transcend space and logic — takes center stage. Thematically, the record becomes philosophical, asking questions that belong in a lab and a diary: If love cannot happen here, does it live elsewhere? Can hearts be tethered like particles beyond interpretation? Tracks like these move with a subtle urgency — airy vocals and dramatic orchestrations capturing a mind refusing to let go even as the world insists it must.
Production-wise, Thoughts on AI is its own experiment. Peng Like toss prompts into a generator as he shapes, refines and rebuilds. He describes AI as “like a child,” talented but unfocused, needing human guidance to be meaningful. That dynamic — the collision of algorithmic possibility and human discipline — becomes part of the record’s soul. You can hear the precision: transitions that click like code running correctly, sections layered with mathematical beauty. But you also hear the flaws — the humanity — in the guitar tremble, the piano hesitation, the breath before a lyric lands. It’s a collaboration between person and machine where neither overshadows the other.
The cultural symbolism embedded in the album’s structure is no accident. Nine tracks — a number linked with longevity and eternity in Chinese tradition — reinforce that despite heartbreak and separation, some bonds refuse to fade. Even if love dies in the physical sense, the emotional truth lingers forever. The record ends not with resolution, but with an acceptance that eternity isn’t always joyful — sometimes it’s the suffering we agree to carry. Pain becomes proof something once mattered.
What makes 献给 AI 的思考 powerful isn’t its technical novelty or ambitious concept. It’s Peng Like’s sincerity — his refusal to lean on anonymity or the novelty of AI, his insistence that this story is earned, lived, and felt. When he calls this the beginning of his artistic voice, it doesn’t sound like empty humility — it sounds like a promise of deeper things to come. He dreams of writing more complex compositions that inch closer to his idol Rachmaninov, but this album — modern, emotional, experimental — already stands firmly as its own achievement.
Peng Like gives us more than a set of songs. He gives us an emotional timestamp of a life split between worlds — cultural, linguistic, romantic, scientific — yet determined to make meaning out of every fracture. Thoughts on AI is about a human learning how to break — and how to turn those cracks into gold.
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