1010Benja uses Suno hundreds of times on one song and proves AI music doesn't have to sound like AI

By Zendoric · July 20, 2026.

Musician and producer 1010Benja has released "Semiramis' Dream," the opening track of his EP "Time Has Nothing To Do With What You Choose…," built with a process of dozens —he himself says hundreds— of iterations with Suno, the AI music-generation platform. As he explained to the publication Hearing Things, his collaborator Patrick Holder created the base beat, he recorded the vocals, and that combination was fed into Suno; the result was taken into Ableton to edit it, fed back into Suno, and so on. Deezer flags the track as AI-generated and Benja does not hide it: "We feel no shame," he has stated.

The relevant fact is not that an artist uses AI —that is already routine in the music industry of 2026— but that critic Terrence O'Brien, of The Verge, confesses he likes the song despite his declared rejection of AI-generated music and of Suno in particular, which he usually calls "offensively boring." His technical argument is concrete: the track hides the usual telltale signs well —artificial voices, synthetic choruses— because it camouflages them within a hyperpop aesthetic that already normalizes extreme vocal processing. It is, by his reading, more a case of smart production than of pure automatic generation.

1010Benja is not a newcomer nor a viral marketing case: his 2024 album, "Ten Total," received Pitchfork's Best New Music seal, one of the most coveted recognitions in independent music criticism. And his justification for turning to AI is as pragmatic as it is uncomfortable: he says he has been unable to pay rent in recent months and has no certainty of where he will live next month. His phrase sums up the underlying tension: "My visions are currently far beyond my means." He did not hire a professional children's choir for the record; he generated it, because he could not afford it any other way.

This is where it is worth separating two questions that the artist himself mixes. One is artistic quality: O'Brien himself acknowledges that almost nothing achieved in "Semiramis' Dream" would be impossible without AI, with well-processed vocal layers and some studio ingenuity; Suno does not provide an irreproducible texture here, but rather makes cheaper and faster a result attainable by other means. The other question, more relevant to the sector, is economic: generative AI lowers the cost of entry to productions that previously demanded a budget —choirs, orchestral layers, additional sessions— and that changes what an artist without a label or investors can afford. Benja says it bluntly: it is the only reason he uses these tools.

There is a third layer, the ethical one, which Benja does not sweep under the rug: he acknowledges the environmental cost of these models and adopts an almost resigned stance —"the good guy doesn't win this game"— about the impossibility of stopping the corporations that operate them. It is an unusual honesty in a field where many artists prefer to deny the use of AI for fear of the stigma, and others dress it up as innovation without nuance. Here there is neither shame nor triumphalism, only a decision made under real economic pressure.

Our reading: this case illustrates well the hard short-term transition we defend at Zendoric, without sugarcoating anything. Generative AI is not replacing a big studio with a budget here, but rather competing with an independent artist's own ceiling in order to finish his work; that says more about the structural precariousness of the music industry than about the merits or dangers of Suno. At the same time, the episode dismantles a common prejudice: that AI music is intrinsically generic. The difference lies not in the tool but in the judgment of whoever handles it —Benja wrote the lyrics, recorded his real voice and worked through hundreds of rounds of human editing before and after each pass through the model. It is, in miniature, the same pattern we see in code or image: competitive value shifts from the model itself to the artistic-direction process that surrounds it. In the long term, if the abundance generative AI promises truly makes quality cultural production cheaper, the beneficiary should be precisely the artist without a financial cushion, not only the label that could already pay for a real choir. But for that horizon not to remain mere rhetoric, the industry first needs to resolve the questions Benja leaves open without answering: who bills for the sound of a choir that never existed, and what happens to the session singers whose work that synthetic choir replaces.