The latest Scarlet Death single, "Error Mirror" is now available on streaming, Blu-ray Audio, CD, and as a digital file. Let's talk about it.

This track title is a reference to the central square image in the album art. I was browsing X (formerly Twitter) maybe a year ago when I came across an image a user was purporting would get you banned from any AI platform if you uploaded it to it. It was a very bare bones dot matrix style abomination. I liked the idea enough that I manipulated the image in such a way that it was different enough not to send any scraping mechanisms into a panic upon seeing it. Maybe it's still a prompt injection, I'm too chicken to find out.

I made the background noise using the same MIDI synths I used on No More Cassandras. Some Ableton plugins that came with the Live suite, like usual. Then, as you can probably notice there's the Kaoss Pad that picks up about a minute into the track that shows off a bit of improvisation.

I've been prone to calling these sorts of noise + instrument solo "masoconcertos" because they aren't exactly a violin over a piano, it's pain on top of pain. The people who hate beats always seem to love this sort of thing.

Instead of using Dolby Beam for direct sound placements, I leveraged Fiedler Audio's Spacelab Ignition plugin for a virtualized bed of objects to give it a spatialized reverb. I intentionally chose to use large room settings so as to make the tracks sound more live than usual. I feel like I'm starting to get used to this Dolby Atmos workflow in terms of where to physically place instruments in a room. Like all the noise goes in the back and the instrument I want to focus on goes side with a hint of center. Typically, I will put vocals in the center but this track does not feature any singing. (You're welcome.)

I wanted to make some sort of poetic statement about how artificial intelligence is trained on all of our errors and is prone to errors. It's meant to represent my propensity toward hypervigilance in the face of misinformation and complex trauma. No AI was used on this single; furthermore, if I am going to ever use AI for my noise music (and not some other project) I would want to make my own finetune so that the licensing would always be clear. Or at the very least make it less desirable for the anti-AI harassment cults to have a leg to stand on, but I digress.

This is an atmospheric track. I don't stray too far from my typical power electronics and death industrial stylings, but my with spatial ecologies this year is making it so it is pertinent to be mindful about how you choose to hear it. As a self-described qualia engineer, I make things with intent. To put it simply, I try to make use of overtones that can only be fully appreciated either in the Atmos master directly (good luck ever being able to listen to that though) or as a 7.1 PCM 24/96 downrender from the ADM BWF. The Stereo Direct versions are pretty good too when listened to in high resolution. Tone clusters, textures, and the like over play to a person's capacity to register physical sensations through bone conduction. Playing it on headphones is great, but ideally you will want to play it loud on an appropriate speaker system so that you can actually feel it.

Music can be catharsis but also connection: I want you to be able to feel how I feel, to experience what it's like to be in my shoes. I try to be very meticulous with my textures, hoping to paint a canvas that will invoke some kind of empathy response. I am a very isolated but extroverted person. Sometimes, I feel like I've given up on people and music is my cry for help. So the "Error Mirror" is myself, it's also you—the listener. Everything is an echo, an endless ping pong game in my sonic torture chamber. I'm laughing. Are you laughing? None of this is funny. (That's why I'm laughing.)

I am the Queen of Pink Meat, you will worship at my feet!

This track embodies the endgame of consumption culture. This is what happens when you shatter the error mirror and realize it was only showing you what you wanted to see. This is when you start to realize you enjoy the smell of your own excrement, you revel in being trash.

The production style was largely similar to Error Mirror. I have the vocals in the center, Kaoss Pad to the sides, and the chorus maybe 45 degrees between center and the zenith so that Dolby Atmos listeners can feel vindicated for the all the hard work they did installing those expensive height speakers. (Maybe I do have empathy after all.)

As usual, I went hard on the distortion, grain delay, echo, and the like. I am still having some doubts over my ability to have vocals that sound "properly mixed" by which I mean it sounds like the vocals of other power electronics artists. They are probably really good at sidechaining, a technique I have yet to dabble in because I've spent the last 25 years doing things as recklessly as possible and have been too stubborn to really figure out what "sounding better" would even mean in contexts such as this. Some people hate hearing my voice, some people prefer it buried beneath the cacophony. The end result is often that things are fairly muddy-sounding in the end result, but in such a way that when mixed with the large reverb presets in spacelab is made to feel oppressive and claustrophobic.

Slopulence

Slopulence

Slopulence

It’s time for slop

It’s time for slop

Listen to this bop

Listen to this bop

I’m a trash person

Take me out

Crush me in the back of your car

I’m a trash person

Throw me away

I want to see you degrade

I want to break you down for parts

I want to waste

I want to taste

Taste the slopulence

Living in filth

All I want is to type a prompt

I don’t know how to do anything myself

My brain is rotting out

I’m the queen of pink meat.

You will worship at my feet.

You can stream the entire release on the Bandcamp link below. If you'd like to purchase the Blu-ray Audio, you can do also get that from Bandcamp. If you have a home theater setup, I highly suggest getting that disc. It's been specifically mastered to be quite a bit louder without while maintaining a safe True Peak. The Dolby Atmos version that's available on Tidal and elsewhere is only 48kHz, and sounds different due to retention of object location data whereas the Blu-ray Audio folds the sounds placed near height channels using Dolby's downmix coefficients. There is also a CD version on Bandcamp that is a downsample of the Stereo Direct mix, but it's more for novelty's sake since the mastering console I use does not render out to 44.1kHz. SoX was used for that.

The Blu-ray can also be picked up at Music Millenium in Portland, OR and at Easy Street Records in Seattle, WA.

Since my last release I completed my OBAM plugin collection. These are plugins that recognize object-based audio metadata. So now I have experience using Spacelab as well as Tonebooster's TB Equalizer Pro. Hopefully I can make some very intentional tracks that convey the emotions I want you to experience in your home theater.