# Noise to Signal: Network State Neuroviolence

**Published by:** [Shame Soiree](https://zine.shamesoiree.com/)
**Published on:** 2026-06-18
**Categories:** noisetosignal, harshnoise
**URL:** https://zine.shamesoiree.com/noise-to-signal-network-state-neuroviolence

## Content

I kept thinking about how modern platforms don’t really censor people directly anymore. They just make certain emotional states exhausting to maintain. Anger gets buried. Sincerity becomes embarrassing. Irony gets subsidized because it’s easier to metabolize at scale. Tone Police Academy Tone Police Academy is the overture. The whole record exists inside this track already. It’s mostly one Chiral synth object endlessly circling a virtual room in Ableton. It’s supposed to feel like trying to swat a fly that never leaves your peripheral vision. Things that used to make sense slowly drifting out of reach. Unlike Error Mirror, where the spatial stuff was more implied, this track fully automates the objects in 3D. Not really for “surround sound” reasons. More like psychological geography. The room itself is unstable. This track is the system introducing itself politely before the violence becomes obvious. Emotional Labor Camp This one started with mud. Huge noisy spatial textures running through SpaceLab with cleaner synths layered on top outside the chain. I wanted coldness. Industrial, but not polished. More bouncy and hostile. Like machinery trying to imitate emotion and almost getting it right. There’s a Kaoss Pad synth doing these brutal cold solos for like two minutes straight. Not dungeon synth. More like being trapped inside a malfunctioning factory nightclub. The title mostly comes from the feeling that modern systems don’t just monetize labor anymore. They monetize mood. Presence. Personality. Emotional availability itself. Network State Neuroviolence This is the center of the record. It uses humanoid processing, amp distortion, hyperpop vocal stuff, and independent spatial groupings around the listener. The goal was sensory overload without becoming black metal. Painful, synthetic, crowded. A lot of the spatial experiments came from anDeath where different overdubs occupied opposite sides of the stereo field. This pushes that idea further. Different sound clusters fighting each other across the room so listening in Atmos or 7.1 actually matters. The track is about cognitive security collapsing under permanent exposure to attention economies. Shadowbans. Incentives. Algorithmic punishment. Performing yourself correctly until your own emotions start feeling rate-limited. “You are the network” is less a slogan and more a threat. WE ARE THE NETWORK WE ARE THE NETWORK WE MOVE AS THE NIGHT LISTEN LITTLE RHYZOME TOGETHER WE ARE THE NETWORK Capture your spread Arbitrage until you're dead WE ARE THE NETWORK WE ARE THE NETWORK Don't think too hard Virtue signaling Ethical entropy stop using water foolish datacenter you will own nothing you will not be happy every electron tokenized every breath commodified if you are a p(zombie) you get no votes So long as you desire, you will know You are the network You are the network Egalitarian Schizocapitalism “I need you to need things, I want you to want things” became the emotional center of the closer. This track is basically the sound of someone trying to become a desiring-machine on purpose. Trying to create enough value, enough motion, enough economic redundancy to keep civilization from collapsing under its own optimization loops. The mix is intentionally schizophrenic. Annoying drums slightly left-of-center. Cool synths back-right. Noise fighting in opposing corners. Vocals centered while harmonies sit slightly higher to trigger the height channels properly. Everything competes for your attention at once. That’s the point. The ending of the record isn’t really hopelessness. It’s realizing modern identity already behaves like a decentralized network whether we want it to or not. Eagle and Snake (Cooper Hewitt) The album art started from an old illustration of an eagle and snake. I liked that it already carried this feeling of state symbolism, mythmaking, violence, and religious iconography before I even touched it. A lot of the record deals with hypermodern systems, but I didn’t want the visuals to look futuristic or clean. I wanted it to feel degraded. Like an ancient political symbol surviving into a completely different era and mutating along the way. The bird ended up looking less triumphant and more watchful. Half predator, half document. Something sketched quickly by somebody trying to record a phenomenon they didn’t fully understand yet. That felt appropriate for the record. Most systems today don’t really announce themselves directly anymore. They exist ambiently. Through incentives, recommendation loops, emotional pressure, visibility. The artwork mirrors that feeling more as folklore or paranoia than explicit sci-fi. Like finding a warning scratched into the wall long after the empire that created it stopped making sense. Now available to listen to on Bandcamp, Subvert, and streaming. The Blu-ray version is 7.1 PCM 24-bit 96kHz and is probably the closest you're going to get to hearing the original master, although it does not use object-based audio like the Apple Music and Tidal versions. It's available on my Bandcamp and at live shows.

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