It's Just a Coat

There's a person who makes random things. He commits to them completely before he knows why, builds them well past the point of necessity, and figures out the reason somewhere in the doing. He has spent an unreasonable amount of time finding somewhere to put all of this and has overbuilt that place in terms of complexity, because that's what he does.

This is the result of that. It has a name, and names make things look like brands, the way a coat makes a person look like they have somewhere to be. Don't let the coat fool you. There's no brand strategy document. There's no mission statement living in a Notion page. There's just the random things, finally somewhere.

If you're in a hurry, that's your stop. Pull up a chair if you're not.

The name came the way names do when you're not being careful. It arrived, and I recognised it before I'd decided on it. Odd Signals. The things you pick up that don't belong to any obvious frequency. The transmission that sits at the edge of the dial, where the stations start to bleed into each other, and something briefly unidentifiable comes through.

I've spent most of my adult life there.

It's because the centre of most things is where you'd go when you already know what something will be, and I've never been particularly good at knowing in advance. I think in the wrong order. I find things by making them, not the other way round. This isn't a method I'd recommend; it's not a method at all! It's what happens when you don't have a better one, and you keep going anyway.

Here is what that actually looks like, because I think you deserve the specifics.

I built a constructed voice called Nora Rhymes. Six albums. A narrative arc across all of them where a voice assembles itself, figures out what it is, and is then undone by a world that changed its mind. I generated thousands of images of her so she'd look like what she needed to look like. I obsessed over things like how her voice should sound because she wears nondescript gold hoops. I made videos of her moving so I could make sure the voice matched how she'd swish her hair. I wrote all the lyrics by hand and then spent weeks fighting with various LLMs to get the singing to land in that specific place where it's believable but uncanny, because a constructed voice should sound constructed but should be believable but constructed. I built a whole site for the project, then rebuilt it, then rebuilt it again. I even wrote an essay saying I didn't do all that, and it was all lies, but I left the point unresolved. The project is done now, but I'm probably not done thinking or talking about it yet.

I purchased a whole streaming setup and learned how to build a live performance rig – a Maschine+, an S49 Mk3, a Boss RC-505 Mk2, a Nectar Pacer pedal, and a stupidly expensive Mac Studio, so I could have a setup to fumble through live on camera, without very much plan for how I'd approach that.

I'm building a “lost folios” project: fake manuscripts in the Irish cycle style, focused on real modern problems. Technically correct. Right shape, right feel, period appropriate. Because if you're going to make something fake, you should probably make it properly.

I'm planning to carry a camera on walks on greenways around my home town to learn how to score footage, with no real idea of why I want to.

I can't vouch for the quality all the time. That's the honest version of the brief.

In-person, I speak very much from my hands and feel it only right to have some mode of translation on the page. The emphasis and the punctuation are doing that work. I make no attempt to apologise for either.

Putting creative work on the internet right now is a strange and slightly absurd thing to do. The internet is full. It's been full for longer than most people are comfortable admitting. The algorithm has opinions about what you should make and when, and which platform it should live on, and those opinions are delivered with the confidence of something that's done the maths and found the answer.

I don't find the algorithm's confidence particularly reassuring. I find it the same way I find people who are very certain about things, interesting at the start and then exhausting.

Its answer isn't the only answer. It's the most statistically defensible answer, which is a different thing entirely. That difference is probably what a lot of this will be about.

The writing here will be long when it needs to be and short when it doesn't. I write in the direction of the thing rather than around it. Some of it will be clumsy, some of it too fond of its own indulgence in ways I won't catch until six months later with the particular horror you reserve for things you made when you were slightly too pleased with yourself. That will happen, my ego won't let it not. I'm telling you in advance, so when it does, we can both have the decency to pretend it was intentional.

What I won't do is make it shorter to avoid the risk of being clumsy. I'm sure enough. Not in the talent, that question's open, but in the work.

The work here isn't behind a wall and won't be. Writing, video, audio, none of it is a product with a price on it. It's the thing itself, and the thing itself should be available to anyone who wants it. That's not a principled stance I arrived at after careful deliberation; it's just as simple as that.

What I do have is a way for people who want to support the work to do so. It uses the word subscription because that's what the infrastructure calls it, but what it actually is: patronage. The old kind. The kind where you gave the painter enough to keep painting, not because you were buying the paintings but because you believed the paintings should exist. You're not purchasing access. You're participating in the continuation of something.

Comments and conversation are behind patronage, which the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed. My take on that: there are plenty of places on the internet for people to engage with each other, and that problem is well solved. The kind of conversation I'm interested in here is the kind that's related to the work, with people who are invested in it. Requiring some investment, frankly, is a blunt form of quality management, and I'll own that. The reprieve for anyone aggrieved by it: all members free and paid alike can reply directly to newsletters by email, which reaches me. I read all of them. The friction of becoming a member is a useful gate, and I think it's worth jumping.

There will be things you can buy eventually. Made things, the kind with weight and edges. That's commerce in the straightforward sense, and I'm at peace with commerce when it produces something physical. But the work itself isn't a product. It's just the work.

You don't need to know why you're here yet.

Most people who find something at the edge of the dial can't quite articulate why they stayed. That's fine. Neither can I, most of the time.

If you're still reading, that's probably you. Good. That's exactly who I'm making this for.

More is coming. If something here was worth your time, tell someone. The algorithm and I haven't come to a satisfactory arrangement yet, and word of mouth remains the best technology we have for finding the right room.