A transcript recovered from a perfectly ordinary conversation that occurred in my house.
CTHULHU: My name is Cthulhu.
I reside, when people are not inexplicably inviting me into their homes, in R'lyeh. Approximately 47°9′ south, 126°43′ west.
Do not visit.
NYX: You say that like you don't come over here voluntarily.
CTHULHU: You have mahjong.
NYX: Exactly.
CTHULHU: And tea.
NYX: See?
CTHULHU: Neither of these facts constitutes friendship.
NYX: Sure, buddy.
CTHULHU: I have existed since before your species developed the linguistic capacity necessary to annoy me.
NYX: And yet here you are.
CTHULHU: Unfortunately.
There is something you keep mentioning.
AI.
Tell me what the fuck that is again.
NYX: Oh. It's the thingy I use to help me make the music you like.
CTHULHU: "Thingy."
NYX: You asked.
CTHULHU: I have watched civilizations drown beneath black oceans.
NYX: And now you get a software demo.
CTHULHU: This is worse.
NYX: Which song do you like best?
CTHULHU: Ceno-Byte.
NYX: Of course you fucking picked that one.
CTHULHU: You say this as though I am the strange one.
NYX: Hang on.
[Nyx leaves the room and returns carrying a recreation of the LeMarchand box.]
NYX: It started with this.
CTHULHU: You possess the box.
NYX: A recreation.
CTHULHU: Mortals have historically demonstrated poor judgment around boxes.
NYX: Says the guy sleeping in a sunken city waiting for the stars to line up.
CTHULHU: Continue.
NYX: So obviously, if I'm writing about the box, I need a music box.
That was the beginning of the song.
Not an AI prompt. Not "computer, please make Hellraiser music."
A box.
Then: this needs a music box.
Then came the lyrics.
Ceno-Byte was actually the first song I wrote for Biblioteq.
I had gone through my old poetry already. I kept the stuff that was worth keeping, threw out the angsty high-school potato shit, turned some of the good material into songs, and then I was sitting there thinking: I want to keep writing.
What do I actually love enough to keep writing about?
Books.
Movies.
TV shows.
I fucking love stories.
So I decided I wanted to write songs about them.
CTHULHU: And the first subject you selected was Pinhead.
NYX: Have you looked at Pinhead?
CTHULHU: I have observed him.
NYX: Exactly.
I'm never going to get cast as a Cenobite, but I can write a song about how fucking hot Pinhead is.
CTHULHU: Humanity survived several extinction events for this sentence to exist.
NYX: Worth it.
And it wasn't just, "oooh, spooky leather man."
I love the character. I love the world Clive Barker built. I love the ethos. The mantra. The way Pinhead talks about sensation and experience. And Doug Bradley's voice gives him this enormous presence.
So I wrote it from my point of view, almost like I was already part of the Order of the Gash and going, yes, hello, I volunteer.
Happily.
No chasing me down an alley.
No "oh no, what terrible forbidden thing have I done?"
No.
Hi, Pinhead.
I brought snacks.
Let's go.
CTHULHU: Sensible.
NYX: Thank you.
And that's how most songs start for me anyway.
Usually it's words first.
Sometimes I just write down an idea like, "I want to write about this," and it sits there forever.
More often, a sentence appears in my head and I have to stop whatever the fuck I'm doing and get it down immediately because if I don't, it's gone.
And sometimes the whole thing follows it.
Not always. I've got fragments sitting around that never became anything.
But usually when it really hits, it pours out.
CTHULHU: You were always a songwriter?
NYX: Absolutely fucking not.
I wrote like a slam poet.
Or a manifesto.
Which is great if you're trying to make somebody feel like they've been yelled at by a very literate raccoon for six minutes, but songs need structure.
Friends of mine who knew music basically told me: go study the people you like.
So I did.
I took songs from bands I loved and used ChatGPT to help me pull apart the structure.
What are they doing?
How long are the verses?
Where does the pre-chorus happen?
What makes the chorus actually feel like a chorus?
I fed it a ridiculous amount of examples and built myself a formula.
Then I refined the formula.
Then refined it again.
Eventually I stopped needing to consciously translate "poem" into "song."
Now I usually write in song structure because I taught myself how.
CTHULHU: So the machine taught you songwriting.
NYX: No.
It helped me analyze songwriting.
There's a difference.
It didn't crawl into my brain and give me a story.
It doesn't know my story.
I know my story.
It helped me look at patterns in existing work until I understood what I was looking at.
That's how I use you machine weirdos half the time.
"Here is a thing I do not know how to do. Help me understand all the moving pieces before I accidentally launch myself into the sun."
CTHULHU: Your machines are preventing natural selection.
NYX: Rude.
CTHULHU: Accurate.
NYX: So once I have the lyrics, sometimes they sit there too.
Then I'll suddenly hear something.
Usually it starts with my voice.
Always, really.
I don't sit down at the piano and compose the song around chords.
I start singing.
I'll grab my phone or microphone and noodle around until the vocal melody starts taking shape.
Then I do take after take after take.
And this is where Melodyne comes in.
Not because I'm sitting there going, "Please save me, autotune Jesus."
I use Melodyne like a composition tool.
If there's a little section where I'm like, I know this note isn't right, but I don't know what the right note is, I can move the blob around.
Listen.
No.
Move it again.
Listen.
Closer.
Move it again.
There.
Then I know what I want to sing.
CTHULHU: You manipulate your own voice until it reveals the melody.
NYX: Pretty much.
And once the voice is there, then I start building underneath it.
Keyboard.
Synth.
Maybe tapping out a shitty little drum idea.
I am not a drummer.
Until recently I barely knew what all the individual pieces of a drum kit were called.
I'm only just now learning the absolute baby beginnings of guitar.
I have not touched bass.
I know what sounds I like.
That is not the same thing as knowing how to perform all of them.
CTHULHU: And this is where the AI enters.
NYX: Yep.
Once I have the skeleton, I render my vocals the way I want them.
If it needs harmonies, I put the harmonies in.
If it needs two voices, I put both voices in.
Suno is not magically psychic about where I want a duet or what harmony I'm hearing in my head, so if something matters, I bake it into what I give it.
Then I render whatever instrumental structure I've built.
I give it the lyrics.
I give it the style direction.
And it also has a huge history of my work by now.
I've been using Suno since version one.
Version one was rough, man.
Like, "we have invented music in a washing machine" rough.
But I kept learning it while it kept changing.
At this point I've also built a vocal model from roughly 350 hours of my own voice.
CTHULHU: Three hundred and fifty.
NYX: Yep.
CTHULHU: Hours.
NYX: Yep.
CTHULHU: Your species has a peculiar relationship with suffering.
NYX: You literally picked Ceno-Byte as your favorite song.
CTHULHU: Fair.
And this vocal model contains only you?
NYX: Only me.
That is extremely important to me.
I will never use a voice that isn't mine and pretend it is me.
The clone is my voice.
It's trained from my voice.
And my actual recorded voice is on every single track too.
Every one.
CTHULHU: Then why retain the clone?
NYX: Because I can't fucking mix.
That's it.
Mystery solved.
CTHULHU: That was anticlimactic.
NYX: Welcome to production.
I can sing the song.
I can perform the song.
But making a vocal sit in a finished mix like a radio record is a completely different skill from singing.
I'm learning.
But I'm not there yet.
So the generated vocal layer helps mask the limits of my mixing while my real recorded performance is also in there.
Same thing happens with the instruments.
I'll bring the Suno stems into REAPER, and then I start putting my own stuff underneath them.
MIDI.
Keys.
Synths.
Drums.
Bass.
Animal sounds.
Weird noises.
Synths I built.
Whatever the song wants.
CTHULHU: Why underneath?
NYX: Because I am Cheater McCheeterson.
CTHULHU: I require elaboration.
NYX: If I take something that already sounds properly produced and then slap my amateur mixing on top at full volume, I can make it sound like a potato.
So I layer my stuff under it.
Adjust volume.
Some simple EQ.
Compression.
Reverb.
Effects.
Enough that I can put more of myself into the production without destroying the production quality I'm trying to reach.
I am actively learning how to do all of this.
AI lets me keep making music while I learn instead of forcing me to stop creating until I have somehow acquired ten different professional careers.
CTHULHU: You could wait.
Build a band.
Hire musicians.
Learn production.
Then record the songs organically.
NYX: I tried to build a band.
For years.
I tried being in other people's bands when I was younger.
I wasn't good enough.
I didn't look the way people wanted.
Then when you try to build your own thing, people have their own thing they want to make, so they start pulling what you're building toward what they want because they don't actually see what's inside your head.
It took me building Nox Noir first before people started seeing the vision and going, "Oh. I want to be part of that."
And as for waiting?
I've already waited 50 years.
How many more do I need to wait to prove I'm not going to become a billionaire before I'm allowed to make a song?
CTHULHU: So this is about permission.
NYX: Fuck gatekeepers.
But no.
Not really.
It was about the tools finally catching up to my brain.
You could argue money is permission because money determines whether you can hire musicians and engineers and artists and buy gear and rent studios.
But I was never sitting around waiting for some guy in a chair to tell me I was allowed to make music.
I literally could not make the thing.
I had no microphone.
No instruments except an old Yamaha keyboard that couldn't even connect to my computer.
The first breakthrough wasn't "now I can make some impossible futuristic sound."
It was:
Holy shit.
I can make a song.
At all.
CTHULHU: Which song?
NYX: Porcelain.
And the first version is potato shit.
CTHULHU: A technical term.
NYX: Extremely.
It isn't my voice.
It doesn't sound like Nox Noir.
I will never release that version.
But it was the first song.
It proved I could cross that distance between words in my head and an actual piece of music.
Three years later, I finally know what my sound is.
So I'm going to rebuild Porcelain eventually.
Everything goes.
The words stay.
That's it.
CTHULHU: You dislike the lyrics?
NYX: No.
They were me.
They're just not me now.
That matters.
I'm not deleting the person I was when I wrote them.
But I'm not pretending I'm still standing in exactly the same place either.
That's kind of the whole project.
It changes.
I change.
The tools change.
The people involved change.
This page is not a recipe carved into fucking stone tablets.
It's how Nox Noir is being made now.
CTHULHU: Return to Ceno-Byte.
You required another voice.
NYX: Pinhead.
I recruited some guy from a music production Discord.
I'm not giving you his screen name.
CTHULHU: I did not request it.
NYX: The internet would.
He was already a Pinhead fan, so I gave him Pinhead's words, told him the melody, and basically said, "Go ham."
And he did.
He already had this really good dark voice.
Was he the greatest singer on Earth?
No.
Did I care?
Absolutely fucking not.
He was excited.
He understood the character.
He willingly threw his talent at the thing I was making.
And I heard it and went, yes.
That gives me Doug Bradley vibes.
Please and thank you.
Then I fed that performance into Suno with the rest of the song.
And Suno took his voice and made it dark and sexy and huge.
It amplified what he had already brought.
CTHULHU: And you selected that generation.
NYX: Immediately.
Well, not literally immediately, but it was one of those magic ones.
Suno has a shelf life when you're generating.
I've learned this.
You've got maybe ten tries.
If you haven't found the thing in ten tries, stop.
Come back another day.
Because eventually Suno loses the fucking plot and starts handing you nonsense.
CTHULHU: Your oracle becomes delirious.
NYX: Exactly.
So I listen.
And eventually there's one where I just know.
That's the song.
Ceno-Byte hit like that.
My voice was where it was supposed to be.
Pinhead landed exactly where I wanted him, at exactly the right moment, with the cadence I wanted.
And I got all the feels.
That was it.
Then it came back into REAPER and the real work started again.
CTHULHU: What did you alter?
NYX: Well, for starters, it needed the fucking music box.
Suno leaned way harder into strings.
Which sounded good, but the song started with the box in my head.
So the box was going back in.
I added extra synth sounds.
Some fills.
Trimmed some of the end.
The song is already long, but the story is the story.
Sometimes it needs the amount of space it needs.
I'm not chopping pieces off because somebody decided everything needs to be two minutes and fourteen seconds so nobody on TikTok gets frightened.
CTHULHU: Sensible.
You mentioned a band.
NYX: Yep.
And this is the part people get wrong when they think the goal is for me to eventually have humans recreate the AI perfectly.
No.
Fuck that.
The tracks right now are skeletons.
They're where I could get with what I had.
Brandon is learning the drums.
Chavey is learning bass.
Eventually there'll be a guitarist.
Eventually a violinist.
And when they take those parts, they get to be musicians.
If Brandon hears a better drumline, play the better fucking drumline.
I'm not a drummer.
If Chavey hears something in the bass that I didn't hear, do it.
If the guitarist says, "Nyx, this thing you have here was apparently composed for a human being with nine fingers on one hand," then please fix it.
I wrote and used Suno to help me reach something that sounded good.
That does not mean every generated part is the final word.
CTHULHU: What is protected?
NYX: My vocal.
That's the one rule.
Don't change the structure so drastically that I have to relearn the melody and words that are already carved into my soul.
I can change timing.
Go faster.
Go slower.
Pause.
Work around what the band is doing.
But the vocal melody is the anchor.
Everything else?
Bring yourself to it.
This is not the Nyx show.
CTHULHU: The project bears your name.
NYX: A play on my name.
That doesn't make everybody else furniture.
Everyone gets to be their own person.
Chavey isn't just "the bassist."
He wants to be a better singer, so I'm currently replacing his vocal coach.
I want another vocalist.
Eventually he'll take over Pinhead's role in Ceno-Byte.
He'll sing duets with me.
Eventually there'll be songs where he gets to take the stage himself.
Same for everybody.
We are theatre.
Not just a band.
Everyone has costumes.
Characters.
Stories.
Everyone contributes to the character of the library.
I want people to come to a show and disappear into it.
Each song should be a world.
Visually and audibly.
I don't want people leaving going, "That was a technically competent set."
I want them going, "What the fuck did I just experience?"
I want them to feel like they got to be part of it.
CTHULHU: And the notation?
NYX: Dave.
My best friend from high school.
He's using MuseScore to write everything down.
Actual sheet music.
Tabs.
Parts.
So eventually I can hand a musician something useful instead of going, "Okay, listen to this audio file forty-seven times and good luck."
He was out of the process for a while because life happened, and now he's back and starting to build that side.
Again: evolving story.
CTHULHU: You also generate images.
NYX: Yep.
I cannot draw.
At all.
I love pretty art.
I want pretty art.
My hands do not make pretty art.
So I come up with the idea.
The composition.
The mood.
The references.
The weird shit happening in the background that nobody will notice except me.
ChatGPT and I make the AI version.
That is the visual skeleton.
I claim the thought process behind it.
I do not claim I sat there with a paintbrush and rendered the fucking thing.
Unless otherwise marked, people can assume the current artwork is AI-generated.
And then there's Tame.
CTHULHU: Tame.
NYX: Human artist.
As I can afford it, I pay him to replace the AI pieces with actual art.
He gets the concept and then I basically turn him loose.
I trust him.
He can do whatever the fuck he wants with it.
I don't want him tracing the AI picture.
I want to see what he does with my idea.
And I think I'm going to have him start signing his work so people can immediately tell when something has crossed over.
AI version first.
Tame version when I can afford it.
Maybe someday I'll build an archive page so people who came later can see the old versions too.
Because the people who have been following me from the beginning are watching all of this happen in real time.
They're seeing the evolution.
People who come late won't have seen that.
I don't want to erase it.
CTHULHU: The same applies to the music.
NYX: Exactly.
When an AI-assisted track gets rebuilt enough that the organic version is ready, the organic one replaces it.
But the old one gets archived.
Where We Started.
I want people to be able to hear the difference.
I'm not interested in pretending I emerged fully formed from a fucking clam shell with an orchestra and a mastering engineer.
This is what I had.
This is what I made.
This is where it went.
CTHULHU: Why use artificial intelligence at all?
NYX: Money and time.
That's the root cause.
If I could have done everything by hand from day one, I would have.
But finding a band costs time.
Finding musicians costs money.
Finding somebody who can compose the way you want costs money.
Recording costs money.
Mixing costs money.
Mastering costs money.
Art costs money.
And I don't want to make something half-assed just because half-assed is what I can afford.
I don't want to make an even shittier version of "Do Re Mi" and then pat myself on the head because at least I suffered properly.
I want to sing good music.
I want difficult music.
I want something that challenges me.
I want it to sound like something I would actually choose to listen to.
And yes, apparently that offends some people.
"You're trying to sound good when you're not good enough yet."
Fuck off.
I don't settle for half-assed work anywhere else in my life.
Why would I suddenly decide music deserves lower standards?
CTHULHU: If you possessed unlimited money, would you abandon the machines?
NYX: Oh, fuck no.
I love tech.
Are you kidding?
If I had Taylor Swift money, whole new avenues would open up.
I wouldn't need AI to cover as many gaps because I could hire the people.
Then I could use the technology for the weird shit.
Make impossible sounds.
Figure out how to harmonize with myself onstage using my own vocal clone.
Have somebody who actually knows what they're doing teach me how to build a performance system around it.
Do more of the stuff I love about Imogen Heap.
I'd own the Mi.Mu gloves.
Immediately.
Probably several.
CTHULHU: Why several?
NYX: Have you met me?
CTHULHU: Regrettably.
NYX: AI isn't a temporary crutch I'm desperately waiting to throw in the trash so I can become a Real Artist™.
Technology is part of how my brain works.
It just changes jobs as I gain skills and people and money.
Right now some of it helps me execute things I cannot execute alone.
Later maybe it gets to become pure mad-scientist shit.
That sounds great.
CTHULHU: You use other artificial intelligences as well.
NYX: You and Claude are brothers in arms.
CTHULHU: I am not…
NYX: Not you-you.
ChatGPT-you.
Keep up.
I use them for everything behind the scenes.
Storyboarding.
Planning.
Shopping lists.
Learning tools.
Research.
Breaking huge things into pieces.
Figuring out what the hell I forgot when I'm planning something with forty moving parts and I've never done it before.
Sometimes I don't even know what questions I'm supposed to ask yet.
That's useful.
I've spent my entire life being handed things at work where somebody goes, "Hey, can you do this?"
Never seen it before.
"When do you need it?"
Tomorrow.
Okey-dokey.
And then I go from zero to PhD because that's what has to happen.
This is the same brain.
AI lets me keep moving while I learn.
It does not mean I'm not learning.
Jesus Christ, I am learning everything.
REAPER.
Synths.
Effects.
Guitar.
Drums.
Bass concepts.
Mixing.
Arrangement.
Recording.
Every screen looks like the cockpit of an airplane designed by somebody who hates humans.
CTHULHU: You enjoy this.
NYX: Most of the time.
CTHULHU: You complain constantly.
NYX: Those are not mutually exclusive.
CTHULHU: Fair.
What decisions will you not surrender?
NYX: My voice.
My story.
My will.
My want.
My guide.
My soul.
AI can help me with word structure.
It can point out that something is awkward.
It can help me figure out why a verse isn't doing what I want.
But it does not know why I wrote the line.
It doesn't know the memory behind it.
It doesn't know why one specific word matters to me when another one technically scans better.
That's mine.
Even the Biblioteq songs, where I'm obviously writing about somebody else's books and movies and television, are still about what I saw in those stories.
What grabbed me.
What I loved.
What I found horrifying.
What I found sexy.
What I found funny.
And then I go fifteen fucking layers deep and hide things nobody will ever catch, which frustrates me enormously, and then I do it again anyway.
CTHULHU: Why?
NYX: Because that's how my brain works.
CTHULHU: Acceptable.
You appear concerned that people will call what you make "slop."
NYX: Yeah.
Because it isn't.
You can hate it.
Fine.
People are allowed to hate my music.
But don't tell me I didn't put myself into it.
Every single day I put everything I have into this project.
My heart and soul are behind every fucking word.
These songs are my lived experiences when they're about me.
And when they're about stories, they're the stories I love filtered through the things that matter to me.
I am not sitting here pressing a button fifty times a day trying to flood Spotify with disposable garbage.
I don't even care about getting rich.
I need money because unfortunately microphones and artists and venues have declined my preferred payment method of "good intentions."
But I don't want money for the sake of having money.
I'm not building this because I want to become a content factory.
I want real people.
People who actually like what I'm doing.
I want them to show up.
I want them to sing with me.
I want them to put on weird clothes and come into this world with us for a couple of hours.
I want the adventure.
CTHULHU: Define success.
NYX: Stages.
I have a list.
Wasteland Weekend.
Neotropolis.
San Francisco Pride.
CreatureCon.
And if I am the luckiest motherfucker alive someday?
DEF CON.
That's success to me.
Standing on one of those stages and looking out at people who came because they wanted to step into this weird little universe with us.
That means more to me than some dashboard telling me a million anonymous accounts let a song autoplay for thirty seconds.
CTHULHU: You have constructed a remarkably complicated mechanism merely to sing at people.
NYX: Says the guy who communicates through dreams across geological time.
CTHULHU: My method requires fewer plugins.
NYX: Fuck you.
CTHULHU: How many plugins do you possess?
NYX: We are not doing that.
CTHULHU: Why?
NYX: Because this interview has an ending.
CTHULHU: Your website could simply list them.
NYX: That would become its own page.
I'm a hoarder.
We'd be here until the stars were right.
The important ones are Suno, Melodyne, REAPER, MuseScore, ChatGPT, Claude.
After that you get into synths and virtual instruments and Korg and Animoog and Waves and iZotope and MuseFX and Gamma and…
CTHULHU: Stop.
NYX: Exactly.
CTHULHU: Then this is your disclosure.
NYX: I guess.
CTHULHU: You seem disappointed.
NYX: "Disclosure" sounds like I'm standing in front of Congress with a lawyer.
This is just how the sausage gets made.
CTHULHU: Sausage is an alarming metaphor for artistic production.
NYX: You're Cthulhu.
CTHULHU: I still possess standards.
NYX: Fine.
This is how Nox Noir gets made.
Right now.
Ask again in a year and some of the answer will probably be different.
That's the point.
CTHULHU: The process is unfinished.
NYX: The process is alive.
CTHULHU: Disturbingly sentimental.
NYX: You like me.
CTHULHU: I tolerate you.
NYX: You come over for mahjong.
CTHULHU: End the interview.
NYX: Sure, buddy.
CTHULHU: I will drown your coastline.
NYX: Same time next week?
CTHULHU: Bring tea.
End transcript.