The genesis of this album wasn't a jam session or late-night melody…it was a spreadsheet. Or more precisely, a machine learning model.

The tour supporting our new album wasn’t a traditional series of gigs. It was part performance art, part dystopian opera, part dance party. From the moment we stepped onto stage, the intention was clear: create a visual and sonic language that mirrored the album’s descent into surveillance, control, and eventual collapse.

One of the most unexpected, and powerful, outcomes of the album has been the creative momentum it sparked beyond itself. During its production and touring, a new project began to take shape in the shadows: The Glitter Conspiracy. Entirely instrumental, this collaboration extends the philosophical spine of First Day on Earth, but strips away the words, leaving only tone, texture, and tension to do the talking.

We’re living in the age of the convenience cage.

That’s the unsettling conclusion I kept returning to while developing this album. My PhD work on machine learning and public perception opened the door, but it was living with that research that shaped the heart of this project. What I learned wasn’t just how algorithms analyze human emotion, but how they are used to direct it.

Sometimes, the best way to critique a system is to play it like an instrument.

As we shaped this album, sonically and conceptually, I found myself pulling increasingly from the world of electronic music. Modular synths, granular processing, algorithmic textures: these weren’t just effects. They became characters. They added tension and unpredictability to a record that, at its core, is about the cost of predictability.

This album doesn’t just tell a story, it fractures one.

The narrative arc I crafted mirrors something familiar to most of us, even if we rarely name it… the emotional whiplash of digital life. We scroll endlessly between joy and devastation. Between catastrophe and cat memes. Between horror and hope. Our feeds have no order, yet we call it a timeline.

Improvisation is usually thought of as something that happens in the moment — on stage, in the room, face to face. But what happens when no one’s in the same room? When your collaborators are on different continents, in different time zones, each plugged into their own version of the world?

When I explain how this album was made…fully remote, across multiple countries, without ever rehearsing in the same room…most people pause. They imagine the technical headaches, the loss of spontaneity, the absence of that “in-the-room” energy. And they’re not wrong. It is hard. But it’s also liberating.

The album isn’t out yet. But the world it describes is already here.

As we prepare to release the first singles, slowly revealing the album’s narrative track by track, I’m struck by how urgently these themes resonate. The music, the story, the aesthetic, the message: it all feels less like a concept and more like a mirror. And in that reflection, I hope listeners see not just dystopia, but possibility.

In a way, the album couldn’t have happened without distance.

Drums were tracked in a studio in Los Angeles. Bass lines found their groove in a hotel room in Vienna. Vocals were captured in a basement in New York City, and I played my guitar parts among the shifting moods in Berlin. This wasn’t planned, it was necessity turned to design. We became a band without borders, a creative organism with limbs on four continents, sending files like nervous signals through the internet’s veins.