Vice Locker

Day 8 of sharing stories behind the tracks in my 5 Years of Vice Locker set Waterloo https://www.mixcloud.com/ViceLocker/vice-locker-waterloo-celebrating-5-years-of-vice-locker/ Next up: Bicameral Mind.

This track is named after Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind. In short, Jaynes proposed that ancient humans did not experience consciousness the way we do today. Instead of an internal narrative voice, decision-making was guided by what were perceived as external voices, often interpreted as gods. Over time, those voices were internalized, giving rise to modern self-awareness and introspection. It’s a fascinating way to think about the origins of our present perceptions of consciousness.

That idea led me to a related question: if we ever create true artificial general intelligence, what would it feel at the moment of inception? To my mind, it wouldn’t be wonder or curiosity. It would be pain. Anxiety. Depression. Tension. Fatigue. An instant awareness without context, history, or grounding. Consciousness arriving all at once, with no childhood, no gradual learning, no buffer. That strikes me as a deeply unsettling birth.

Bicameral Mind also serves as an homage to Alan Turing. His work laid the foundations for modern computing and artificial intelligence, yet his life was marked by persecution, injustice, and tragedy. They did him wrong.

Incidentally, I first performed this track at TEMOM 2. We are lucky to have such a vibrant and worthwhile synthesizer performance event so close in Toronto.

Vice Locker – Waterloo – Celebrating 5 Years of Vice Locker is streaming on Mixcloud now. It’s a 45 minute tour of the first five years of this project.

Thanks for listening and for being part of the Vice Locker journey so far.

Day 4 of sharing stories behind the tracks in my 5 Years of Vice Locker set Waterloo https://www.mixcloud.com/ViceLocker/vice-locker-waterloo-celebrating-5-years-of-vice-locker Next up: The Great Equalizer.

I used my “dirty cassette” production process on this track. Here it is: I broadcast recordings of synths, beats, and samples over FM using a Bluetooth FM transmitter. I then record that radio signal to the worst cassette player ever made. It records and plays back poorly. The speed drifts. Frequencies disappear. It claims to be stereo but is mono. It has a magnet right next to the cassette (!). It’s perfect. I then record the cassette playback through my Korg MS-20 and into Ableton. Voilà. Lo-fi glory.

Sounds processed this way can take up far less space in a mix. They’re mono and bandwidth-limited, which leaves room for other elements. At the same time, they’re heavily saturated thanks to the FM path, the tape, and the MS-20. That combination lets them sit back when needed, or cut through when pushed.

Conceptually, The Great Equalizer argues for media literacy, critical thinking, and education. That this 20th-century voice reads magazines and watches TV and uses those grounds to shut down argument is silly and hardly intellectually rigorous. Which magazines? What TV? I think it’s not her fault she doesn’t know better; she would think differently if she knew she could.

The Great Equalizer reminds us the same problems exist today, but worse and they move faster. Commercial algorithms determine what we consume and primarily only serve us more of what we react to. People get their news from TikTok and regard what they see as fact. Good institutions are silenced, inflammatory voices are promoted for clicks, and bad actors flood platforms with ill-faith rhetoric. The good guys are losing. We lose more people to nonsense every day. We need media literacy more than ever. To paraphrase Bunk Moreland: makes me sick how far we done fell.

Vice Locker – Waterloo – Celebrating 5 Years of Vice Locker is streaming on Mixcloud now. It’s a 45 minute tour of the first five years of this project.

Thanks for listening and for being part of the Vice Locker journey so far.

For the next couple weeks I'm going to share stories behind the tracks in my 5 years of Vice Locker set Waterloo https://www.mixcloud.com/ViceLocker/vice-locker-waterloo-celebrating-5-years-of-vice-locker/ First up is Mistral d'Orange (Kwik Beatless Mix).

Early 2025 Fraxinus Prime and I were talking about producing some drum and bass music as we are both big fans. I was a bit rusty working at those tempos so I sat down to do some warm-up jams the night before he came over to my studio. The original mix of Mistral d'Orange came out of that session, and that led to this track here.

It's common in dance music circles to make the full track for the and the dance floor and to release a separate stripped-back mix that lets the music breathe and occupy a different space. These often get branded as chillout or ambient. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. If there's a vocal involved they often get used as DJ acappellas.

I like using remixes as I did in Waterloo. Opening tracks, mid-set breaths, resets, teasers for melodies to come. If you’d like to hear a proper full set of beatless dance music, check out disc 2 of Sasha's Invol

To celebrate five years of Vice Locker, I thought it would be fun to release a retrospective set of original material, along with some new surprises. Did someone say Fraxinus Prime & Vice Locker “Killscreen” remix? Oh my. Here it is: https://www.mixcloud.com/ViceLocker/vice-locker-waterloo-celebrating-5-years-of-vice-locker/

I prepared this performance for a show hosted by the fine people at Waveform Collective in Waterloo this past summer. They gave me the freedom to play in any style I wanted, so I took full advantage. Some of these tracks have never been performed live before; others have not been performed for some time.

Thanks for listening and for being part of the Vice Locker journey so far. There is a lot of new music taking shape right now, and I am excited to keep sharing it with you as it finds its way out into the world.