Journal — Buildspace — journal entry
What I built in Erevald
An album of girlie pop. I wrote every song, sang a vibe track for each one, produced them with Suno, and spent the whole season making videos.
People who read the Fort Mason entry have asked what I built in the green house. An album. Girlie pop. I have a secret affinity for it and it is not a secret anymore.
Solaris Performa Edition 42. Twenty-two songs, an hour and thirteen minutes, released under the name Mameen on October 19, 2024. That is eight weeks after Buildspace announced it was closing and about three months after Season 5 ended. The program that gave me the deadline was gone before the thing I built for it shipped. I find that funny in a way I can defend.
Here is how it was made, in plain language, because this is a lab that publishes how things were made.
I wrote all the songs. Lyrics, melody, the shape of each one.
For every song I recorded what I call a vocal vibe track. That is me, singing the song into a microphone, not as a finished performance but as a guide: this is the tune, this is where it lifts, this is the feel. Anyone who has made a demo knows the object. Producers call it a scratch vocal.
Then I collaborated with Suno. Suno is a music generation tool: you give it words, a description of the style, and, in my case, the vibe track, and it produces a full arrangement and performance. Collaboration is the right word and not a polite one. I gave it a written song and a sung feel, it gave me back versions, I chose, I rewrote, I sang the feel again, it gave me back more. Twenty-two times. The songs are mine. The production is a duet with a machine, and the machine did not write a word.
And then the videos. That is what the season actually was. Six weeks of nights and weekends, and I spent nearly all of it making a video for each song, the way the program asked you to ship something in public every week. If you want to see one, the link is in the sources. That is the toy version, the launch, and the demo day all in one file.
Why it belongs in a journal about a sensing lab. Because the sidewalk framework says the value of a community is what people carry out of it, and this is what I carried out. Because the ice-storm entry further down is about listening to a place, and a record is the same act pointed the other way, making a place people can listen to. And because I spent twenty-five years as the voice on other people's systems. This time I wrote the words and sang the feel and let a system carry the performance, and I know exactly which part of that was me.
It is on Apple Music. The label on the page says Pop. For once the database got it right.