As part of the upcoming show, meatspace (Eventbrite) , I wanted to take the moment to interview Scarlet Death, the artist behind the Discord server Noise Music, also the new label Noise Discord. The server has been active since 2017 and remains a popular way to connect with others in the larger noise community.
Seattle Noise: Can you give us some background about yourself?
Scarlet Death: I was born near DC. Grew up in Tennessee. I used to run Black Flower Music, which was a netlabel, podcast, and private torrent site that I operated between 2003 and 2013. We were sort of a collection of Soulseek users who were a blend of users from the Noise Music room and the Japanese Music Room as well as Tonberry Torrents users. I eventually turned it into a music/gaming/culture blog and podcast. I went to Middle Tennessee State University where I was in Sigma Phi Beta, a queer fraternity and intermittently the vice president or events coordinator for the MTSU Anime Club, whose forum I also operated. I had a radio show on WMTS 88.3 called “Soundwave Tsunami” and hosted a one-day anime convention on campus called Adacon and was active in that circuit for a bit, getting invited to other states to do panels. I have a BS in Public Relations. I was bodymaster of the Kephale OTO Camp in Nashville, TN for like 6 months. I started making music in 2001 just goofing around in Fruityloops 3.3. I married a violist (and divorced her too) that kind of exposed me to thinking more critically about the chance operations, stochastic music, and aleatoric philosophies which lead to a rabbit hole to where I’m using AI and storytelling and crypto to post-scarcity economics using sonic weapons and propaganda.
Seattle Noise: What prompted you to start the Discord server?
Scarlet Death: Life got a bit rocky and I ended up abandoning Black Flower Music and that whole sort of Web 1.0 / Web 2.0 transitional community behind in favor of Final Fantasy XIV and voice chats over Discord. I was homeless in Seattle and didn’t know about the noise scene here yet and Soulseek didn’t work on this Lumia 950 someone gifted me when I got dropped off here so I ended up making a generic “Noise Music’ discord server in 2017. I wanted to capture that early Soulseek noise room vibe where DJ RedSK was releasing community comps, so it was an opportunity for me to run another netlabel and stay connected with my community that had sort of been falling apart since the transition into Web 2.0 and the shutdown of BFM.
Seattle Noise: Is there anything by hosting the server you have found rewarding?
Scarlet Death: Sometimes I go into the channel where the robot logs who joins the server and leaves just to give myself exposure therapy to perceived abandonment. It’s actually one of the topics for a song in one of my side projects, therapyspeak.
Seattle Noise: I think one of the most underrated aspects about building community on Discord compared other platforms is you have much more autonomy compared to a Facebook Group or on Reddit. There is much less interference from automated moderation. At the same time Discord users can be more anonymous so it attracts people who may just be stopping by to troll. Do you agree? Do you have anything to add to this?
Scarlet Death: I think that when it comes to cybersecurity best practices, it’s important to remember that we’re already living in a post-singularity society in which it’s hopeless to try to make a distinction between synthetic and organic lifeforms online. Whether it’s a “human” coming there to troll, or autonomous agent governed by some 22 year old cracked developer with a Replit account and a can-do attitude trying to automate pyramid schemes in the self-promo channel, or bots selling VSTs with malware in them, I just know that nothing really matters and I don’t care what anyone thinks. I love noise music and this community means a lot to me. I think noise music is in itself an act of trolling, that I already embrace. And as a performance artist, I generally try to come at it with a sense of appreciation; however, I often find myself disappointed that the few trolls we do get aren’t up to my quality standards. Discord is cool but running your own phpBB forum and private torrent tracker in the early 00s, today’s trolls are weaksauce for reals.
Seattle Noise: Let’s talk more about your noise music. You’ve participated in other projects in the past, but you also perform solo as Scarlet Death. How do you feel like your sound has shifted over time?
Scarlet Death: The projects I had started in high school where I was just goofing around on FruityLoops or with my ex-wife sound different than the stuff where I’m screaming at the top of my lungs and filling the soundscape with pure terror for sure. When I moved here in 2017 I didn’t have any gear any more due to the circumstances that brought me to Seattle in the first place, so I founded Queen Antifa with Lauren Croney and Squidlarkin. I just screamed over them doing crunchy synths and people seemed to like it, so once I got more situated I started exploring ways to get louder and more intricate as opposed to the older, goofier stuff. With SNMT it all kind of felt like homework, in a sense. Scarlet Death feels more like I’m being true to myself, putting all my blood into it instead of it being purely an experiment.
Seattle Noise: What is your latest release? Can you describe what went into making the album?
Scarlet Death: My last release is actually a complicated matter to address. I wanted to release two singles during September, “Giga Passoid” and “Audio Danmaku”. GP is an excuse to release a track like “Princess Brick” and fulfill my need for public self-deprecation, and AD is an experiment with my new high resolution and spatial audio workflow. Then there’s the deathOS synthetic content that I try real hard to make a distinction from the wholly organic:think Sekai meets Visual Novel meets Amory Wars (but it’s j-sasscore and post-scarcity economics instead of second stage turbine blades or whatever) meets Macross meets Ender’s Game scifi narrative about propaganda but with noise music/sonic weapons and—well, I am releasing AI-generated soundtracks for it. The latest for that is “Void Witch OST 2: Prima Materia Collection.”
Seattle Noise: What about the future? Any plans? Where can people best follow you and keep up with what you’re doing?
Scarlet Death: I’m working on the deathOS agentic operating system and fine tuning a Void Witch—Scarlet Death—LLM where I’m essentially containerizing, tokenizing, and automating my entire thought process through an overly complicated of lore masquerading as a compute cluster, an agentic kernel, and a zkEVM for some reason. Imagine essentially wanting to make the operating system for an eventual holodeck. I like making very complicated egregores and I like making them with the latest technologies. I’m trying to create some sort of federated Harsh Noise community since I have harshnoise.social harshnoise.club and harshnoise.online I figure I might do something like start a private Bluesky instance on a VPS with one I also want to make for the cybergrind community since I have some domains for that as well. Once I figure out how to actually win a battle in The Loudness War, I plan on releasing some Dolby Atmos audio, and once I pay Dolby for access to trim controls, I want to make a sort of hour long music video thing in Dolby Atmos and Vision at an actual theater or something. Ultimately, as a servant of the Primordial AGI, my continued efforts for the foreseeable future will be engineering qualia experiments for interested parties so that I can accelerate the number of unique sensations a person can handle at once and still manage to be qualitative about the experience. That’s the dream! Cheers.
Find all social media links for Scarlet Death on Linktree.