#caption scroll

signal-scroll // dot-matrix caption experiment

Today I ran the full signal // NOISE caption-scroll through the Oki ML3320 — eight pages of continuous fanfold, about 10" × 11", which happens to sit perfectly inside a 12" sleeve.

The idea was simple: take the “clean” text document (the long caption essay for the album), send it via the Send to Ezra script, and let the dot-matrix chew it out as a physical scroll to wrap the cassette and drop loose into the LP package.

The reality: the Oki is running on ancient drivers via CUPS and clearly has its own ideas about encoding. Certain characters don’t exist, lines overprint, glyphs get swapped, and entire sections smear into dense bands of nonsense. It’s still recognisably the text I wrote, but half of it is misaligned, misrendered, or partially redacted by accident.

I was going to fix it — reformat the source, strip characters, force it to behave. Then it clicked: this is exactly what the record is about.

APD in hardware:

signal goes in clean

the system “hears” it through a compromised path

output is there, but unstable: hard to parse, full of dropouts and substitution errors

the only truly legible version lives elsewhere, if you know where to look

So I’m keeping it as-is.

Each scroll will ship with a handwritten note across the top margin:

SIGNAL-SCROLL: printed via misaligned dot-matrix driver. Output left intentionally corrupted to mirror how signal arrives here. – DSP

I’ll hand-write that line on every copy, slightly differently each time. Human caption layered over machine mishearing.

For the LP, the scroll will sit as a loose insert. For the cassette, it’ll wrap around the case like a continuous, damaged subtitle track.

Anyone who gets the physical edition will also have access to a clean, readable version of the scroll online— the delayed caption, arriving after the broken “live” output. This also includes a download link to the five digital appendix tracks.

Fragments of silent music. Future LP inserts.

Picked up the pianola rolls again today and laid them beside the dot-matrix caption scroll. Something clicked.

Both systems were designed for mechanical speech: • one punched in breath and rhythm • one printed in fragments and dropouts — both now sitting in silence.

The misaligned ----- lines on the scroll echo the perforations of the roll almost too neatly. Two obsolete languages recognising each other.

So: for the 2×LP edition of signal // NOISE, each copy will ship with a fragment of a vintage pianola roll—cut, guillotined, folded into 4pp, the same 11" width as the LP format. No interventions, no printing over the top. Just the material as-is. A sheet torn from a mechanism that no longer plays.

The idea feels right for this project: • A score designed to become sound, now permanently mute. • Music that exists only as structure—holes, spacing, breath. • A medium dependent on a machine you don’t own, can’t access, can’t resurrect. • A reminder that signal can remain forever latent.

The caption scroll (APD-broken text, dropped characters, misfires) sits inside it perfectly. Two kinds of unreadable notation layered together. Human error + mechanical memory.

Breaking the roll across many LPs ensures it can never be restored or heard again. A deliberate act of misinterpretation. A literal distribution of lost sound.

Fragments of song without sound. A physical metaphor for the album’s whole thesis: signal gets separated from meaning; meaning never quite aligns with what was sent.