#deafprocess

// cassette edition — signal // noise (first run, 20 units planned) A small experiment in making a record you can hold but never stream.

Got the provisional quote back today for a short run of twenty cassettes — black/white sandwich shells (Side A: white / Side B: black), on-body printing, clear cases, full J-cards. A physical split to mirror the internal one: digital-left / analogue-right, printed directly into the plastic.

This run is intentionally tiny. Partly a proof-of-concept for a future Kickstarter (vinyl, maybe even VHS music videos), but also a way of testing what a museum-object version of signal // noise can be. The core rule remains: no digital release. You can touch it, rewind it, mishear it — but you can’t link to it.

Each tape will be mailed out in a black bubble mailer, wrapped in a continuous dot-matrix scroll from Process Zine #00 (printed on the OKI). Inside the cassette case: — the full J-card — a thermal-roll DSP diagram (receipt printer) — a stray QLn420 label generated during early Second Copy tests — another QLn label used as the actual address label (All of this routed through Ezra / the Interpreter — artefacts of the machine, not merch.)

I’ll keep a handful. The rest will be sent to places that genuinely live in the intersection of sound, text, misinterpretation and glitch: Suno, The White Pube, The Quietus, The Wire, and a couple of others. Not as promos — more like dispatches from an experiment: objects carrying a signal the internet can’t hold.

No idea if anyone will actually “hear” it. Maybe that’s the point.

ASCII visualiser — study #01

Built a browser visualiser that speaks in glyphs instead of bars. ASCII as coded language → misrecognition → APD. Spacebar swaps the symbol on beat; keys punch the signal (I invert, G glitch burst, E edge-stretch, S stutter, N noise surge, B blackout, Z/X zoom, H heavy smear). Everything is grayscale, photocopy-crushed, and a little wrong.

This clip uses Emptyset’s Fragment as the motion reference. Next: feed signal // noise stems through this, then back out through The Interpreter — CRTs, waveform/oscilloscope, VHS and Hi-8 — for another round of recursive distortion until the caption becomes the sound.

Try it out: https://processzine.org/visualiser

process → pause → product (concept)

Process paused today. And along came a product idea. Whether it’s practical or not is another matter—but like most ideas here, I explore it a little, document the edges, then file it for later inspection.

null™ — the Abyss Orb

A desk-scale “mini black hole” that visually collapses under normal light. Not a toy—more a meditation object about perception, duality, and fear. Therapy for the noise: a physical pause that refuses to mirror you back.

Symbolism: // (process) becomes || (pause). The project pauses itself and turns into an object.

How it works (prototype path):

Orb: ultra-matte black sphere (paint or micro-flock).

Base: a collar-cup—a shallow concave seat plus a thin knife-edge ring that blocks grazing light so the orb reads as a void.

Finish: outside = matte; inside of the collar/bowl = optical-black (flock/velour).

Scale: 100 mm orb; base Ø 100 mm; knife-edge 0.9 mm thick × 7 mm high; cup depth 9 mm.

Intent: a pocket of nothing to rest your eyes on. A pause button for the brain. Place it where light fails. Breathe until the urge to name it passes.

Status: concept → drawings → renders → print-ready base (for testing). Could become a small batch or a Kickstarter perk bundled with Process Zine #00 and a Signal // Noise “NULL mix.”

ARCHITECTURES OF THE VOID — Playlist II (59 mins) A four-act descent and return. A different gravity this time.

I — Threshold (Cold Breath) Abul Mogard — Slate-Coloured Storm

II — Fracture (Revisited) Demdike Stare — Erosion of Mediocrity Kangding Ray — Pruitt Igoe

III — Architectures of the Void Emptyset — Collapse Ben Frost — Venter Raime — Passed Over Trail Roly Porter — Mass Shackleton — Blood On My Hands Klara Lewis — Msuic 1 (ghost-voice moment)

IV — Haunted Clarity Alessandro Cortini — Perdonare Loscil — Stave Peak

Runtime: 59 min

This playlist hits differently than the first.

Where SIGNAL // FRACTURE // VOID // AFTERIMAGE was a descent from humanity into darkness and back again, ARCHITECTURES OF THE VOID is a descent from silence into structure — and a return into haunted clarity. The focus this time is narrower, colder, and more interior. The Void is no longer a backdrop; it is the architecture.

Through listening and iteration, I realised I respond most strongly to:

instrumental or voice-as-texture, not lyric-led narrative

dark, pressurised, immersive atmospheres

repetition, pulse, recursion, structure, degradation

sonic interiority — sound that lives inside the skull, not outside in a room

spatial play — drop-outs, L/R movement, negative space

emotional seriousness — no irony, no theatrics, no glitter

This clarified my lane:

Dark architecture, not dark entropy. Not ambient haze — focused darkness with agency and contour.

Act III now dominates the runtime by design. It is the gravity well, the recursion chamber, the body of the experience. Act I and IV simply brace it — a cold threshold on one side, a thin afterimage of clarity on the other. One ghost-voice moment remains, but only as a presence, not a storyteller.

The arc is simple:

From stillness to pulse; from pulse to recursion; from recursion into depth; and from depth into haunted clarity.

I’m listening now to learn what resonates most — to refine again, and eventually to carry these architectures back into the SIGNAL // NOISE album.

PERCEPTION AS PALIMPSEST — transparency tests (first passes)

PROCESS ZINE visual studies for the next phase

Today’s experiment shifts things out of Signal // NOISE and into a new visual body: PERCEPTION AS PALIMPSEST — a photographic process built on obstruction, interference, and recursive seeing.

I printed the first batch of CRT captures onto A4 acetate sheets — each one carrying two “frames” from the PZ_FRAME series, complete with added codex overlays (▶︎PZ_FRAME_01, ▶︎PZ_FRAME_02 …) and the recurring baseline:

NO FRAME IS ORIGINAL / EVERY IMAGE IS A MISHEARING

Then I taped one sheet to the kitchen window and photographed the back garden through them. Extremely banal subject; unexpectedly altered perception. Dust, toner inconsistencies, CRT raster, and sheet scratches all collapse into the scene. Nothing stays still. Everything interferes. The world comes through as if half-remembered.

It already aligns perfectly with the core idea:

Perception is not immediate — it is layered, occluded, overwritten. A palimpsest made of attention, loss, interference, and mishearing.

Next steps: • Chinon CE-4 tests (film running through the acetate “lenses”) • Apollo overhead projector runs — projecting these frames into environments and re-photographing the distortion • Further degradation cycles: paint, ink, scratches, toner-lift, dust accumulation • Eventually: a recursive archive where no generation is authoritative… only accumulated perception

This will become a parallel series to accompany the album — not album artwork per se, but a visual language born from the same conditions: deafness, APD, limbo, partial knowing, and the impossibility of a clean signal. A library of mishearings made visible.

Silent S

This little orange sigil has been orbiting the project for a while.

It started with the difference between deaf and Deaf – lowercase as medical condition, uppercase as culture and community. I drew the d/D pair as a tiny glyph to hold that tension: same word, different worlds.

Then I rotated it.

Turned on its side, the mark started to read as D/p instead: Deaf Process, Daniel Pinkney. One glyph, multiple readings. Already mis-hearing itself. APD as logo design.

I used it like that for the Deaf Process community (here) and later dropped it, Unifont-blocky and CRT-soft, onto the signal // NOISE artwork as a small sleeve sigil.

Fast-forward to setting up Bandcamp for DSP. I needed an artist logo, reached for the same glyph, and immediately thought: this needs an S. It isn’t literally DSP.

And then the phrase arrived, uninvited:

the S is silent.

Instantly the mark worked again. The part of the name that points to sound is the part that disappears.

d / D / p stay visible as rotated brackets: deaf / Deaf / person

the missing S becomes a stand-in for dropped consonants, swallowed words, captions that arrive late

And sitting between all of that is the /. I’m not fully in the Deaf community, not fully in the hearing one either. I live in the slash: limbo, interface, boundary. The glyph ends up as a tiny self-portrait – D / p with me as the dividing line.

Only afterwards did the second click land.

When my hearing loss was picked up at four, I went through speech therapy. One of the big sticking points was any word starting with S. Even with hearing aids in, I couldn’t hear the “sssss”, so my mouth had nothing accurate to copy. Those words arrived without a leading consonant. The S was (and still is), for me, genuinely silent.

So now the logo carries all of that: a rotated deaf/Deaf glyph pretending to be D/p, standing in for DSP, haunted by a letter that never quite makes it into the mark.

🧠🖨️ ASK EZRA TO SIMULATE APD: Feature Complete

The latest command prompt added to the Signal Protocols user guide is now live and operational: python3 interpret.py --mode=apd

Type a sentence. Ezra mishears it.

Alternatively: python3 interpret.py --mode=apd --input=apd.txt

Randomly selects a prewritten sentence (based on deafness, APD, glitch, misunderstanding, Ezra lore) and runs it through the same garbled gauntlet. Some words get redacted. A few disintegrate into scrambled phoneme-corruptions, where “meaning” turns inwards and fractures.

What you get back is never what you put in. That’s the point.

📄🖨️ Logs are saved to the Pi ,and auto-printed via dot matrix to generate physical records of cognitive noise—archives of misfires, delays, distortions. And here’s the kicker: I tried to make the terminal’s redacted block (“█”) render identically on the OKI ML3320 printouts… but the character ROMs are out of sync. The dot matrix interprets it as a different glyph entirely—somewhere between a vertical bar, broken pipe, and cryptic foreign diacritic.

A permanent mistranslation between screen and page. A hardware-level metaphor for APD.

I'm keeping it.