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.