Hi, I'm Cory. 

C▲B is a fictional band, but the music behind it comes from a very real part of my life.

Most of these songs began a long time ago. I started writing music as a teenager and continued through my early twenties, usually with whatever I had available to me: a guitar, inexpensive recording equipment, a computer, and eventually programs like Audacity or GarageBand. Some songs were carefully worked out. Others came together in an afternoon. A few were practically written while I was recording them. 

I grew up on a farm outside a small town, at a time when discovering something new could still feel surprisingly difficult. We had dial-up internet. Music came from my Dads record and tape collection, CDs I bought or discs burned, friends, record stores, message boards, and whatever fragments of the larger world happened to reach me. I spent a lot of those years feeling trapped while simultaneously trying to imagine what might exist beyond the place where I grew up.

Naturally, a lot of the music I wrote was angry. Or sad. Or loud.

Sometimes all three.

But I kept writing.

Eventually life moved on. I moved away. I found new music, new people, new perspectives, and parts of myself that I hadn't really understood yet. The recordings stayed behind. I performed with multiple different bands in my youth, none of which went any further than rough, self recorded demos to get stage time. 

For roughly twenty years, many of these songs existed primarily as only rough demos: recordings made in bedrooms, apartments, practice spaces, or directly into a laptop. I could hear something larger in them, but I didn't necessarily have the money, equipment, musicians, production knowledge, or time required to turn them into what I imagined.

C▲B became a way for me to finally explore that.

So, yes, AI is involved.

I don't want to obscure that, especially given the political climate against it in the Pacific Northwest where I reside.

The finished recordings released as C▲B use AI-assisted and generative music technology. The voices you hear aren't mine, and C▲B isn't secretly a group of human musicians pretending to be animated characters, though many of the compositions come directly from human sources. 

But the story doesn't begin with a prompt.

I wrote these songs.

The lyrics, melodies and original instrumentation come from music I wrote and recorded 20 or more years ago. I bring that material into modern tools and use it as the foundation for something new, choosing genres and arrangements, generating and regenerating performances, changing sections, adjusting instrumentation and vocal phrasing, correcting lyrics and pronunciation, and continuing to work with a track until I hear something that feels connected to the song I originally wrote in the early aughts. 

Sometimes the result stays remarkably close to the original.

Sometimes it becomes something my younger self never could have imagined.

That's part of what interests me about the process.

I don't consider the finished recordings a representation of what I could walk into a room and perform entirely by myself. They aren't. I also don't consider them songs that were simply "made by AI." Neither description feels particularly truthful to the process. Because I didn't just write a prompt that said, "write an emo punk song about feeling lonely." I was that emo punk kid who felt lonely, and I wrote that song myself 20 or more years ago. 

Now, they're collaborations between music I created in the past, the person I've become, and tools that didn't exist when those songs were written.

Why create a fictional band?

Because somewhere along the way, simply remaking the songs wasn't enough.

Cyn, Beta, Arc and Echo gave the music somewhere to live.

Their world grew out of the same themes that were already buried throughout the songs: isolation, anger, memory, identity, loss, survival, friendship, curiosity, and the search for something beyond the world immediately around you.

In their universe, pieces of music and culture survive as artifacts. Records, tapes, CDs and broken signals become connections to a world that existed before theirs. The members of C▲B take those fragments, combine them with their own experiences, and create something new.

I didn't initially set out to make that a metaphor for what I was doing.

But at some point I realized that it was.

I'm also doing archaeology.

I'm digging through recordings made by a younger version of myself, brushing off the dirt, and deciding what still has something to say.

Why am I doing this?

Mostly because I want to.

C▲B isn't an attempt to prove that AI-assisted or generated music should replace musicians, nor human creativity at all, and I'm not particularly interested in convincing anyone that they have to like music made with these tools.

I understand why people have complicated feelings about assisted and generative AI. I have complicated feelings about it too.

There are real conversations to have about the environmental costs of technology, training data, creative labor, ownership, and the enormous volume of disposable content that generative tools make possible. I don't think pretending those concerns don't exist does anyone any favors.

But I also know what this particular project means to me.

I'm approaching forty now. I'm a partner. I'm a parent. And I've found myself looking backward, not because I want to return to being twenty, but because I'm finally far enough away to see that person more clearly.

I used to listen to those old recordings and mostly hear their imperfections.

Now I hear artifacts.

They're imperfect, sometimes messy, occasionally embarrassing, and beautiful because they're truthful. They capture someone trying to make something with the resources available to them.

C▲B lets me answer that person twenty years later.

And, perhaps more importantly, it gives me something I can leave for my daughter.

She's still little. She doesn't understand production techniques or assistive generative AI or why adults argue about any of this. She knows there are four characters named Cyn, Beta, Arc and Echo. She recognizes their voices. She has songs she likes. Sometimes I hear her singing lyrics that I wrote before she existed.

That means more to me than streaming numbers ever could.

Maybe someday she'll be old enough to hear the original recordings alongside the C▲B versions and understand what I was trying to do.

Maybe somebody else will find something meaningful in these songs too.

I'd love that.

And if someone hears C▲B, learns how it was produced, and decides it isn't for them, that's okay too.

I'm not making this to settle the argument about AI.

I'm making it because these songs mattered to me when I wrote them.

They still matter to me now.

And attaching the lore and character universe behind it all is another part of my creative process. I create it all. I use AI to flesh out some details in between. It's a tool, not an artist. 

And after all these years, I finally have a way to let my songs become a little closer to what I once imagined they could be.

~ Cory