Client Project: Human Halfway House
A new website for a friend and former coworker with a massive easter egg
Towards the end of last year, my friend and former coworker Leila got in touch with me. She is known in music circles as Naz Hejaz and was putting the finishing touches on her sophomore album: Human Halfway House. It is a fever dream of an album. It explores how the human experience is mediated by the digital — most recently artificial intelligence systems. She proposed a collaboration to build her website for the album. She wanted something unconventional and participatory while still holding all the traditional material a website marketing an album needs: imagery, about, streaming links, that sort of stuff. This is what we came up with.
The homepage has all the necessary information mentioned above. In addition to this, for visitors on their desktop and laptop computers, there is an easter egg that reveals what I call a mini Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). Shown above, the DAW Mini allows you to drag clips from Leila’s single and arrange them into your own eight bar loop. DJs and musicians often cut stems of a single to enable remixes. This interface takes it a step further by allowing anyone to make custom loops and cutdowns of Leila’s amazing samples from her single Incurable Dreams. The features of the DAW Mini include quantization, start and end delimiters, and mp3 downloading with metadata included.
Leila, a software engineer by day, built an easy-to-use and access Content Management System (CMS) to organize and store the audio samples. I added the interface on top. At the eleventh hour we decided to reveal the DAW Mini as an easter egg instead of as the first thing you see. One challenge making the DAW Mini was determining how many features to include. What has been great working with Leila is that she is a recording artist. She is the composer and performer, so the conversation of what was the simplest set of features opened my eyes to the perspective of a music producer.
The productive conversations and conclusions we came to make me think there is an opportunity (particularly with the not too long ago Epic Games’ sale of Bandcamp)1 to provide distribution tools that speak to music creators’ needs. Streaming is one of many things that artists and bands need to juggle when releasing their content.
Anyway, give it a try. I would love to hear what you make!
–Jono
Epic Games Sells Bandcamp Amid Layoffs. Jazz Monroe. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/news/epic-games-sells-bandcamp-amid-layoffs/