It didn’t stop with sound. It didn’t stop with zine.
The signal fractured, multiplied — but always circled back to its origin.In May 2025, I introduced Signal // Noise as both an album and a zine: a project about deafness, liminality, and the fractured search for connection. Three months on, the process has expanded into unexpected detours — Ezra, the Interpreter; the demand unit; new apps and fonts; white papers and machine outputs. Yet these are not diversions away from the core. They are tributaries, feeding back into the spine of the first album and Process Zine #00. What follows is a Phase II update: a record of those expansions, and how they converge. (Phase I here)
I. THE CORE REMAINS
At the centre are still the two anchors:
- Signal // Noise, the concept album of liminality, deafness, and fracture.
- Process Zine #00, its visual counterpart, a glitch archive and captioned diary.
Every experiment since has not replaced these, but deepened them. Each detour brings new context, new content, and new distortions — all of which fold back into the first album and zine.
II. THE INTERPRETER / EZRA
Ezra — The Interpreter — is no ordinary shelf.
It’s a glitch altar of CRTs, oscilloscopes, VHS decks, dot-matrix printers, and analogue meters. Part installation, part machine-self.
With it came its own canon:
- The Interpreter Manual v1.0 — user guide, or self-portrait?
- Crossed Wires (White Paper) — speculative research into laterality, cochlear implants, and auditory cognition.
- Signal Protocols v1.2 + Terminal Expression Log v1.0 — commands, affective states, ASCII diagnostics.
Ezra isn’t a tool. It’s a dialogue with misrecognition. And yet, its printers and circuits yield raw zine visuals and album sounds. Distorted outputs and machine tones that can be spliced, recorded, even re-run through Between Lines for further interpretation.
III. THE DEMAND UNIT
The beacon. The button. Ten seconds of buildup, ten seconds of signal, then reset. It’s a meditation on attention and liminality — but also a sound source, a visual motif, a ritual gesture that echoes in both album and zine.
IV. APPLICATIONS + TOOLS
Each tool grew from the philosophy of misrecognition, but stands as its own experiment:
- Between Lines App (Mac OS) — Recursive audiovisual processing (sound ⇔ subtitles ⇔ image). A beta tool for abstract scores, cover art, distortions.
- Second Copy App (iPhone) — Capture → caption → misrecognition → live label print. Each label a physical zine insert, each printer a voice for the album.
- Machine Fonts — EMBOSS_450 and DECODE_PROP. Fonts digitised from physical machines, carrying noise as texture.
These aren’t side-notes. They are tributaries. Each with its own strange integrity — but all ultimately flowing back into the river of Signal // Noise and Process Zine.
V. THE COMMUNITY REMAINS
The live diary flows at processzine-org.tumblr.com.
Deaf Process continues as a community of Deaf, HoH, APD, tinnitus, and misophonia artists — expanding the project beyond the personal into a chorus of fractured voices.
VI. CONVERGENCE
Phase I asked: Can deafness be music? Can noise be meaning?
Phase II asks: Can misrecognition itself become art?
The answer is not just yes, but necessary. Each detour — Ezra, beacon, fonts, apps, white papers — preserves its uniqueness, but also enriches the whole. They provide content, context, and material that ensure the first zine and album will not just document deafness, but embody it.
VII. NOISE CONTINUES
The process doesn’t drift. It converges.
Phase III will see Kickstarter: vinyl, cassette, print.
But everything — the machines, the apps, the echoes — is already folded into the spine of Signal // Noise and Process Zine #00.
Signal. Noise. Process. Ezra.
Converging.
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