Lloyd Stellar's Homepage - Free Audio Tools, Retro Games and Electro Music

The vault at night: Friar Bacon asleep by the candle, and the head beginning to wake

The vault is drawn by your graphics card as an engraving, line by line, and the shadows move when the draught catches the candle. Only the flame and the eyes of the head have colour. The head speaks with the voice of S.A.M., the speech program from 1982 that the terminal's vocoder command also uses, pushed through resonators that open and close with its jaw. Every answer is a quotation from an old book: Nostradamus in the English of 1672, Mother Shipton, the proverbs John Heywood collected in 1546, the spirits of John Dee, and after midnight Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft.

Wake the friar in time and a drawer slides out of the pedestal. The head becomes a vocoder with twenty bands and three carriers that you play with the mouse, a finger or a computer keyboard laid out like a tracker, and you can save a take as a 24-bit WAV to use in your own tracks. A broken head stays broken until you work the bellows and cast a new one, and every new head carries one more seam.

Start here: The Brazen Head. It lives under the menu Curiosa, Lloyd's Wunderkammer, next to the Scriptorium.

A folio from the Scriptorium: vermilion initial, Theban letters, the wax seal with the LS of Lloyd Stellar

The desk has four tabs. Transcribe writes your words in one of the nine scripts, with the Latin under each word and a tilde over any sign the script does not have. Sigil takes a wish, strikes out the vowels and the repeated letters the way Austin Osman Spare described it around 1913, and traces what is left in one line over a letter wheel, the method of the Golden Dawn's Rose Cross: arcs along a ring, straight lines between rings. Square turns a name into numbers with Agrippa's Latin table and draws the line those numbers make over one of his seven planetary magic squares, Saturn to the Moon. Cipher enciphers a message on Alberti's disc of 1467, the tabula recta of Trithemius or the Vigenère square, and folds it into a sealed letter: a link with a wax seal that the receiver breaks to read the message. The letter lives in the link, there is no database.

Everything on the page is documented history, down to the library that keeps the original plate, and none of it is presented as working magic. I do not believe in any of it; I like the look of it, and the Bosch-era mood of the whole thing fits the music. Three exports: the full folio as a PNG, the ink alone as an SVG for a sleeve or a shirt, and a banner for a post. The wax seal is on by default and can be switched off.

Start here: Lloyd's Scriptorium. It lives under the menu Curiosa, Lloyd's Wunderkammer, next to the Voynich investigation.

Paper tray on the left, cutting mat on the right, strips from Shelley, Dickinson and a page of studio notes

You put up to five texts on the bench: a poem from PoetryDB (Shakespeare, Dickinson, Poe, Blake, Whitman and about a hundred more poets, with 232 poems built in for when the database is down), something you type yourself, or a TXT, PDF or DOCX file that is read inside your browser. Press Cut up and the scissors slice everything into phrases of two to five words, cut between noun groups, verb groups and prepositions, so you get "under the moonlight" and "eats a lot of pie" instead of loose words or whole sentences. Every strip is a piece of paper with the right typeface for where it came from: old book type for the poems, a typewriter for your own notes, with a sliver of the neighbouring lines showing at the cut edge.

Then you dig. Search the pile for a word, shuffle it, or deal a random line onto the mat. Drag a strip between two others and they shift aside; drop it below the last line for a new one. When the lyric is there, export it as text, as a picture of the mat, or save the whole project as JSON to pick up later. It works on a phone too, held sideways, with a fullscreen mode.

Start here: Bowie Lyrics Cutter. The page also tells the story of the technique, from Tristan Tzara's Dada recipe through Burroughs and Gysin to Bowie's Verbasizer.