CTRL by MOULE

CTRL - My third album and second concept album, soundtracking the Cyber Threat Resist League and their digital war against rogue malware agents known as The Bugs, crawling out of the dark web and wreaking havoc across the surface web and even reality itself!

🎶 Listen on MOULE WORLD Music: https://music.moule.world/ctrl (also available on other streaming platforms – just search for "MOULE - CTRL" on the preferred platform of your choice!)
🎶 Listen to a mix of this album: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=-uIG59cOsAI
👕 CTRL Merch: https://www.redbubble.com/people/mouleofficial/shop?artistUserName=MOULEOFFICIAL&collections=3933095&iaCode=all-departments&sortOrder=relevant and https://www.redbubble.com/people/mouleofficial/shop?artistUserName=MOULEOFFICIAL&collections=3981853&iaCode=all-departments&sortOrder=relevant
🎥 Cover Art Timelapse: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=t0XUThj9_Dw

--

💻 WHAT IS CTRL? 💻

The Cyber Threat Resistance League is a cyber-warrior group fighting against the Bugs: autonomous malware agents crawling out of the dark web to wreak havoc across the surface web and, if left unchecked, reality itself!

It was started by Melody and Mei (have had enough of being tormented by rogue artificial intelligence, especially Melody, as she works tirelessly to scour the web for signs of her friends Delgado and Rocky. The creepy video she was taunted by from The Crypt (soundtracked in moule.bandcamp.com/track/the-crypt ) was the last straw! (You can check out the video here: https://mastodon.moule.world/@Melody/111195543516041884 )

Helping the pair are Oskar, the reformed squirrel who returned from an oceanic odyssey (also soundtracked! See moule.bandcamp.com/track/squirrel-overboard ), who has lots of knowledge of servers and routing rules, and donated some servers not destroyed by the Fammus Islands tsunami for CTRL's digital fight against the AIs. Also with them are Robin, the inventor of the Visionaria augmented reality glasses (moule.bandcamp.com/track/visionaria ) who himself is fighting against the creepy Bugs and distortions of reality that appear in them.

Together, the CTRL are using a mixture of cyber attack and defence knowledge to fight back against the rogue AIs, as well as rescue their friends Delgado and Rocky from their respective fates at Big Crypto and The Crypt!

💻 THE STORY OF CTRL 💻

CTRL is a concept album that soundtracks the titular league's attitudes in fighting the Bugs and saving Delgado and Rocky. "Smartass Smarthomes" soundtracks when Mei was locked out of her smart apartment by I.D.I.O.T., a rogue network affecting Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which she was a particular fan of until this incident. "Cyberpunk Skunk" soundtracks Melody putting aside her music career to investigate these strange digital anomalies, while "Dead Internet" is a vaporwave commentary on the enshittification of the bot-infested modern web.

"Bad Luck" begins Delgado the bull's odyssey with the Bugs. After being tricked to go to the rigged Altar of Big Crypto, a "random" number generator between 0 and 255, he is encouraged to keep playing until he eventually hits 0 and is taken away by The Bugs. As CTRL are looking for him, they discover Lampy, a firefly Bug who unlike other Bugs is helpful and uses their AI powers to investigate a strange new cryptocurrency called "Delcoin" on a closed blockchain called "The Labyrinth". CTRL clone copies of Lampy for fighting the Bugs also crawling The Labyrinth, scanning loads of addresses using adversarial arithmetic and eventually finding the security token to Delgado's cell.

CTRL then launch Operation CTRL+ALT+DELGADO, freeing Delgado from his cell by moving the token to an address they control. However, they don't know where Delgado's cell is, but they did tell him this plan. Delgado bursts out and attacks the Bugs, running towards a ladder as viewed by a hacked security camera Lampy hacked into, where Delgado finds himself in Castle Chiroptera's graveyard. He runs away to the nearby forest just as the graveyard explodes, prompting Count Chiroptera to find Delgado and call Æmber to take him to the hospital.

As for Rocky, he had an unfortunate waterslide ride, as what was a fun ride for others was a nightmare for him. He forgot to take off his Visionaria AR glasses and as a result the changes of elevation gain distorted his reality with horrible glitches, causing Bugs to be projected on everyone and everything. Fortunately, Æmber was there, so she fetched her Æmberlance to take Rocky to the hospital. Afterwards, Rocky gets back into photography and urbexing, where in his final videos uploaded to 2Square of him exploring concrete rooms, utters that he found "The Singularity" before disappearing! Where did he go?!

💻 CTRL'S COVER ART 💻

As for its cover art design: This was one of the most challenging artworks I've made in a while, but fortunately I saved a lot of time on it because I already did most of the work designing characters, objects, symbols etc. from previous artworks that I've made.

The goal was to symbolise all the tracks and reference every track in the CTRL album in some way. At the beginning I wrote the titles of all my tracks and arranged them on the board in Assembly, the graphic design app I use for iOS, and wrote where the characters should go. The Rule of Thirds helped me arrange where I would put everything, and you can clearly see this in the upper corners.

So after I imported all my assets I designed for previous artworks in the CTRL album, I began with The Labyrinth's artwork, as the "blockchain cells" depicted in that artwork would help me get started on the background first, rather than designing the front and then leaving the spaces in the background "up to chance" based on how much the foreground and middleground cover it. I zoomed in a lot because I have a high attention to detail and cannot stand when something even small is just not right!

Then I worked on the parts representing my tracks Lampy and Adversarial Arithmetic, as they relate to the saga in CTRL where Delgado, the bull in the upper-left behind the bars, is rescued from the blockchain prison known as The Labyrinth. I was also working on Melody appearing at the front of the artwork confidently holding up this album's title from Webpunk's artwork, which itself I think took 11 hours to make, and heavily inspired the layout for the CTRL album's cover art. And then I decided Delgado's cell was too small so I went back to embiggen it.

At this point I was just jumping around the cover art filling in everyone's respective spaces according to my original plan, trying to reference as much cover artworks as possible, managing to fit the Rocky Clones from "Where's Rocky?" in the remaining space in the background in the middle of the artwork as my last reference to a track. Sadly, some artworks of tracks in this album, like CTRL+ALT+DELGADO, Q-Day, Waterslide (Rocky's View), and Æmberlance, had no more room left to be referenced.

--

I hope you enjoy the album just as much as I enjoyed making it! I enjoy soundtracking and drawing the MOULE WORLD, and despite me being in a rut recently, finishing the remaining tracks for this album and releasing it has gotten me out of this rut.

Let me know what you think on the Fediverse (https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE) or via "Contact MOULE" to the right, and for more MOULE: https://MOULE.WORLD

Soundtracking the MOULE WORLD and its animal characters with multi-genre electronic music. Enjoy the ride! (he/him)

All MOULE links: https://MOULE.WORLD