A New Podcast?
Podcasts are everywhere—millions of them. So, why add one more to the mix? The answer isn’t as simple as it seems. Let me start with a bit of history.
It all began with MedMera, a fascinating project I became involved in. This idea—originally conceptualized by Chris DeBry, a friend from my Nova Beat Estate label days—was about transforming a vast collection of music into a unique sonic experiment. The concept was to create a podcast featuring hundreds of unlabeled and unnamed albums, leaving listeners to wonder: Who made this music? Only four producers were officially credited, with two responsible for the majority of the work, but behind the scenes were “uncredited others”. Here’s where it got interesting: the “others” were diverse, often stigmatized minorities whose contributions to the music world frequently went unnoticed. By presenting their work anonymously under a single umbrella and hinting upon involvement of those minorities, the project aimed to critique elitism and prejudice in the industry. The anonymity served as both a commentary and a protection—revealing their identities in today’s volatile political climate could have posed significant risks. So, the archive exists online, quietly waiting for its moment, fulfilling its purpose as a statement and a record of everyone involved.
My interest in MedMera grew out of a separate problem: the need to reissue around seventeen Nova Beat Estate albums. Licensing issues, however, had trapped me in a legal quagmire, making reissues nearly impossible. So, when the opportunity to contribute to MedMera arose, I jumped at it. It was a workaround of sorts—leveraging fair use laws (thanks to Chris, who’s from Texas) to share music that otherwise would have been locked away. I handled remastering and uploading episodes to Permanent.org and Arweave, ensuring their permanence. I also introduced Aria Argento, a talented visual artist I met on Discord, to the project. Aria created stunning graphics for MedMera, including a cover artwork template I’ve used ever since 2023.
The project aimed to surpass 200 episodes, but the journey wasn’t without challenges. The pandemic disrupted everything, and tensions arose among the core team. One incident particularly stands out: a producer used my name in an episode and shared statements I hadn’t approved. That was the breaking point for me. Although some of my contributions later found a home in Fiat Lux, I was done with MedMera at that time. However, by late 2023, Chris reached out, requesting my assistance in recovering corrupted episodes from Audius. I returned to ensure the original 200 episodes were retrieved and permanently archived. Despite the challenges, the effort to secure MedMera’s contributions for posterity brought a sense of closure and continuity to the work we had started.
Enter Fiat Lux
In 2021, I started my own podcast, Fiat Lux. It became a space for archiving odd tracks and collaborative experiments, drawing inspiration from MedMera. Hosted initially on Audius, the podcast featured compilation tracks, experimental collaborations (including projects with Neal D. Retke), and work from other artists I collaborated with. To avoid complications, I chose not to publish playlists for the episodes. Experience had taught me caution—especially after some older bands initially gave permission to sample their work, only to revoke it later. I also experimented with voices, both real and synthetic, blurring the lines of identity in the process. As of now, it’s impossible to pin down which voices are mine, and that’s exactly how I like it.
Navigating Online Privacy and Security
Let me take a quick detour to discuss a topic I’m deeply mindful of: online privacy. I’ve always been cautious about what I share online, choosing to keep significant parts of my life away from social media and the internet at large. The less data you share, the less risk there is of being profiled or tracked. As a graduate student in machine learning and statistics, I’m acutely aware of the risks posed by today’s technologies. For instance, with just a simple variational autoencoder, someone could clone your voice and use it to make fraudulent statements. While it’s easy to assume that no one would care enough to create a deepfake of a random person, I’ve seen otherwise. In early 2024, I encountered scammers willing to go to extreme lengths—cloning voices to target vulnerable individuals. In one case, they nearly succeeded in impersonating someone to defraud the target's partially deaf 80-year-old grandmother. This experience underscored just how dangerous leaving a digital trail can be. Of course, limiting your online presence has its trade-offs. It can make it harder to connect with people globally. However, there are spaces like Discord and Mastodon where you can engage with niche communities without revealing “biometric” data. By focusing on your work, rather than personal details, you can still build meaningful connections while minimizing exposure.
It’s also important to recognize that using major platforms like Facebook or Instagram can lead to profiling in ways you may not even realize. Suggestion algorithms often push irrelevant or harmful content based on advanced data mining techniques. The less these platforms know about your habits, the better. Beyond that, being in control of your data is crucial. Sharing content on your terms is just one part of the equation; verifying ownership and ensuring that your content isn’t misused or misrepresented is equally vital.
These principles are more than just theoretical—they’ve become guidelines for my own online safety. They also help mitigate risks specific to women online, such as objectification. By focusing solely on your work, you remove much of the material that could be misused, for objectification as well, and you limit the pathways for potential stalkers or bad actors.
These beliefs are why I’ve always supported anonymous speakers in my projects. My guarded approach to my online presence extends to respecting others’ anonymity. Many contributors have used this opportunity to share their voices without fear of exposure. While I allow anonymity sparingly nowadays—since it can complicate collaboration—I still value the principle.
At its core, I believe everyone deserves control over how they represent themselves online. Ownership of your data should be verifiable in the most secure, trustless way possible. That’s the key to staying safe in an increasingly interconnected and complex digital world.
Evolving Ideas
Building on these themes, let me share how these ideas, MedMera and digital privacy, inspired my work with podcasts. In 2023, a group of machine learning students from Umeå University in Sweden launched a fascinating project called Dewdrop. The premise was simple yet innovative: two QR codes were placed on trees in the Ängsbacka forest in Umeå, leading users to online resources with clues for calculating the geographical distance between the trees. But here’s the twist—Euclidean distance wasn’t the only metric in play. The project also incorporated alternatives like Manhattan, Minkowski, and Hamming distances, turning the challenge into a fun, hands-on exploration of machine learning concepts. Clues were scattered across the city via additional QR codes, random internet images, and even music. This playful approach made learning abstract ideas more accessible and engaging.
Inspired by Dewdrop and the final iteration of Oriondrive—which focused on extracting sequences of numbers embedded in music and applying linear algebra and regression analysis to recover information—I began work on perception:enigma. While still in its early stages, this initiative aims to weave challenges and hidden puzzles into music and other creative works. It reflects a philosophy rooted in engineering paths for sharing data not just for protection and recovery of such data, but to make a statement, much like MedMera did.
Podcasts as a Medium for Hidden Messages
This approach extends naturally to the podcast. There’s incredible potential to embed layers of hidden information into episodes, especially when they’re archived permanently on platforms outside of major corporate ecosystems. Podcasts can become vehicles for surprises—think encoded messages, cryptic clues, or intellectual puzzles for listeners to decipher. One of my inspirations is Soviet-era numbers stations: seemingly nonsensical broadcasts that actually contained encoded instructions. Incorporating this style of hidden messaging into Fiat Lux as a part of perception:enigma feels like a natural fit. To others, it might sound like gibberish, but to those understanding the puzzle it’s a treasure trove of meaning.
Intellectual Playfulness and the Limits of AI
Moreover, I find immense intellectual satisfaction in leaving subtle traces of information for others to piece together—traces that only a human mind could truly analyze. While AI excels at clustering and pattern recognition, it’s still possible to design datasets that resist such efforts. By doing so, one can stay ahead of data-scraping algorithms and automated clustering. There’s even a certain schadenfreude in proving doubters wrong about the limitations of AI—particularly a family friend who insisted its capabilities are boundless. In the music world, where exaggeration and speculation often run wild, I’ve even encountered people imagining me—an ordinary grad student—as some kind of shadowy oligarch. I’m happy to play along, poking fun at these assumptions. Sometimes, a well-placed meme is all it takes to drive the point home:
The Open Invitation
All of this—the puzzles, the archival work, the social commentary—is just one facet of what Fiat Lux can be. It’s not about chasing play counts or commercial metrics; in fact, we don’t even track those. This project is about experimenting with ideas, playing with formats, and seeing what resonates over time. Fiat Lux isn’t limited to intellectual puzzles or commentary. It’s a space for creativity, inspiration, education, and connection. The podcast is whatever we make it. If you’re intrigued and want your music featured or have an idea you’d like to explore, reach out. For at least one episode, I’m open to making your vision a reality.
And, the podcast is more than just a platform for creative expression; it’s an open-source project. You can explore everything behind the scenes—the website is here and the GitHub repository is here. This openness embodies the spirit of Fiat Lux—a space for ideas, creativity, and endless possibility. Let’s see where these ideas take us.
