A record shop for music that does not exist. Every artist, label and album here was invented — the sleeves, the sleeve notes, the interviews, the songs. None of it happened. All of it plays.
It is an experiment in AI production
Sidetrax started as a question about process rather than about music: how far can you get by treating a record label as a pipeline? Not one model doing everything, but several — different models for lyrics, for arrangement notes, for artwork, for the prose on the back of the sleeve — handed between agents and workflows that each know one job. One writes a brief. One argues with it. One records. One files the paperwork. The catalogue you are browsing is the output of that pipeline, and the app around it exists because the output needed somewhere to live.
What came out was not what I expected
Some of it is tongue in cheek, and unapologetically so — there are jokes in here, and band names nobody should have to defend. Some of it turned out surprisingly, awkwardly moving, which was never the plan. Mostly it is music I wanted to listen to and could not find anywhere else, which is a strange reason to build a record label, and turned out to be a sufficient one.
None of this exists without real musicians
Every note of it is downstream of people who learned an instrument, hauled an amp up a fire escape, and played to a room of eleven. The models have heard all of them. I have not stopped being aware of that, and this page is the wrong place to be coy about it.
So: go to a small venue this month. Pay the door. Buy the record and the ugly t-shirt from the merch table at the back, because that is the part the band actually gets. Follow someone local. Turn up on the wet Tuesday.
This may not be real. Music is.