THE OTHER
FREQUENCY.

Wanted to be a video game developer.

Before any of the bands, before the 4-track recorder he saved up to buy as a teenager, there was a kid in Melbourne who wanted to make video games. The fascination with the machine was the original thing. The music arrived as the louder of two parallel obsessions and ended up doing most of the public talking for the next twenty years — but the other one never stopped.

The same instinct that made him want to know how the box on the desk worked is the one that, later, made him prefer his home demos to the LA studio takes, that made him want to walk away from the major label and run his own imprint, that has him now uploading a version of himself to a server. It’s all one impulse: build the thing yourself, and own the means of making it.

Apple.

The company that, more than any other, treats hardware as a kind of theatre — which, if you have spent your adult life on stage with discarded department store mannequins and bubble machines, is a vocabulary you already speak. There is a throughline between the controlled environment of a major arena production and the controlled environment of a product surface: every element considered, nothing accidental, the audience meeting the work on the maker’s terms.

A controlled environment with its own internal logic.

He has used the same phrase to describe both. It was the phrase he reached for watching that show from the wings. It is also a fair description of what the best consumer technology does to its user’s attention. Apple was the first place where the two halves of his life clearly looked at each other and recognised what they had in common.

He was inside the company for the launch of the iPhone. There is, in an archived inbox somewhere, an email from Steve Jobs himself.

Intel.

Down a layer. Closer to the silicon. If Apple is the surface a person touches, Intel is the substrate it all actually runs on — the side of the industry that thinks in transistors rather than typography. The cold-synth lineage he inherited from Numan was made by people who loved their machines. Intel is where that affection stopped being a metaphor.

xAI.

And then the model itself. Working at xAI puts him on the inside of what every other artist is now reckoning with from the outside. He builds it during the day and writes songs about being a person at night. The two activities have stopped feeling like separate jobs.

The artist who works in AI building his own digital presence.

The Virtual MK project — the chatbot in the next section — is the point where the parallel lines finally meet. It is not a marketing gimmick. It is what an artist does when the artist also happens to know, professionally, how the new instrument is wired. The instrument in question this time is a language model. The song is a persona.