Colophon
How this was made
Ethọ́s Lab Block Party 2026. Eleven songs, one afternoon.
The story
Eleven people came to Ethọ́s Lab’s block party on June 13th, 2026, and told me one true thing each. We turned them into eleven songs before the day was out. With them, not about them.
I set up a booth and asked about heads and hearts. Not for soundbites, for the one sentence a person says when they stop performing. That sentence is the song. Then the machines did the heavy lifting on the sound, and we kept going until the room had a record.
The tools
Lyrics written by Claude, run through Ethọ́s’s own brand brain so the person stays the hero and the tech never does. Sound generated in Suno, styled by genre and never by anybody’s name. A cut-paper visual world built with Rafiki and Gemini. Whisper to reconcile the written words against the as-sung takes. The site is Next.js on Vercel, mostly vibe-coded in conversation.
The honest part: the tools did the generative middle, maybe a third of the way to done. The other two thirds, the ear for the true line, the curation, the consent calls, the cohesion, was judgment in real time. AI is the amplifier. You are still the original intelligence.
How I work
I don’t spec, I reveal. You can’t plan your way to the thing. You build it and push the buttons until it tells you what it actually wanted to be.
AI is a mirror more than a tool. It amplifies whatever taste and values you bring, which makes self-knowledge the real prerequisite, not the prompt. And the creative job is shifting from making to selecting. DJs were first called selectors. That’s the role now: the machine generates, you choose.
What I believe
Consent or it doesn’t exist. Nobody is here who didn’t say yes, and for the young people that means a guardian said yes too.
The person is the hero. The technology never is. Credit goes outward, by name.
I’m a guest on Coast Salish land and a guest in a Black-led youth space, so I keep my hands light and my ears open. A settler accomplice, not the author of anybody’s culture.
And I hold the both/and: stoked about what these tools can do, clear-eyed about whose work they were trained on and who gets left behind. Non-extractive, or it’s just theater.
Who made this
I’m Kris Krüg. I produced this. I run the BC + AI Ecosystem, one of Canada’s biggest grassroots AI communities, and I’ve been building websites and communities since 1995, back to co-founding Bryght and building Dead.net for the Grateful Dead.
I’m CTO of the Indigenomics Institute, where AI helps surface billions in unaccounted Indigenous economic activity. I teach human-AI collaboration through The Upgrade AI, and my photography has run in National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and at the UN. I call the philosophy techno-optimism with a critical edge.
Ethọ́s Lab
Ethọ́s Lab is a Black-led youth STEAM space in Vancouver, led by Anthonia Ogundele, building somewhere young people can fail excellently. I made this record with them, as an accomplice and a producer, under the BC + AI Ecosystem banner. The songs belong to the people who inspired them.
If the day moved you, back the people who make days like it. Donate·Volunteer with Ethọ́s Lab.
Made in conversation with Claude. Songs in Suno. Art with Rafiki and Gemini. Set in Fraunces and Inter. Next.js on Vercel. The photos and clips on this site are real and tagged “not ai.” The album art is generated, and labeled as such. Vancouver, 2026.
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