About a month or so ago I was working with Greg. He saw what I was working on: a playable filter, an extremely complicated n-dimensional VAE drum machine (NxD), and a bunch of other stuff. He had a go on it, he was hugely impressed by the drum machine, and we talked about it the way you do. I had told him the filter was going out first. I gave him the code for everything I had, so he could pull bits out of it if any of it was useful to him. That is the level of trust we were at.
Before this
Over the years Greg would tell me about techniques he had picked up from watching me work. Fair enough; ideas went back and forth between us, though more of them went his way than mine. Recently, he told me something I used to do when I was nineteen had become one of his staples. I had left it behind decades ago. It was strange to me that he even remembered it.
When we started working together again I went round to his, and he was celebrating how much he had lifted from other artists and got away with. Put it out quick on Bandcamp, sell it, and the original artist never even finds out. I laughed along when he said he had managed to get Björk in there and nobody pulled him up on it. It never occurred to me I was next.
The drum machine
He wanted the drum machine running on his machine, an older Mac. I spent about six hours on that. Porting, testing, getting it to behave on hardware I did not have in front of me. Then I sent it over and heard nothing.
I need to explain the next part, because without it I come off badly.
I am autistic. Waiting for a reply is not a passive thing for me. It is an open task that sits in my head and runs, and it does not stop running until it is answered. It does not fade into the background the way it seems to for other people. After long enough I cannot carry on holding it, and the only way I can put it down is to end the conversation. I do not like being like that. I would change it if I could. But that is how it works. The really painful thing is that I have to explain that here to you, but he knew full well I had massive problems with this. He had triggered it many times before, and each time I had to try to hammer the point home.
I thought him agreeing to start doing music again was a tacit acceptance that he would try to help me with it: just tell me clearly when he is available and will reply. Pretty simple, I thought. But no. He did the same damn thing all over again, and this time it was after I had put down everything I was doing to go through a long and complicated process just so he could run this drum machine he liked on his old Mac.
So eventually I said: if you cannot help me with this communication problem, just delete the plugins.
He then finally answered! He said: ok, they are gone.
He could have answered at any point before that, but he answered at exactly the moment I had reached the end of what I could hold. I have no idea if he thinks I’m lying about this problem, or that it’s funny to him. Maybe he doesn’t believe I’m autistic, or thinks it’s a joke.
The name
For decades I have been Krust, or Krustian, in private studio sessions, and when I started planning this venture I knew I wanted that in the name somehow. Greg knew that. He told me I should call it AntiKrust. I was not fussed, and I was not looking for the name at that point anyway. Then he bought the domain, by his own admission to spite me, during an earlier round of this same communication problem. I forgot all about it until it came time to start the company.
So I started going through names. Krustify, AntiKrust, Krustisation, a dozen other bad ones. I went looking through the namespace. And there was a site already up at the .com.
What was on it
Plugins with the dirt left in. That phrasing, which was the whole brand idea I had been circling with the name, and which he knew about.
N-dimensional. That is the technique used on my drum machine and printed on the front panel. Greg did not even know what it meant before he came round. It is the thing he played with, said was “fresh”, and wanted to have on his own machine.
I told him I was releasing my playable filter first because NxD is pretty damn complicated and you need a GPU to train on the whole corpus. I clicked on the page, shocked he had used Krust, and the first thing that comes up is a filter! Funnily enough, with tuned steps, just like the one of mine he had just used.
Unfortunately for Greg, he seems unable to think of his own stuff anymore.
I do not have an ending for this
I keep trying to work out whether it is an elaborate wind-up that I am supposed to find funny, or whether he intends to treat me as a free resource, the way he views other people’s work. I genuinely do not know, and not knowing is its own kind of exhausting. Therefore I have created antikrust.io, he will not steal my work!
What I keep coming back to is that he knew. Not just about the work. He knew about the communication thing, specifically, because we had been through it before and talked about it. Knowing that and then ruining our communication and attempting to steal my stuff is just weird and cunty.
We had started making music again, and it hurts that that has died as well. In person we are fine, we always have been, we have a great time. I was genuinely happy that was happening again, and I did not see this coming at all.
Whatever happens, he has nuked our friendship for good. I will never trust him again, and that sucks.
