Participants 2025

"MF U UP" was created by humans not only steering AI like an instrument, but writing that AI's code as they went. All models ran locally as personal AI. We built new effects—even if they only appear for a few seconds—because we’re music hackers and we’ll open-source what we can.

Vocals were recorded into Ableton at 160 BPM. To build the band around them, we used our home-grown Stable Audio to generate hundreds of short ideas—drums, riffs, synth-guitar hybrids—then hand-picked favorites. We developed new tricks. "Inversion" let us transform our own audio into new timbres, and a lightweight LoRA fine-tune blended CJ’s teenage mathcore with trap for a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo. We pushed a “CFG” control to make sounds wilder, then re-ran with “init noise” to smooth them -- like overdriving a guitar, then sanding the edges. For contrast we invented "twinkle trap" using scripted multi-step inpainting (basically repainting parts of a song without touching the rest) to make a hybrid style.

We shaped voices with I AM CHOIR models -- a children’s choir and demonic choirs trained from studio recordings. A local LLM (Gemma3-27b) sparked prompt ideas and extended lyrics. Finally, we arranged everything in Ableton, balanced sub-bass for club translation, and had Encanti master the track. In short: we played conductor, engineer, and performer, and the song emerged from a tight loop of coding, prompting, listening, and human taste.