#110: Spook-ehh Season IV
Handing out AI slop to trick-or-treaters.
Halloween season has returned, and with it, Band Name Bureau’s annual visit to Bandcamp Beach to collect the seasonal music that has washed ashore. And, in the case of 2025, to gape at the tsunami of AI slop barreling toward us.
Spotify already has a well-established problem with AI music1, but Bandcamp seems in greater danger. You only need an email address to post music, which makes it a gold mine for Band Name Bureau and an easy target for sloppers. It also has far fewer resources to fight slop, because Bandcamp is smaller by several orders of magnitude. That could be an asset, weirdly: The only way to make money from the famously stingy Spotify is with tons and tons of streams—and Bandcamp doesn’t offer that scale.
Yet the stuff I encountered isn’t, like, awful. Take Alex and the Chatbots, who just released Halloween Monster Madness:
Though the actual “band” “looks” like this:
The entirety of their Bandcamp bio says, “Written by humans, generated by AI”—a riddle hidden inside a sentence. What’s written? What’s generated?
Scroll down to Prompt Jockey AI Slop, the first of three albums Alex and the Chatbots have released since April, and you’ll learn that this “virtual rock band” has “a human locked away in a dungeon who writes the lyrics.”
The opening track of Prompt Jockey AI Slop, the Chatbots’ opening salvo to the world? “Huntin’ for Hot Wheels,” a punky pop song about…obsessive Hot Wheels collectors.
they rummage through the retail pegs
and dig through all those toys
they gotta find what they’re lookin’ for
they’re 65-year-old boys
Seems random, right? It’s not.
You can find the Chatbots at https://zobovor.bandcamp.com, and some quick searching for “Zobovor” turns up a homepage for David Edwards, a.k.a. Zobovor, an illustrator and writer famous for “recreating and redesigning action figures, die-cast vehicles, and other toys” (or as the headline up top puts it, “slathering ugly gobs of paint on your favorite childhood toys”).
While the Chatbots’ Bandcamp has no direct association with Edwards, the band is “from” Ogden, Utah, where Edwards lives. Considering the URL and that Hot Wheels song, I don’t think there’s any mystery here.
How’s the music? Only marginally more synthetic than your average K-pop. The Halloween album offers serviceable gothy, punky pop, all of it pretty wholesome. (See: Utah.) “Attack of the Killer Pumpkins” is fun, like AFI’s take on It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.
Does the world need this? No, but it seems pretty harmless. I mean, aside from data-processing centers spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and cooling themselves with our precious drinking water.
It’s not all fun times with the Chatbots, though. Last month they released a tribute to Iryna Zarutska called “Iryna.” You’ll recall that her horrific murder on a train in North Carolina intersected perfectly with right-wing hysteria about crime to make those folks briefly care about Ukrainian refugees.2 While the lyrics read as deeply sincere…
Iryna, we shout your name tonight
Iryna, we’ll take up arms and fight
Iryna, your death can’t be ignored
Iryna, we won’t stay silent anymore
…the song sounds like Josie and the Pussycats attempting a protest song for the dance floor. It’s super weird and the most unsettling song in this issue, yet it has nothing to do with Halloween.
More fun are the Gaslighters, a.k.a. “the bad boys of doo wop,” an AI creation of Jack Atkins, a wedding/party/event DJ based in Baltimore. He debuted the project last December with a vintage-sounding Christmas album whose opening song is about a little boy who sharts on Santa’s lap. It also included this:
Disclaimer: I aimed to give this project an old, classic feel, so please don’t expect a high-resolution listening experience. There’s an airy quality and intentional pitch shifts, designed to evoke the sound of playing a record on an old turntable. Additionally, AI technology isn’t perfect, and this was a lot of work! Please keep in mind that I’m just one person with a love of music and creativity... not five singers in a doo-wop group. I don’t sing. So please, understand what you’re getting here.
Band Name Bureau: Please, understand what you’re getting here.
The Gaslighters’ new Spooky Season is a seven-song EP that includes a fun track called “He’s the American Psycho.”
He’s The American Psycho
(Patrick Bateman)
Got a face so smooth an’ a heart so low
Huey Lewis playin’ on the stereo
It’s The American Psycho
(American Psycho)
Moving on from AI to spam is DJ Chris Diablo. He floods Bandcamp with mash-ups, ambient tracks, and other miscellany so often that the site has previously banned him. “I’m Back - They deleted my last page - Ill try this again - Follow Me,” goes the bio on his current page.
In the past six weeks alone, Diablo has uploaded 45 albums’ worth of music themed around Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. (You can purchase his digital discography for only $538.65!)
Each track’s title includes the name of the song, “(DJ Chris Diablo Edit),” and a questionable BPM number. Take a listen to “131bpm- Tortured Souls(Dj Chris Diablo Edit)”:
For reference, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” is 131 BPM. Maybe the souls are tortured because they can’t find the beat?
Each year “Horror music composer with a lifelong passion for horror” Sam Haynes posts a Halloween album because that’s what you do when you name yourself after Samhain. The ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of harvest season is actually pronounced “SAH-win,” but try making a common name out of that! Something Winn? Cy Winn, maybe? Just spitballing here.
Pronouncing it as written is endorsed by none other than Glenn Danzig, who named his post-Misfits band Samhain. “The Celtic pronunciation is ‘sah-win,’ and the American pronunciation, of course, because Americans don’t speak Celtic, is ‘Sam-hain,’” Danzig told Vanyaland in 2015. Sam Haynes is British, not American, but let’s move on from my insufferable pedantry.
Thirteen, the 13th album in Haynes’ Halloween series, combines “elements of Synthwave, Gothic rock, EDM and more.” It’s the follow-up to Every Night is Halloween, which reached #11 in Rock Rage Radio’s Top 31 tracks of 2024. Which you obviously remember.
Wondering how an album ended up among the top tracks of 2024—again, insufferable—I did some digging. While I couldn’t confirm where Every Night is Halloween placed, I did find Rock Rage Radio.
It’s part of a network of sketchy-looking internet stations with names like Tattoo Metal Radio (the homepage takeover still mourns Ozzy), Brews Radio (beer or something), Country Rage Radio (red hats welcome), and Mud Radio (“We like it dirty”).
That last one looks extra sketchy, because the “team” page shows one DJ: Roc Rawker, with a stock photo of a DJ and this tossed-off bio:
Roc Rawker is a dude that loves Rock Music. So much so his parents new at birth he was destined to go on to rule the world of Rock N Roll. To not waste any time he was named Roc & that is just what he did.
When you search for the name lurking in the URL, https://mudradiolive.com/members/albert-philips/, a bunch of “talent scout” pages from other countries pop up. They all have different photos of a person purporting to be Albert Philips, but share the same nonsensical bio:
I’m a professional DJ since 1994, graduated at the New England Conservatory in Music & Djing.3 It two doesn’t, herb, have open subdue were. Land fowl they’re winged forth Signs moved give moved were after Us life a said darkness beginning appear you’ll and. Divided in bearing together forth also lesser fifth him appear form. Female. And had firmament there blessed without.
I guess “lorem ipsum” is passé.
Let’s move on to Mexico’s OCULTISMO, who just released ¡El Orejón, El Fanático Y El Valiente! (The Big-Eared, the Fanatic and the Brave!, per SpanishDict). Guess which is which:
It’s all lo-fi, synthesized instrumental music with campy horror vibes and absolutely no low end. But at least it doesn’t sound like AI.
I chuckled at the song title “No Quiero Tu Maldita Fruta En Mi Calabacita!!!!!!,” which Google told me means “I Don’t Want Your Damn Fruit In My Zucchini!!!!!” But the more-reliable SpanishDict noted calabacita can also mean “pumpkin,” which makes more sense and is less funny.
I’m also partial to “Niños Del Autobús A La Muerte,” or “Children from the Bus to Death.”
I’m getting a warning that this is near the email length limit, and I’ve barely covered anything. Let’s go lightning round!
Speaking of spam, Ontario’s Phibes Praetorius has 563 releases on Bandcamp dating back to 2017. If they share a common denominator, it’s a devotion to quantity, not quality. The latest is By the Flickering Firelight, in which each track forms part of a sentence: 1. Well, We Warned You 2. When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls 3. And the bat in the moonlight flies 4. And inky clouds like funeral shrouds 5. Sail over the midnight skies 6. When the footpads quail at the night bird’s wail 7. And black dogs bay at the moon 8. Then is the spectre’s holiday 9. The dead of the night’s high noon 10. The welcome knell of the midnight well 11. Grisly Grim Goodnight 12. Gonna Git Ya. That last one feels out of place?
Speaking of Canadians, Count Vlengar hails from Montreal and just released Call of the Gossamer Shadow. It’s a lot of gothy industrial stuff, but nothing with as great a title as “I Know They Hate Me But I Still Hug Human Brains Fresh Out of Pickle Jars,” from 2021’s Bittersweet Hell.
Gotta say Warlock Corpse is a pretty sweet name for a “dungeon synth” project. It self-describes as music from another world “where magic, dragons and evil warlocks exist”—or Kazakhstan, per its bio. The music is created with vintage synths and recorded on cassette tape, like the new Melodies for Ghosts. It’s inspired by Japanese tales of the supernatural, so obviously there’s a song called “Sanctuary of Supernatural Cats.”
POST-SCRIPTS
This is the fourth time we’ve done a Halloween issue, and I’ve retroactively branded them all Spook-ehh Season. Now I just watch those SEO dollars roll in!
From DJ Chris Diablo’s Instagram:
“Hits like a beast!” he says. It belongs to his son, because the family that smokes together, something something.
Wait, is the stem supposed to be the gorilla’s penis?
More “He’s the American Psycho” lyrics:
Well, he’s talkin’ ’bout Genesis with some lady friends
With a nervous smile that jus’ never ends
Then he stops mid-sentence, there’s a chill in the air
Says, “Sabrina, eat her ass, now, don’t just stare”Those internet stations are apparently linked to a “record label” called Curtain Call Records. Why the quotation marks? Because it seems less like a label and more like a company that charges no-name bands for stuff like “tailored marketing strategies” and “impactful promotional campaigns” to “help your music shine.” Sounds legit!
The company also likes to promote cheapo “ghost artists” to reduce expenses, so this feels weirdly karmic.
In response, North Carolina may bring back the firing squad. Problem solved!
You will not be surprised to learn the New England Conservatory offers no such degree.