One Booth, One Afternoon, Eleven Songs:
I set up a booth at the Eth??s Lab open house and asked people for one true thing.
That was the whole pitch. Sit down, tell me something real, and I will turn it into a song before you leave. Eleven people took me up on it. By the end of the day we had eleven songs and a record called Block Party 2026.
You can hear the whole thing here: the Eth??s Lab Block Party album. There is a little ETH??S·FM player on the page that I am stupidly proud of.
This is the story of how it got made, and the one rule I would not break to make it.
How the booth worked
The flow was simple on purpose.
Somebody sat down. I asked a few questions and listened for the one line that was actually theirs, the thing they said without thinking about it. We captured voice if they wanted. Then the lyrics got written through the Eth??s brand voice, I built a style from genre instead of from any artist’s name, generated the track in Suno, and, only with their yes, the song joined the album.
One booth. One afternoon. A line of people willing to tell the truth.
The genres went everywhere, because the people did. Ghanaian highlife. Afro-soul. Caribbean soca. Deep vocal house. Indie folk singalong. A cottage-core chanson in French. A nineties summer hip-hop track. The record sounds like the room sounded.
The one rule
Here is the rule. The person is the hero. The technology is never the hero.
That is not a slogan I put on a slide. It is the thing that decided every call I made all day. The song had to sound like the person who gave it to me, not like the tool that helped carry it. If a track started feeling like an AI demo instead of like somebody’s actual life, it was wrong, and I changed it or cut it.
The photos on the site say “not ai” on them for a reason. The music is made with AI. The people are not. The day was not. That line matters more than anything else on the page.
The songs
Every track is anchored to one real quote from one real person. I built the song out from there.
Chris came from Accra and fell for the city nobody talks about:
Nobody talks about Vancouver, but there’s a lot of cool things going on. People should take notice.
So he got highlife. Bobby has been a youth worker, a father, an activist, an opener for the Rascalz back in the day:
You don’t eat until they do. You open the doors for them.
So he got a vocal-house floor with no borders on it. Maurice came to tech late and is holding the door open early for his son:
I came to IT later in life. I want my son to have these opportunities earlier.
So he got soca and steel pan and a proud-father heart. Anthonia, who built the room, closed the record:
We are all uniquely gifted to do something in this moment. So just do it.
That one became a gospel-soul finale with a whole choir on it.
The kids got the same care as everyone else, with more guardrails. Aster is fourteen and told the truth about being scared and going anyway. Caleb beat the game in the lab and then graduated elementary the same week. They are on the record first name only, by design, and nothing about them shipped without a guardian saying yes.
The consent part is the whole part
People ask me how the AI worked. The harder and better question is how the consent worked.
Nothing went public without the person saying yes. Minors are first name only and never shown as a face. I built every music style from genre, not from copying a named artist, so nobody’s voice got cloned and no living musician got imitated. No turning somebody else’s culture into a costume. We cleared all of it on June 14, the day after the party, person by person.
If a person is in the work, the work has to respect their agency. The tech helped carry the songs through the door. The people are the reason the songs exist.
My own track, and the parking garage
I spent the whole day holding the mic for other people. Then the day caught me on the way out.
I was leaving, fried and happy, and somebody in the parking garage had a dead battery. Ribbon skirt, stranded under the fluorescent lights. I had cables in the back. You give somebody a jump and somehow you are the one who feels revived. I turned that into the last track on the album, a dark little slow jam called Meta Angel in da Parking Lot. The featured line is mine:
I was exactly where I was supposed to be, doing exactly what I was supposed to do.
That is how the whole day felt. I did not have to chase the signal. For once I was standing in it.
Go listen
Start with the album. Play it loud. The ETH??S·FM player is worth the click on its own.
This is one of a few things I have been making lately where the human parts stay in charge. If you want the rest of the map:
Bring both hands. Keep your taste on. Do not let the machine have the last word.
Produced by Kris Krüg for Eth??s Lab and the BC + AI Ecosystem. Eleven voices, June 13, 2026. Consent cleared June 14, 2026.
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