A LIFE lol · Music, art & a life in progress
Welcome to the BASSVerse: music, characters, artwork, stories and games by Matt / MP Studio & Designs. A LIFE lol is your way in. Some of the work contains adult themes and explicit lyrics.
THE FULL STORY · Giving back
This story helped me survive. I want whatever it earns to help somebody else keep going.
If you buy the album on iTunes or Amazon Music, every dollar from that purchase that actually reaches me will go to the work of Austin Take A Chance Organization.
That work helps LGBTQIA+ people in Austin facing displacement or homelessness get housing, food, healthcare, transportation, legal help, employment, and community care. You’re buying the music. I’m putting my share toward that work.
This is a music purchase, not a tax-deductible donation. Artist earnings are directed to the work after the distributor confirms and pays them.
You can explore the project without buying the album.
18+ · Explicit content
I talk about trauma, psychosis, emotional abuse, suicidal language, grief, mental health treatment and medication, and sexual consent. I’m pretty direct about it, and some of it may be hard to read.
Take your time. Take a break. If this is more than you want to sit with today, it’s okay to leave it here. Please look after yourself.
In the U.S., the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7.
This story helped me survive. I want whatever it earns to help somebody else keep going.
If you buy the album on iTunes or Amazon Music, every dollar from that purchase that actually reaches me will go to the work of Austin Take A Chance Organization.
That work helps LGBTQIA+ people in Austin facing displacement or homelessness get housing, food, healthcare, transportation, legal help, employment, and community care. You’re buying the music. I’m putting my share toward that work.
This is a music purchase, not a tax-deductible donation. Artist earnings are directed to the work after the distributor confirms and pays them.
ZER:0 / From the three acts to the finale
A PSYCHOSIS IN THREE ACTS
This is the true story of my psychosis, told as a three-act concept album. No lore required, just what happened, put to music.
I'm Matt. I wrote and built all of this (the songs, the characters, the art) out of things I actually lived through.
Start with "No One Ever Came." It's the one that started all of this. 30 seconds, no commitment.
I’m Matt P. These songs follow a year and a half of my life.
A note from me
This is what that year and a half sounded like when I stopped trying to make it tidy.
I wanted to talk about what happened, but speech was hard. Making songs gave me a way to say things I couldn’t finish in conversation.
The characters carry fragmented parts of my life through hyper-pop beats and metal licks. The humor belongs there too. Sometimes the joke was the only way I could get the rest of the sentence out.
I would never wish this fate on any person. My wish is that someone out there will hear these songs and find something they needed to hear.
So here it is, in all its oddity: The Full Story — A Psychosis in Three Acts.
Act I
I was still in the middle of it when I started writing. Hurt, pissed off, confused. Making songs gave me somewhere to put all of that.
No One Ever Came 12 tracks
The core story, arranged for this site: Act I → + what came after → Act II → Act III. See Release History for how the editions fit together.
12 tracks
So here we are.
This is not a dig.
This is not blame.
This does not erase the people who showed up after.
This is what it was like inside the head of someone still haunting the life they used to have.
(P.S. This cover was a collaborative effort. A good friend of mine showed me a photo he took, and the minute I saw it, I knew it was part of this story.) Thanks, babe.
Some of the lyrics in this song are more than ten years old. I held onto them because they always felt unfinished, like words sent somewhere that had not answered yet. I would return to them every few years, but I never knew where they belonged. It turns out I had not lived the rest of the song yet.
Despite the title, this is not really a song about space. It is about looking toward the night sky when I was too hurt to keep looking at the world around me. I was not asking the stars to fix anything. I think I just needed something vast enough to recognize how broken I was without asking me to explain or prove it. For a moment, it felt like the sky looked back and acknowledged me.
Not healed. Not whole. Just seen.
I once dreamed of reaching the stars by becoming an astronomer and working for NASA. Life took me somewhere else. But maybe this was another way of reaching them. I spoke into the dark, and after more than ten years, the song finally answered.
I thought I was falling for someone. There was something in the way they looked at me, or maybe in who I became when they did, that made me feel awake again. I called it attraction because that was easier to understand. I gave them credit for every color, every soft part, and every piece of myself that seemed to return whenever they were near.
But they were not putting those things inside me. They were reflecting back what I had forgotten was already there.
That does not mean the connection was imaginary or that the person meant nothing. Something about them genuinely helped me see myself again. I had simply mistaken the mirror for the source.
For a song with such a self-centered title, [ME ME ME] is really about reclamation. I spent so long believing I was chasing another person, only to realize I had been trying to find my way back to myself.
Sometimes, when you already know things are kind of f****d, you reach a point where you think, “Well, if the plane is going down anyway, I might as well enjoy the view.”
That’s really what this song is about.
It’s not pretending everything is okay. It’s knowing things are absolutely not okay and deciding you’re not going to waste the rest of your energy crying about it.
Sometimes the only thing left to do is turn the music up, let go for a minute, and dance through the disaster.
Plus, who doesn’t love an easy, radio-friendly song that lets your brain take the night off?
No boo-hoos. No dramatic speeches. No trying to fix everything before the beat drops. Just dance.
If you’ve ever had to navigate the medical system, change therapists, or explain your entire life to yet another person holding a clipboard, this one may hit a little too close to home.
There’s a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being asked to write down “the worst day of your life” for what feels like the hundredth time. At some point, you start wondering if there’s a loyalty card.
Then there are the medications.
You finally get your refill called in (seriously, don’t forget to take them), only to discover that somewhere between you, the doctor, the pharmacy, and the system, someone didn’t get it quite right. Again.
Sometimes a little dark humor is the only thing keeping you from completely losing it.
I don’t really know how to talk about this one.
LOVE(D) was about him, but it was also about the moment that set this entire story in motion.
I’m going to tell you the truth.
My truth, anyway. And what I fear may also be true for other people who have been through something similar.
Even when someone betrays you in a way that splits your life into before and after, part of you can still love them. Or maybe not them exactly. Maybe you still love the version of them who existed before you knew what they were capable of. The version you never thought could hurt you so completely and leave you alone with the wreckage.
It’s confusing. It’s frustrating. And it’s extremely difficult to talk about.
There’s shame, because “How could you still love someone who did that to you?” becomes a little too familiar. As if loving them means you’re excusing what they did.
It doesn’t.
I love(d) him.
And that was then.
The words that became this song are words that should never be arranged in that order:
“Go kill yourself, f*****.”
Those were the last words he chose to leave me with.
Not an explanation.
Not an apology.
Just something meant to hurt as deeply as possible before he disappeared.
If anyone has ever said something like that to you, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it.
People like to say they’re “just words,” but some words don’t leave when the person does.
They replay. They find their way into quiet moments. They change the way you hear your own thoughts for a while.
This song is what I did with mine. I took the words he meant as an ending and made sure they weren’t.
There is such a clear line between “Then” and “Now” that they sometimes feel like two completely different lives.
There was the me who lived without knowing the weight I would one day be forced to carry. Then came the version of me who had no choice but to become strong enough to carry it, even on the days I really didn’t want to.
I don’t romanticize that strength. I would have preferred not to need it. But now there is a version of me who can finally see tomorrow waiting just over the horizon.
For the first time in a long time, I believe I might actually reach it.
That’s the version of me I want you to meet. I remember who I was, and I know what it took to get here, but I’m not looking back.
Psychosis.
Where do I even start?
It’s one of those things that can fundamentally split a person in half.
Mine bent my reality until nothing felt simple, safe, or completely certain anymore. It became complicated in ways I still don’t always know how to explain.
I’m deeply sorry to the people who had to see me that way, especially anyone I may have scared, confused, or pushed away while I was trying to understand what was happening to me.
But to those who stayed and carried me through the hardest days of my life, even without knowing the heartbreaking circumstances that led me down that rabbit hole, thank you.
You didn’t have the full story. Some of you barely had any of it. But you stayed anyway. You reminded me that I was still here when I couldn’t find myself. You saved my life, and I will always carry each of you differently in my heart.
At the very beginning of this story, a few unwanted guests found their way in and made themselves far too comfortable.
For a while, I was too overwhelmed, too confused, and honestly too tired to say what needed to be said.
Silence can look a lot like permission to people who benefit from it, but it never was.
This is the version of the story where I finally found my voice, drew a line, and refused to move it.
No long speech. No dramatic goodbye.
Just a very clear message: you have officially overstayed your welcome.
Sincerely, Get the f*** out!
I gave mercy.
I was given mercy.
Either way, I bit my tongue and hoped the people who attempted to take my life from me would be given a different fate than the one they chose when they harmed me.
I waited quietly.
I watched from afar, keeping a shaking finger on the detonator the entire time.
Because I knew where they could end up if I told the truth.
I know what happens to people in the system.
What I didn’t understand then was the cost of silence.
It was a coin toss.
And now, sitting on the other side of it, I can say that I’ve seen what love did in the lives of those people. I’ve seen what became possible because they were given the chance to keep going.
Maybe that means I made the right call.
Maybe it doesn’t.
We won’t know until the world stops spinning.
What I do know is that mercy has consequences, too.
I made my choice.
I accept the consequences of love.
These bonus / additional tracks remain part of the release history. They sit outside the primary narrative of THE FULL STORY.
5 tracks
You know this one.
The person who disappears without a word, leaves you to make peace with all the questions, and then suddenly decides they’re ready to talk again.
As if the conversation has just been sitting there patiently waiting for them to come back.
There was probably a time when I would have answered immediately, because closure can look really attractive when you’ve been denied it long enough.
But eventually, you realize that someone returning doesn’t automatically earn them access to you again.
Sometimes the silence already said everything.
But don’t worry, we aren’t bitter.
We’re simply no longer available.
WHERE ARE MY SAD BOYS?!
This one is for everyone who keeps showing up, even on the days when staying inside feels like the only reasonable option.
For the people who can be sad, tired, anxious, and still somehow pull on their boots and make it out the door. I love you.
Existing can be a lot, and sometimes the victory isn’t fixing everything. Sometimes it’s simply making it through the day without disappearing from your own life.
So bring the emotional baggage. We can check it at the door or drag it onto the dance floor with us.
Either way, the music is already playing.
Let’s boogie~
I kept hearing myself tell the same stories over and over again.
I realized how much time I had spent replaying this past year and all of its horrors, letting it happen to me again every time I told it.
I decided I wanted to move forward.
Not forget. Not forgive. Just finally say, “It happened.”
So I’m letting it go the best way I know how.
Usually, letting go means you stop talking about it. But since it’s me, I thought, “Well… why not make a song about it first?”
Will they?
Won’t they?
Is anyone even asking the same question anymore?
And does the answer subtract from the feeling?
Labeling the abstract is not welcomed here. I subscribe to the nonsense because I participate in it. Because “just close enough, but we’ll never say the real words” is better than nothing.
Ya know?
Of course you do.
Because I do not.
(But I do.)
Consent.
C-O-N-S-E-N-T.
Commit that to memory if it hasn’t been yet.
This was made from the bones of a song that was overbearingly educational.
The message is still baked in.
It just sounds better as a club anthem.
Always.
Ask.
Fucking.
Consent.
This has been a PSA provided by isweartofuckinggodiwillkickyourassyoupieceof…
I wrote this album from inside the wreckage. There was no clean lesson yet. I was trying to name betrayal, isolation, psychosis, broken systems, unexpected kindness, and the strange humor that survived with me. The record keeps changing shape because that year kept changing shape while I was living it.
Everyone wants a beginning. The trouble is, I could never pick just one. By the time I understood what had been taken, I was already trying to make sense of the person left behind.
I didn’t want an album that only sounded wounded. It needed to feel alive. Defiant. Catchy. Messy. Hyper-pop beats, metal licks, dance-floor momentum, and sharp left turns gave the pain somewhere to move without letting it become the only thing left.
The white looks clean from a distance. Up close, the title won’t stay still. That felt right: something presented like evidence while every color underneath it insists there’s still a person here. The restraint makes the instability inside the letters harder to ignore.
I can’t undo that year. But I got to tell it in my own words. That mattered.
Between Acts I & II
I finished telling that part of the story. Then I still had to get up the next morning.
These nine songs belong to the aftermath of Act I, from No One Wore Black to Too Busy Cry Later.
No One Wore Black 9 tracks
9 tracks
Disenfranchised grief.
Go look it up.
Put that in your “new word” piggy bank for today if it describes something you’ve felt but never had the language for.
There is a version of me that was left for dead. And that version of me died.
I never had time to mourn him. I was too busy clawing at every thread I could find, trying to save whatever part of me was still alive.
People can look at me now and say, “Oh, but you made it. You shouldn’t be sad. You should be thankful.”
Kind of hard to feel thankful when I’ve been dragging around the corpse of who I used to be.
I don’t know which version of me still lives in your head. So I’ve had to Frankenstein together some version of myself that still looks enough like that guy for you to recognize him, while somehow making room for everything that came after.
I made it. But he didn’t.
And I don’t blame you if you didn’t know to wear black.
I wear it every day for you.
THE ACT
And we have arrived at the beginning…the real one, anyway.
Odd, considering we’re halfway through, right?
That’s what happened.
I didn’t realize how much of an impact that night had...or would have...on me. I didn’t know how much of my life would be ripped away in the year and a half that followed.
I didn’t know how one person’s act could alter the entire life of someone who had tried to love even the worst parts of them.
I didn’t think my partner would be behind the crime.
I didn’t think the only person I had ever trusted with all of myself would be behind The Act.
This entire project starts here.
Everything before this song is leading to it.
Everything after it exists because of it.
I wish I would have known then.
Could’ve started writing these bangers sooner, lol.
Take care of others.
Sit beside someone when the lights come back on.
When the music stops.
When whatever felt fun five minutes ago becomes something someone has to survive.
Take a second to think about what you’re doing. Then take another to think about who will have to carry it after you leave.
The party dies once when the fun ends. It dies again when everyone decides the aftermath belongs to someone else.
We don’t leave each other when the fun becomes responsibility.
Sometimes the bad times just keep coming.
At some point, you learn to ride the wave.
After a year of terrible shit happening, you get a little better at taking the punches. Not because they hurt any less. You just stop being surprised when the next one lands.
On the bright side, I learned to stop asking how much worse it could get.
Have you stopped clutching your pearls?
Good.
The purpose of this song, and the imagery I used, was never to be blasphemous. I wanted to show what it felt like to sit among the upper crust with “the good ones,” only to be betrayed by those same people.
But there are people in the shadows, too.
Good people.
The people who accepted me, held me, and helped me find my way back home when the light had nothing left to offer.
I’ll never forget them.
They taught me how to see in the dark, and I promised myself I’d come back for them in whatever way I can.
Life went on.
Despite everything it endured, my heart still managed to make a little room for whatever beautiful, messy thing I believe love can carry.
If you can’t tell, this song is for someone.
(Thankfully, a different someone than the one this story has been riding on.)
Maybe your someone.
But definitely mine.
You showed me there was still something beating inside my chest.
I won’t tell the world what you did that gave me that spark again…because I’m not even sure you remember doing it.
But every time I see you, there is still a piece of me living in that moment.
Thank you.
I’ll always be yours, even after.
When Public Safety closed the combined release, I wanted to end that show with something that felt like ownership.
This little sick track is half a public service announcement to remember to take your meds and half an attempt to conquer my own stigma around having to take mine.
It’s part of the residue I still carry from “the people who came.”
Between them and The Act, taking them became necessary.
And that burns me.
But I’ve seen what I can be like without those meds, and I’d swallow my own pride before I ever made the people around me deal with that version of me again.
I’ve learned to live with these scars. With the damage. With the broken heart and the bleeding soul. With the “back thens” and the “if onlys.” With the tears that find me more often than not. With the life I should have had but lost. With the people I thought would show up but didn’t. With the regrets. With the fears. With the lonely.
You all tried to take everything from me.
And you got goddamn close.
But somewhere in the wreckage of yesterday, I found my strength. When I couldn’t find a light, I made my own. When I couldn’t see a path, I forged one. I conjured every ounce of myself I could find so I wouldn’t fade out.
I wanted to stay that badly.
I needed to know the world wouldn’t erase me or reduce me to the things that happened to me. I refused to let any of it win.
So I stayed.
And I will keep staying.
For myself and for anyone who finds themselves on the other side of this coin. I will make sure no soul carrying this weight passes me believing they have to carry it alone.
You took enough from me.
You don’t get this too.
I take the meds.
I carry the scars.
I live with what happened.
But this life is still mine.
I don’t take them because you won.
I take them because I did.
Come hell or high water...
I’m still here, alright!
I’ve had panic attacks. But I hadn’t had a PANIC! attack.
It was so disorienting to suddenly move from the bed to the kitchen, trying to find a reason for why it was happening, and then almost wind up crawling inside a cabinet because I had no control over whatever my body was freaking out about.
Thankfully, I remembered some good ol’ grounding techniques. They helped me keep it together until a friend found me face down on my bed. He sat with me through the rest of it.
Thanks, Bob. (That’s not his name, but I forgot to ask if he wanted to be mentioned.)
I tried to make the soundscape feel… well, panic-inducing, while still controlled enough to carry the beat.
The panic attack unfortunately cost me an opportunity I was very much looking forward to. But hey, that’s the fun of trauma, baby!
I don’t have time to cry these days.
I’ve got too much work to do and other people’s debt to pay off to just sit around and shed another damn tear over any of this BS.
I don’t condone not taking care of yourself or sidestepping emotion. But sometimes you gotta punch in, and I don’t look cute ugly-crying at my desk on a Wednesday morning.
We got bills to pay.
Get it together, Susan. (I’m Susan.)
Act II
I thought I had written the ending. Turns out I was still pretty fucking angry. Five songs later, here we are.
That Was the Lie 5 tracks
5 tracks
So now you know.
I lied.
But not in a way meant to cause hurt.
Quite the opposite.
I omitted parts of this story for the safety of others. Including myself.
I wanted to wrap this whole saga of pain into something that looked pretty on a shelf. Something that could make you believe love doesn’t have to cost anything.
I wish with my entire heart I could look at you and tell you that was true.
But this was me, strained from everything it has cost to keep my tongue held. From watching what the effects of “kindness” can actually do.
I’m not sorry I lied.
I’m sorry you know the truth now.
It hurts knowing you’re only wanted because of what you can offer.
It hurts even more when you realize you played a part in allowing it to happen.
I made myself useful so people would want to keep me around. I became the punching bag because, as long as I could take the hit, I could call that being wanted.
This song is an admission.
Useful was enough.
Until it wasn’t.
This song was about a pizza.
Sorta.
I had a really shit weekend. It’s actually what tipped the scales and made me write this sequel.
Part of that weekend involved having no money to eat, being somewhere I wasn’t familiar with, and being pissed off because, if you drew the lines far enough backward, some of it could be traced all the way back to the… ya know.
So yeah. I was hella pissed.
Through sheer determination, I managed to get myself over to a Domino’s and use my collected points to get one fucking pineapple-and-ham pizza.
And somehow, that became the song.
Because no matter what you throw at me, I’m going to keep going.
Whatever pit the world leaves me burning in, let it.
I’ll see you on the other side, motherfucker.
Pizza and all.
This felt like the theme song for my life at the time.
It was me admitting that sometimes it feels like the camera is permanently searching for my worst angle.
So enjoy the view.
I make a good show.
Also, I have a friend who performs in drag named Betty Punk, and the entire time I was writing this song, I could see them performing it in my head.
Thanks for keeping my fire burning, friend.
For the better half of my adult life (and I’m 30 at the time of writing this, so you can do that math), I’ve had a thing about telling people when something good happens to me.
Mostly because some part of me became convinced that if I talked about something good, it would get ruined.
I now have one of the most amazing humans in my life as a friend, who also happens to be a therapist, and through what I can only describe as indirect exposure therapy, I have discovered:
Oh.
That’s trauma.
Haha.
Welcome to my brain.
It’s a good one, but damn, we got baggage.
CREDITS ROLLED is what happened when I stopped trying to make the ending easier to love. Five songs. No cleanup. No folded corners. No pretend closure. It’s smaller than Act I because by then the argument had narrowed to the things I could no longer avoid.
By this point I could look functional and still be falling apart. The act asks what happens when surviving becomes another performance: stay useful, make it presentable, let everyone else go home.
The tone shift was intentional. The guitars are heavy. The synths hit hard. The beat keeps moving, even when I wasn’t sure I could. I wanted the aftermath to feel physical because living through it was. This is the pressure boiling over instead of being arranged for company.
The 零 mark doesn’t sit politely in the middle. It lands there. Red against violet. Doubled, dragged, and a little damaged. Like a title card that survived the movie and resented being asked to smile for the sequel.
Admitting my part in it was harder than being angry. That had to be in the songs, too.
Act III
Some days I could barely get out of bed. Some days I wanted to change the world. This is where I let both of those people be me.
Everything We Inherited 5 tracks
5 tracks
Wow.
Another album.
So quickly, huh?
Seems sus.
I wish I could tell you this was some AI-hallucinated fever dream, but sadly, I just wake up with ideas and lyrics and start writing like a little demon.
This song sparked the entire album.
After that really shit weekend, I spent the next week reflecting on everything that had come and gone. For the first time, I felt sort of above the damage.
Not healed.
Not removed from it.
Just far enough away to finally see some of the lessons hiding in the rubble.
And somewhere in all of that, I really started learning how much we inherit from the people who came before us. Patterns, fears, coping mechanisms, pain—things that started long before we ever had names.
And I was basically like:
“Wait. We carry generations of trauma around with us? Like, legit?”
Whaaaaaat?
Suddenly, a lot of things made sense.
That doesn’t excuse the trauma I’ve added to the pile myself. But it helped me understand that sometimes we’re walking around carrying things that are bigger and older than we are.
And with that realization, I made myself a promise:
I will do everything I possibly can to make sure my trauma doesn’t become someone else’s inheritance.
Especially from my lot.
So take the time to learn yourself. Learn your parts. Learn what belongs to you and what was handed to you.
I wish you nothing but healing, babe.
Ahhhhh.
This one hurts.
Losing someone because of the way they perceive your damage sucks butt.
To keep the details of that relationship behind closed doors, I’ll leave it at this:
This was two people who overthought everything and unintentionally killed something that maybe could have been good.
We still talk.
It’s all good.
Life is weird.
I like the way certain titles look.
I genuinely think there’s an art to naming songs, and I felt extremely cool about this one.
But the sentiment behind it is true.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been willing to bleed for another person while refusing to love myself enough to do the difficult thing for me.
That’s the contradiction.
I’ll destroy myself proving I care about you.
Learning to care about myself with that same intensity?
Still working on it.
I witnessed you.
All of you who have been part of this journey.
I’ve seen you struggle.
I’ve seen you summon just enough strength to keep the ball rolling for one more day.
The ones we’ve lost.
The ones still hanging on.
The ones who give everything.
The ones who held my hand in the dark.
The ones who saw the ugly parts of me and still wanted me around.
The ones who haven’t learned their worth yet.
The ones who got left behind when they never deserved to be.
I witnessed you.
And I will always be your biggest cheerleader.
I will move heaven and hell for you.
Because your story needs to keep going.
No.
Matter.
What.
I’m proud of you.
I mean this.
IT ENDS WITH ME.
I know with every ounce of my heart that my story is not supposed to end with me adding another human being to this tragic little saga.
Trust me.
I did you a favor.
I will not pass this trauma forward.
I will not hand someone else the same struggle this world handed me and tell them to figure out how to survive it.
Whatever came before me, whatever was handed to me, whatever I added myself—
it stops here.
So:
It Ends With Me.
Love,
Matt.
(It’s okay to laugh. Especially at this song. I know it’s tragic, but… pfffffft. lol.)
This record doesn’t live apart from the first two acts. It is what happened when everything they taught me, musically and personally, had to share one body. It is the summary, but it isn’t a neat one.
ZER:0 tells me a story about a boy who wanted to love and be loved and died. Then he came back as the ghost of that person and learned to inhabit a body he is still learning to love. Listening to ZER:0 tell it gives me enough distance to hear my own life without pretending it belongs to somebody else.
I blended the electronic sound of WHAT THEY TRIED TO TAKE + what came after with the metal and alternative sound of CREDITS ROLLED, then added something theatrical. It can laugh, cry, get angry, and still keep moving. That is what the whole story sounds like to me now.
A single line cuts across the dark like a horizon I’m not sure I can reach yet. Purple, blue, and red become proof that direction can exist before certainty does.
Act II → Act III
I couldn’t change what happened. I could decide what happened next.
There are still days when I find it hard to get out of bed. Some days I feel inspired to change the world in some small way. Both are true.
I realize how differently all of this could have gone. How being spared can become something worse. That was where I drew the line.
Then I woke up one morning with the concept and lyrics already buzzing. That was Act III.
ACT III: SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A LIFE
All of it belongs here. The grief, the anger, the stupid joke. I’m still the person who lived it. I get to be more than that, too.
The trilogy is complete
That’s the three acts. Thank you for spending some of your time with them.
Next, OK… WE GET IT steps outside the story and breaks the fourth wall. SUPERNOVAblackhole follows as the finale of the full project.
THE FOURTH WALL
The three acts ended. The parts that kept going didn’t.
Here I step outside the three-act retelling and let the person behind ZER:0 into the frame. “Well… Welcome Back, Matt!” opens the first song’s note. The character, the music, and the life I’m returning to start sharing the same space.
Welcome Back! 7 tracks
7 tracks · Out Now on Apple Music
Well… Welcome Back, Matt!
You’ve been out of it for about a year and some change now?
How ya liking the weather?
Can we still ask that?
It feels some kinda way to be alive right now.
BUT J.F.C. — and I will plug this forever — WHAT A SHOW TUNE.
Four years of theater and a lifetime of Les Misérables finally showed their worth. Though I still want to know why none of them sound French.
Thanks, Mr. Ortiz! You raised a theater kid.
I was Daddy Warbucks in Annie.
Felt like you needed that information.
For something.
Yes, Mother, I know there’s supposed to be another “.” after the C. I just liked the way it looked.
I get mad sometimes and wonder how far I can push my luck with people and the things that come out of my mouth.
Again, I come from a Christian background. Like, I ate that stale-ass cracker like a champ and sang in choir for nine years. I served enough time to stand far enough back from it all, appreciate it, and poke it a little bit.
Also, family, sorry. Probably not what you thought I’d be out here yelling.
Speaking of family… hi, guys.
I’m sorry I stayed away so long. I’m sorry I’ve missed important things.
I couldn’t find a way to prepare you for a funeral and a birth at the same time.
But you didn’t care what version of me came home. You just needed me to come home.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah, it’s getting a little hot in here…
This is for every person who borrowed God, fate, the universe, or “hard love” to excuse what they chose to do. Faith isn’t on trial here. People who use it as a shield are.
I survived every god you pretended to be.
Amen.
As I sit here and write this, I am wearing a shirt that is a little too close to touching my stomach when I sit down, and I can’t tell you how much I’m crawling out of my skin.
Except I can.
And I will~
I have body dysmorphia.
It’s great.
I find myself constantly shifting around when a shirt is 1% tighter than it should be.
Or after a wash?
Fucking hell.
It sucks to be out of a relationship with your own body.
But I solemnly swear, as I type this with absolutely no intention of following through on it, that I will do better for me.
I will be better to me.
I will absolutely cry if I can’t eat my cereal.
And I will cry harder when I feel my skin do a gross thing when I run up the stairs.
But yay for VA//A:RE.
We needed more VA//A:RE.
Also, fun lore: my sister inspired the overall aesthetic and general kick-assery that VA//A:RE manifests.
She also dyed her hair red when we were younger, and I thought that was pretty freakin’ cool.
This song.
Has been.
In my head.
For 15+ years.
I had a dream one time where I heard the end of the chorus, and, like Talking To Stars…
Bonus points if you knew that was a song off the first album.
It felt like such a release to finally get it out exactly the way I heard it.
And then remix it with some more of that beautiful vocal-repeat thing ZER:0 does on basically every song.
Also yes, I’m aware.
Also yes, I made it a thing on purpose.
This is an album. Not an EP. CREDITS ROLLED and Somewhere Between A Life were smaller, concentrated releases. OK… WE GET IT is where I let myself be indulgent.
These are the parts that kept going after the conclusion: the commentary, the return, and the thoughts that showed up once I had enough distance to look around and realize I was back in the world.
The first three acts carried what happened, the anger that followed, and the decision to keep living. This starts after I began settling back into the world.
Coming back didn’t mean everything was resolved. It meant I could finally notice the world again: what it expected from me, what I missed, what still made me angry, and what parts of myself survived beneath all the versions I tried to become.
Musically, this doesn’t behave like a polite epilogue. Hyperpop and rock collide with electro-industrial punk, emotional synthwave, hyper-techno, and raw melodic punk. The record is colorful, loud, fast, abrasive, melodic, and occasionally funny because returning to life wasn’t one clean feeling.
The voices keep mutating too. ZER:0 carries the blunt center of the album. Limbo tests what happens when VA//A:RE moves close enough to that sound to feel related while remaining recognizably herself.
The holographic color came back, but it didn’t come back clean. It is ripped apart, pasted onto black, scratched, folded, and interrupted by the red 零.
The first act used white like evidence. This artwork uses black like a wall covered in whatever survived the night: fragments, light leaks, warnings, signatures, and one title large enough to sound exasperated before you even read it.
ZER:0 / The Fourth Wall
The holographic color came back. The armor kept coming off.
Explore the character designsThere isn’t a second grand conclusion hiding here. This is commentary from someone who is still alive, still changing, and finally far enough from the original story to notice what living inside the aftermath actually looks like.
This record didn’t catch me at the end of healing. It caught me in the current state of affairs.
Apparently I had more to say. These songs live outside the three acts. Some helped me let things out. Some I just really wanted to make.
GAME OVER is now part of VA//A:RE’s UNLIMITED DELUXE. Listen to the current album recording.
Fly Bird, FLY! is heading into an upcoming project. Listen to the full song in Upcoming project.
The earlier single previews and original notes are preserved below.
This is what my soul feels like. And this isn’t meant to be some pity party. Melanie Martinez beat me to that by a few damn years.
It means I’d rather swallow my light if it helps make yours a little brighter.
I wanna see you tear it up. I wanna see you get your moment and then some.
Because if I need to be the one running the lights, you better give them everything you’ve got.
No matter what, I’ll be cheering you on.
Valerie
Here is a confession exclusive to the website: I like to write rap.
This track is the tip of the iceberg. But, like, the very tip. Like waaaay up there.
Again, I have to shout out my mother, who introduced me to sooooo many genres of music. Rap was one of the places where I learned that movement, rhythm, and story could all hit at the same time. I watched people translate their truth into something with impact and bite.
I hate watching people be closed-minded about an art form that carries this much history, invention, and life. And don’t get me started on female rappers, because I will body-slam you.
I learned from teachers whose class was never mine to claim. That doesn’t make what I learned less real. It means I have a responsibility to remember where it came from and respect the people who built the language before I ever touched it.
I’m not apologizing for loving rap or for writing it. I’m saying I don’t want to pull from something this culturally rich, call it mine, and forget what it cost for some of these words to hold the meaning they do.
If I’m going to pull from the creativity this world gave me, I want to be just as willing to give my own creativity back. That matters to me. So does the respect.
Thank you. Forever and ever.
I like anime. A lot. A lot.
Like, I got my ass kicked in middle school over it. But let me tell ya, I was more upset about being picked on for liking anime than I was about being gay. Crazy, right?
I don’t know if there’s anything better out there. I only know I can’t stay here long enough to become this place.
That’s the heart of this one. The landscape isn’t evil. It’s numb, repetitive, overfamiliar — every little thing losing its color.
And the bird isn’t some grand symbol of destiny. It’s the part of me that still wants to move before that instinct dies.
Maybe it’s worse out there. Maybe I circle the earth and end up right back here. I still have to know.
The fact that I still want something means I’m not gone yet.
So: FLY, BIRD, FLY!
(And yes, the title looks like that on purpose… it’s a thing for me.)
ZER:0 and VA//A:RE are the characters and synthetic voices you hear in the music.
The split hair, headphones, violet details, and 零 stay with him as the armor slowly comes off.
UNLIMITED DELUXE VA//A:RE is a fictional artist and synthetic voice I created and write for. I’m Matt P., the person behind this project.
Hear her on G-T-F-O
Built to survive the noise.
I needed him to look like he could take a hit and keep moving. I was carrying too much, so he was too.
The jacket, straps, and heavy boots are his armor. Everything looks like it has room for one more thing to carry.
A little less armor. A lot more anger.
By Act II, I wanted him more exposed. Less to hide behind, even when what he had to say wasn’t pretty.
A sleeveless black top, chains, violet hardware, and that red 零. Still him, with fewer places to hide.
The armor came off. Everything else came with him.
I didn’t want a whole new person at the end. I wanted the same person to have a little room to breathe.
A loose white shirt and black jeans. The familiar details are still there. He just looks like he could go have a day now.
IV / The Fourth Wall
Enter the Fourth Wall V / The finale
Enter the finale A way in, not a prerequisite
I care about every detail in this little universe. You still shouldn’t need a character bible before any of it can mean something to you.
Building ZER:0 gave those changes a face and gave me enough distance to talk about them. VA//A:RE gives another part of that experience somewhere to live.
If you can see the armor come off, hear the anger cool, or recognize someone trying to imagine an ordinary life again, you already understand something real. The names and symbols are there if you want to stay.
I spent a lot of time here. Covers, character sketches, little experiments that got out of hand. Some made it onto a release. Some just helped me figure things out.
Use the arrows or swipe to browse, or choose View all for thumbnails. Select a piece for a closer look.
01
Getting to know them through clothes, poses, expressions, and the way they fit together.
02
The marks I kept coming back to. I wanted to recognize them even when everything around them changed.
03
I wanted each cover to feel like the song. Looking cool was only half the job.
04
The “what if I tried this?” pile. A few wrong turns turned out to be worth keeping.
Watch the Suno motion study (opens in a new tab)
A 10-second video made with Suno.
A lot of writing, listening, trying things, and going, “Nope. Again.” Here’s how I got from the idea to the thing you’re hearing and seeing.
I wrote and developed the lyrics with AI assistance. I used Suno to generate music and synthetic vocals, and generative AI tools to develop visuals. I directed, selected, edited, and assembled the work. ZER:0 and VA//A:RE are characters and synthetic voices I created.
A song usually starts with the part that won’t leave me alone: a sentence, a joke I probably shouldn’t make, an image, a contradiction, or the line I keep hearing while I’m trying to do something else.
Then I work it into structure: hooks, repetition, tension, payoff, voice. Having feelings isn’t the same as writing a song. The craft is in translating those feelings into something another person can enter and remember.
I reject lines that sound impressive but aren’t true. I keep the awkward line if the cleaner one stops sounding like me. Sometimes the joke is the most honest part of the verse.
I had a story to tell. The lyrics were how I learned to tell it.
Directing the voice meant listening for intent: where it should hesitate, where it should bite, and whether the delivery sounded like it believed the lyric.
Using Suno, I first had to shape the core voice. That took more trials and experiments than the finished records make obvious. The voice heard across Act I wasn’t a preset I found. It was something I kept pushing, then mutating over time into what you hear by Act III.
Some songs almost didn’t make the cut because I couldn’t get the inflection right, the phrasing wasn’t landing, or one instrument sat just a little wrong. A take could be technically usable and I would still know immediately that it wasn’t the song.
I hand-picked every difference you hear.
The designs took the same kind of work. I made character bibles for ZER:0 and VA//A:RE, gave them personas, and kept working the details until each one had an identity you could recognize across different poses, clothes, expressions, and rendering styles.
The sound helped shape the characters, and the characters changed how I directed the sound. A harder delivery could reveal something about ZER:0’s posture. A visual detail could make me hear a line differently. They grew by talking back to the music and to each other.
Neither character is a puzzle the listener has to solve. They’re vessels — fragmented parts of my life made cohesive enough to carry a narrative I couldn’t carry by speaking plainly.
The anime-like language is personal. I grew up exposed to Japanese culture and fell in love with the way anime, games, music, and design could build a complete world around a feeling. That visual vocabulary stayed with me.
It was never one style to copy or decoration I pasted on afterward. I pulled together all kinds of odds and ends (childhood influences, hyper-pop color, metal abrasion, character design, editorial typography, glitches, fashion, and whatever else the story needed) and curated them into one show.
The covers and character designs changed together. I kept enough shared details for continuity while letting each act have a different emotional weight.
I didn’t force the releases to wear the same uniform. They belong together because of the story. The differences are the system, because the work changed when I did.
There were alternatives, rejections, near-misses, and covers that looked good but still felt wrong. Looking finished and belonging to the song aren’t the same thing.
I tested scale, thumbnail legibility, release dimensions, color, character pose, and whether the image held the same emotional pressure as the track. If one of those failed, the fact that the piece was technically polished didn’t save it.
The gallery keeps that evolution visible. It isn’t a victory lap of perfect finals. It’s the trail of decisions that taught me what ZER:0 could look like.
Sometimes type is the image. THE FULL STORY works because the color lives inside the letters while the page around it stays almost aggressively white. CREDITS ROLLED works because the 零 refuses to behave like a polite logo.
Scale, spacing, distortion, and direction let words carry pressure before anyone reads their meaning. I use legibility as a threshold, not an excuse to make everything calm.
The typography still has a job. A first-time viewer needs to know what the work is called, where they are, and what matters next. Expressive type only works when the hierarchy survives it.
I wrote and developed the lyrics with AI assistance, shaped every concept, and directed the music and artwork. I used Suno to generate music and synthetic vocals, and generative AI tools to develop visual material.
The tools gave me material to respond to. Then the human work kept going: direct, listen, select, reject, rewrite, regenerate, edit, assemble, test, and decide what belonged. Most options didn’t.
This project happened because skill, opportunity, and grit met at exactly the right moment. I had the time. I had the tools. I had the lyrics. So I did it.
The tools didn’t live this story. I did.
A release isn’t finished because I uploaded a file. Artwork, metadata, track order, credits, platform rules, delivery status, and the listener-facing page all have to agree.
That administrative layer feels far away from the emotional work, but it changes how the story arrives. A wrong title, broken sequence, rejected image, or premature announcement can turn a deliberate act into a pile of files.
I only call something released when it actually is. A draft, preview, saved upload, or generated option is part of the process — not proof that the work reached the audience.
WHAT THEY TRIED TO TAKE and + what came after became the definitive Act I release, followed by CREDITS ROLLED and SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A LIFE to complete the three acts.
First came WHAT THEY TRIED TO TAKE. Then I wrote + what came after and joined them into the definitive 24-track edition of Act I: the original 17 songs and seven from the follow-up.
On this site, those first 17 songs are split into a 12-song core story and five bonus tracks. The aftermath has nine because I’ve added the later singles PANIC!PANIC!! and Too Busy Cry Later to its original seven. That makes 26 songs across these sections; the 24-track release itself hasn’t changed.
CREDITS ROLLED and SOMEWHERE BETWEEN A LIFE followed, with five songs each. Together, those releases make up the three acts.
A real metadata mistake
The character’s name is VA//A:RE. On Apple Music I accidentally released the credit as VA://A:RE. That extra colon isn’t lore. I fucked up the metadata because I was moving too fast, and I’m leaving it here because it’s part of the real process.
Act I: core storyBonus / additional tracksThe nine-song aftermath
How the project grew
One album was never going to hold the whole story.
When I sat down to write WHAT THEY TRIED TO TAKE, there was never any intent for it to become a three-act project.
Once it was finished, I went, “Well shit… I have more to say about this.” Then that became, “Oh god, there are still parts of this I am experiencing in real time.”
From the outside, releasing all of it may have looked frantic. Fair. I’m trigger happy when I get excited and I forget to pace myself. I wanted the work in the world almost as fast as it was arriving in me.
The accident became intentional.
I’m Matt P., the person behind MP Studio & Designs (MPSD). I wrote and developed the lyrics with AI assistance, built the characters, directed the music and artwork, and put the releases together.
ZER:0 // 零 and VA//A:RE are the characters and synthetic voices you hear. I used Suno for the music and vocal production, then kept directing, choosing, and refining until it felt right.
Visit MP Studio & Designs (opens in a new tab)Back to the beginning
To the people who witnessed me when I was hard to explain and chose to stay anyway: I know what that asked of you. Some of you sat beside me in the noise. Some answered the phone. Some simply kept showing up without demanding that I become easier to understand first. You are in this work, even if your names aren’t.
To the people who came carrying lessons I probably would have preferred delivered a little more gently: I learned anyway. Some of you stayed. Some of you left. Some belonged to versions of me that don’t exist anymore. I can be grateful for what I carried forward without pretending every part of receiving it was kind.
To the people who know me now, and to the people who came before us and tried with whatever they had: I see the effort more clearly from here. None of us arrived alone, even when we inherited silence, fear, or ways of surviving that hurt the people after us.
And to my mother, specifically: you are the real reason I am here, still fighting. There is no version of this story where I pretend I got here by myself. When I couldn’t find enough reason inside me, your love gave me something to hold onto until I could.
Some people changed my life by teaching me. Some changed it by staying. My mother is why I am still here to tell any of it.
Why I showed it
I told a story. That’s cool, right?
I spent so much time inside this little thing I built — the music, the characters, the artwork, all of it — that I stopped knowing whether I had made something real or was just high on my own fumes again.
That feeling can move in both directions. One minute I can see the whole universe clearly. Five minutes later I can convince myself it’s embarrassing and nobody should ever see it.
What I know is that I made a body of work with its own identity. The songs talk to each other. The visual rules repeat without making every piece identical. I kept asking whether something belonged because, eventually, there really was a thing for it to belong to.
It doesn’t have to become enormous to matter. Maybe one person gets here, looks around, listens, and says, “Wait. This is kinda fucking cool. What is this?” That’s a real outcome. That’s enough to let the work exist outside of me.
I had a story to tell, and I just happened to be legit good at lyrics and shit.
