The Toaster Was a Decoy | Meanwhile

Meanwhile / November 2026 / Part I: No Fixed Studio

Suzy and another speaker holding microphones onstage at Futureproof Festival. — Futureproof Festival. Photograph by Michelle Diamond.

A few days ago I wrote What We Leave Open, about the spaces between things, impermanence, and learning to listen.

Apparently, I was also describing my living situation. lol.

September had me between tech jobs, navigating Vancouver’s housing market, and trying to find my way back into making music. Kris Krüg connected me with Martin Montero, who was launching Basecamp, an affordable live-and-build residency for artists, developers, and other curious humans at HI Jericho Beach.

Martin invited me into the inaugural cohort, just in time to spend October developing my performance for Futureproof Festival.

Suzy outside the HI Jericho Beach hostel, wearing clear glasses and a dark jacket.

I arrived with a project called The Appliance Latent Space. The plan? Turn a toaster into an AI-powered musical instrument using sensors, code, and sound.

Naturally.

A simple bunk bed and backpack inside the Basecamp residency.

I started exploring DCTRL, Vancouver’s wonderfully experimental hacker collective, thinking about physical computing and hardware. Meanwhile, I was booking recording sessions at the Vancouver Public Library’s Inspiration Lab, recording vocals from my bed, walking along Jericho Beach, and writing an absolutely unreasonable amount of code.

The sandy shoreline at Jericho Beach, curving toward autumn trees under a blue sky.

There was something interesting happening underneath all of this.

A maple tree glowing red-orange in the autumn sunlight.

The more temporary my physical spaces became, the more I wanted my creative space to be portable.

Earlier this year, Kris and I made a psychedelic little film called I AM NOMAD for the BC + AI Film Club. A time traveller moves through a retro-futurist airport for lost decades, where fish become aircraft, clocks lose their authority, and memory and identity drift between departures.

One traveller. One bag. A golden skywhale. Very normal aviation stuff. 🐋

Turns out I’ve been doing some rather committed method acting.

But somewhere in the movement, I began to understand what I actually needed.

Small waves rolling onto the Jericho Beach shoreline, with trees in the distance.

Not necessarily a toaster. Not even a traditional studio.

A laptop, a microphone, my voice, and instruments I could build myself.

My little 8GB MacBook was already capable of synthesizing sound, recording audio, running Google’s Magenta model locally, and becoming a live musical environment through software I was writing.

Before engineering, I studied composition and improvisation, trained in digital and analog recording, and spent five years working at HMV on Robson, surrounded by jazz, classical, and pop music. Five years of listening, recommending records, and absorbing an absurd amount of music.

Then came software engineering, automation, and AI.

A Futureproof presentation explaining local AI inference on different hardware platforms.

And somewhere between the musical arrangements and the lines of code, all those seemingly separate chapters started talking to each other.

What if the instrument wasn’t a fixed object, but an evolving relationship between musician, machine, and sound?

On October 29, that experiment made its way onto the stage at Futureproof Festival, as my first solo electronic performance, an AI-integrated interpretation of Radiohead’s Pyramid Song, complete with live vocal looping.

Suzy holding a microphone while performing with live music software projected behind her.

Beautifully imperfect. Very much alive.

Suzy working at a laptop with microphones, cables, and an effects pedal on the Futureproof stage. — The live instrument, software and all.

I’ve been thinking about how much of creativity is really learning to pay attention. To make room for the unexpected without giving up authorship. To let an idea change shape without feeling like you’ve lost it.

The toaster didn’t fail. It just led somewhere else.

Now Basecamp has ended, and I’m writing from a little Airbnb in Vancouver, continuing my search for the next chapter in tech while figuring out where this creative adventure might lead.

A cluster of suitcases and instrument bags arranged on a paved sidewalk.

The practical world keeps turning. So does the creative one.

And for the first time in a while, those two seem to be moving in rhythm.

I want to keep building instruments, exploring orchestration, and eventually turn up at open mics with my laptop and voice instead of half a recording studio.

The address may change. The music can come with me.

Suzy with pale lavender hair and clear glasses, smiling and making a peace sign.

Maybe finding your way isn’t about knowing where you’re going. Maybe it’s about recognizing what you want to carry.

And yes, I’d still quite like a permanent address. Vancouver, please fix your housing API. 😂

Next transmission: Part II. Inside the instrument. Magenta, local inference, live audio looping, and what happens when you decide to build your own orchestra on 8GB of RAM.

🐟