voidstar — press kit
also billed as: Randy Brown's voidstar

Ambient, improvised pedal steel run through live code, with audio-reactive visuals built for the room.

SHORT BIO
voidstar is Knoxville pedal-steel player and software engineer Randy Brown: ambient, improvised music where the steel guitar runs through live code, and the visuals are played as an instrument too.

MEDIUM BIO
voidstar is the ambient / live-code project of Knoxville musician and software engineer Randy Brown. A set starts with pedal steel — long swells, bends, and drones — routed through a live-coded system: Strudel patterns, loops grabbed on the fly, and a neural amp model, all running in a browser. The visuals are played too. qualia, the open-source instrument Brown built for these sets, turns the sound, the performer's body, and the room into light, and the audience can join in from their phones by scanning a QR code. The music moves from stillness to eruption and back.

LONG BIO
voidstar is the ambient / live-code project of Knoxville, Tennessee musician and software engineer Randy Brown. The name is a C programmer's joke — void*, a pointer to untyped memory: potential without form. That's where every set starts.

At the center is the pedal steel: long swells, slow bends, and drones that sit somewhere between country-church sustain and deep-space ambient. The steel runs through a live-coded system — Strudel patterns, a multi-track looper that grabs phrases on the fly, a neural amp model, and vocal processing — so the arrangement is written, rewritten, and erased in real time.

The visuals aren't a backdrop. qualia, the browser-based instrument Brown built for these sets, reads the audio, tracks the performer's movement, and renders it all as light — black holes, stained-glass fields, phosphor code. Audience members can scan a QR code and fold their own movement into the picture. The performer stays in control; the room gets a vote.

voidstar grew out of Knoxville's experimental and improvised-music scene, and sometimes plays as a father/son duo with Cade Brown. Off the voidstar stage, Brown plays pedal steel in nightjar, is in the metal band Dysmorphic Demiurge, and releases solo music as randbrown. Everything voidstar uses on stage is open source and opens in a browser tab at voidstar.sh.

BILLING
- voidstar: The default. Experimental, electronic, and ambient bills; anywhere the project is the draw.
- Randy Brown's voidstar: When the personal name carries weight — listings for audiences who know Randy from bands and steel work, local press, posters.
- Randy Brown (pedal steel): Band, session, and sit-in credits outside voidstar.
Always lowercase "voidstar", including in "Randy Brown's voidstar".

PHOTO CREDITS
- photos/voidstar-live-qualia.jpg: Victoria Kay
- photos/voidstar-live-code.jpg: Paul Seguna
- photos/voidstar-stream-still.jpg: Knoxville Community Media
- photos/randy-brown-pedal-steel.jpg: Inside of Knoxville

Logos are white-on-transparent; use them on dark backgrounds.

CONTACT
- booking@voidstar.sh
- https://instagram.com/voidstar0
- https://voidstar.sh/press
