Brownie Digital
Me at night beside my car, its headlights on, fallen leaves glowing orange on the ground behind me

kikiwafford

songs · instruments · photographs, after dark

I'm Kiki. I make music and take late-night flash photos in Kentucky. I don't believe in templates. My songs start however the moment asks them to, jumping off old hardware and my own tools into new territory every time. When I'm not in the studio, I'm out with a camera after dark, looking for a good shot in the quiet while everyone else is asleep.

CH 01

who i am

I'm an ENFP, if you care about that kind of thing, and I'm a jack of every trade I can get my hands on.

I fix things

CRT televisions. Guitar electronics. Home audio speakers, samplers, synthesizers, game consoles and old computers, anything from the eighties through the two-thousands.

If I'm honest, the stretch I love most is 1997 to 2008, when Windows 95 slowly turned into Vista and the Macs still looked like Fisher-Price toys some kid left out on their parents' porch.

And then I write software, which is how Brownie Digital happened. Give me something old and half-broken and I'm happy for a week.

I write

Writing is the thing I've always been best at. I've been at the top of my class in essays for as long as I can remember, and the part that matters to me isn't the grades. It's that I can hold an argument together, and I can understand people.

I try to give out real empathy, kindness and respect, and I try to know where my own line is. When something wrong is happening, I can feel it, and I won't pretend I didn't. That goes for politics too, where I try to stay independent and stand with anybody who shares my values instead of with a team.

I'm not a math person

Math stopped being interesting to me somewhere after the basics of algebra, and I've struggled with it hard. It's my biggest weakness.

My wife and I are opposites there, which turns out to be the best possible arrangement.

Next channel: where I'm fromGo ▶
A tabby cat lying on its side in a pile of yellow and orange fallen leaves on the pavement, looking up at the camera with glowing eyes
Some random cat from my neighborhood that I took a photo of.
CH 02

where i'm from

I grew up in a mostly poor part of Kentucky, and I'm not going to pretend that taught me nothing.

It taught me that if you want to get out, you have to be better than the odds. You have to invent your own road, plant your feet, and be strong on the days when it would be so much easier not to be. It taught me to count what things cost, and to feel what they're worth, and those aren't the same number.

It also made me good at the art of the deal. I buy, I fix, I sell, I trade up, and that's how a kid with no money ends up holding machines she could never have bought new. I don't take that for granted for a second.

I'm somebody born a little too late, becoming an adult in the wreckage of the 2020s economy, and a lot of what I make is me trying to find the beautiful part of that.

CH 03

why browniedigital exists

Room BBrownie Digital
Kiki

Brownie Digital started for two reasons, and both of them are true.

Kiki

One: I couldn't afford expensive plug-ins. So making my own seemed like a no-brainer. Not just for me, but for everybody else who was standing where I was standing, and for the people who'd want to help. The paid versions are what get me through college, and I'm grateful for every one of them.

Kiki

Two: I have ideas. Being poor made me inventive, and almost everything I build starts with the same question: why hasn't somebody done this already? And then I get tired of waiting and do it myself. I like to finish the plug-ins I see other people only get halfway to.

Kiki

A hundred dollars for a plug-in isn't an impulse buy. For a lot of people, and I'm one of them, it's an investment, and it can be the difference between making the record and not. So I charge five or ten dollars, a little more when the work took me a long time, and some of it I give away.

TurboSwine, which began as my attempt at a Nine Inch Nails guitar tone, has a free version for anyone who loves that sound and can't spend a fortune on it. Tin Roof is free for good, a small, simple reverb that's easy on your CPU and sounds like itself, because I wanted to show that an algorithm that simple isn't a useless one. It fits into most productions, one way or another.

A small black 1980s sampling keyboard with cream keys, lying flat, with its model name blurred out
My dad's keyboard, on the floor. Where it all started.

Every instrument starts as something I needed for a song.

CH 04

the instruments

The plug-ins I've put out so far, and some of the 3D I render.

The Microsampler 85' plug-in window in pink, showing its sample page with a waveform and rows of knobs

Sampler · Mac and Windows · $10

Microsampler 85'

An 8-bit sampler rebuilt from my dad's 1985 home keyboard: the gritty 9.4 kHz sound, the lo-fi playback filter, 13 envelopes, the little rhythm box, and circuit-bending knobs for clock bend, glitch and stutter.

Open the page
The TurboSwine 1988 plug-in window in black and white, showing a patch of three modules and a waveform

Sound designer · free, or $5 for everything

TurboSwine 1988

The 1988 TurboSynth modular sound designer, rebuilt, plus a wavefolder I made to chase a Nine Inch Nails guitar tone.

Open the page
A corrugated tin roof seen at an angle, covered in junk: a disco ball, a kitchen clock, a peppermint, a donut and a dartboard, drawn in dithered pixels

Reverb · free, always

Tin Roof

A pad and stutter plate reverb with one big red HOLD button that freezes the tail. Easy on the CPU, and it sounds like itself.

Open the page

i render 3d too

Pre-rendered 3D, the CD-ROM kind: textures as rich as Samorost, a 1920s noir mood, and old technology everywhere you look. These are a few of the rooms I've built.

A rendered ice cave with huge pale stalactites, glowing blue walls, thick pillars and steps up to a lit doorway
3D render · ice cave
A rendered ice cave with a lit marquee frame hanging over a small stage
3D render · a stage in the ice
A rendered golden cavern with a pipe organ built into the rock and a still pool reflecting it
3D render · an organ in a cave
CH 05

where the musicstarted

My dad was an audio engineer. He spent years working in Nashville and then in Lexington, and he's the reason I knew what a good mix sounded like before I knew what a mix was.

I had a guitar in my hands very young. Around ten I stopped just holding it and started trying to be good, and after that it exploded: my first audio interface, my first experiments in Mixcraft 9. Even before that, back in third and fourth grade, my music class used a sample-based program called Quaver Music Education, and that was my very first time making music out of pieces. I'd show my teacher what I had made, and I still remember the look on her face.

Going into high school I played with people my age, but I kept finding out the same thing: I did my best work alone, in my own home studio, at night, with nobody watching. I proved myself twice in J Term band, a four-day band class at my school, where I ended up running the equipment, the songs, the production, the vocals, the guitar and the synths. People saw that. But everybody knew the real work happened at home.

A long covered footbridge at night with a row of amber lights and a blurred, crouching figure in the middle, caught by a long exposure
The dark is where most of this gets made.
CH 06

stone

For years I had unfinished projects, rough ideas, and a lot of recordings I never let anyone hear. Then a song I'd had a classmate sing on lit something in me, and I decided to turn it into a whole album.

That became Promises Like Ghosts. I made it on a small two-input PreSonus interface that my dad had given me for Christmas years before. That was the entire studio. Looking back, it's naive, and there are moments that aren't finished, and I'm proud of it anyway, because it's the first time I finished something that big and because every sound on it came out of that little box. It was also my first real dive into the electronic music I love, and it only went further on STONE, and then on Pebbles, where I took my own songs apart and put them back together.

The name STONE isn't from my middle name, though Stone is a family name on my mother's side, the Waffords. It comes from my grandfather's band in the 1960s, Stoney and the Cavemen.

I try not to lock myself into one genre. What holds my music together is how I produce. I write about how I feel, about whatever I'm into, and sometimes to say something about the world, and the trip hop is usually somewhere underneath. My music isn't meant to be a template of the 90s. I'm trying to make it without cliché, to make something that sounds new and sounds like me instead of copying any one artist. And I say my influences out loud, every time, because I don't just make music. I love it.

They start the old way, with a melody and some words. Then they get taken apart like an electronic track.

Promises Like Ghosts · 2025 Idaho · 2025 STONE · 2026 Pebbles · 2026
CH 07

what i grewup hearing

I wouldn't say my taste changed so much as it grew, the way a house does when somebody keeps adding rooms. A lot of it came to me on burned CDs.

as a kid

As a kid in the 2010s I was listening to Imagine Dragons with my mom, and to the Beatles and Paul McCartney more than anything. My dad would drive me around with a Van Halen CD he'd burned, and a Bob Marley one. When we moved into our new house, around the middle of elementary school, I had a Lego CD player boombox, and that's where he first played me the Beastie Boys.

Having split parents was hard. At my mom's house my dad would leave me burned CDs, whole stacks of songs he'd found for me to hear, and a lot of tracks that are really obscure. I thought those were the most popular songs in the world. For me they defined a whole era, a utopia where everyone listened to these. The truth was just that my dad is a really, really good music curator, and I think I've been trying to live up to that ever since.

middle school

Pink Floyd, the Beatles and Van Halen were my three, and my favorite has always been the Beatles. I knew every track. I downloaded 120 GB of their outtakes, sessions, demos and commentary, and went through all of it. My dad took me to see Paul McCartney on his Freshen Up tour in Lexington, after Egypt Station, and I would do anything to see him live again.

Then came psychedelic rock and doom (Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, King Gizzard, The Beta Band, Steve Mason), punk (Bad Brains, Circle Jerks, Fontaines D.C., Viagra Boys), rap (Run-DMC, N.W.A, Public Enemy, slowthai), and by my last year, deeper cuts like Urban Dance Squad, Butthole Surfers, Whale and Beck.

high school: the ones under everything

This is when I started to curate for real. These sit under everything when I'm producing, along with the lessons my dad taught me from his own years working on music like this.

  • Radiohead
  • Boards of Canada
  • Mew
  • Pepe Deluxe
  • DJ Shadow
  • Fontaines D.C.
  • Daniel Johnston
  • Car Seat Headrest
  • Paul McCartney
  • PinkPantheress
  • The Police
  • Squarepusher
  • The Smiths
  • 808 State
  • We Are Jeneric
  • Air
  • Massive Attack
  • The Doors
  • UNKLE
  • Stevie Wonder
  • Steve Burns
  • Orbital
  • Björk
  • The Clash
  • Funkadelic
  • David Gilmour
CH 08

the pictures

I was taking these pictures before they had a name.

Long before people started posting empty hallways and 3 a.m. parking lots and calling it liminal, or uneasy, or weirdcore, I was already out there doing it. I had a Canon PowerShot because that's the camera I knew as a kid, and it came with a flash, and I never stopped using either. I grew up shooting this way. It wasn't a style I picked from the internet. It was just how I'd always looked at the world.

I was early. Really early. And I was definitely made fun of for my cameras before it was cool. Now everybody wants that look, and I understand why, because those photos have so much soul and life in them. It's the kind of thing a smartphone ruins, with all its smoothing and fake daylight.

I take hundreds of pictures on my old digital cameras, almost always with the flash on. Later I sit with them and go looking for the few that actually mean something. Then I change them the old-fashioned way, with film-style processes, and in Pixelmator Pro, until they come out grainy and textured and look like the world as I really see it. Mostly that's Kentucky. It's my roots. It's what it feels like to be someone born too late, trying to grow up in the middle of an economy that's falling apart.

I do the same with video, on a high-end Hi-8 camcorder that used to belong to my grandfather. It's mine now. There's something about carrying a machine he carried. The characters on the cover of Promises Like Ghosts are mine too, drawn by me. And the look I'm after in all of it, the glitch, the layered opacity, the half-there double exposures, comes partly from old film processing and partly from the psychedelic film techniques of Stanley Kubrick. My 3D renders come from the same place.

An empty carpeted hallway lit by fluorescent ceiling panels, with a pool-rules sign on the wall
A path under a bridge at night, lit by flash
Blue beach chairs and closed blue umbrellas on pale sand at night, lit by a flash, with dark dunes and sea oats behind
A snowy two-lane road at night with a yellow center line and an orange light in the distance
A brick church tower at night in the snow
An empty green and blue playground under an overcast sky
A blurred red light
A snowy field at night under flash
Two leafy trees against a heavy grey sky
Icicle lights along a roof, blurred
CH 09

gear, books& shows

I've owned a lot of equipment, through a lot of buying and selling, and it all comes and goes. Growing up without money made me good at the art of the deal, which is how I've been able to hold some really nice technology for a while. More is always on its way.

GEAR · BUY · SELL · TRADE

in the studio now

MacBook Pro + Logic. Where everything gets made.

My own plug-ins. Microsampler 85', TurboSwine, Tin Roof.

Audient iD44. Audio interface.

Arturia MiniBrute. Analog synth.

Klark Teknik 76-KT. Compressor.

dbx 166XL. Compressor.

sold, traded, gone

Ensoniq ESQ-1. Synth. sold

Teenage Engineering KO II. Sampler. sold

dbx 160VU. Compressor. sold

Digidesign 96 I/O. With the Pro Tools cards. sold

Digidesign 003. Console. sold

VHT Special 6 Ultra 1x12. Guitar amp. sold

Guitars. Rivolta, Gibson, Fender, Squier. sold

More always on its way.

books

  • Philip Larkin: “This Be the Verse” (my favorite)
  • Daniel Handler
  • Harry Potter (the books, not their author)
  • Alvin Toffler
  • Kurt Vonnegut
  • Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles
  • Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
  • Tender Is the Flesh

tv

  • Doctor Who
  • Futurama
  • Disenchantment
  • South Park
  • Stargate Universe
  • Stargate Atlantis
  • Star Trek: TNG
  • Star Trek: Voyager
  • Star Trek: The Original Series
  • Star Trek: Picard
  • Moral Orel
  • The Office
  • Lanterns
  • Smiling Friends
  • The Twilight Zone
  • Planet of the Apes (TV)
  • Logan's Run (TV)
  • The Prisoner (1967)
  • The Good Place
  • Seinfeld
  • Blue's Clues, with Steve Burns (as a kid)
A black and white cat lying on a cushion with a slice of bread held above and another below its face, like a sandwich, showing its small fangs
not every picture has to be sad

film

I've seen a lot, and I'm still counting. Sunshine is one of my favorites, with 2001, THX 1138, Donnie Darko, The Truman Show, The Iron Giant, Galaxy Quest, A Clockwork Orange and No Country for Old Men.

every movie I've watched so far (and I'm still adding)

Sci-fi and the future

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey & 2010
  • THX 1138
  • Logan's Run
  • Alien series
  • Interstellar
  • The Martian
  • Sunshine
  • Tron trilogy
  • Close Encounters of the Third Kind
  • Ex Machina
  • I, Robot
  • Minority Report
  • Serenity
  • Star Trek (all)
  • Star Wars (all)
  • Planet of the Apes (old and new)
  • Terminator series
  • RoboCop series
  • Idiocracy
  • The Truman Show
  • Bicentennial Man
  • Starship Troopers
  • Galaxy Quest
  • Spaceballs
  • Project Hail Mary
  • The Day After Tomorrow
  • 2012
  • Cloverfield
  • Back to the Future trilogy
  • all the Futurama movies
  • Donnie Darko
  • A Quiet Place
  • Apollo 13
  • For All Mankind
  • Disclosure Day

Comedy

  • This Is Spinal Tap
  • Blazing Saddles
  • Young Frankenstein
  • Office Space
  • Austin Powers trilogy
  • Wayne's World
  • The Beavis and Butt-Head movies
  • Dumb and Dumber
  • The Cable Guy
  • Liar Liar
  • Man on the Moon
  • Me, Myself & Irene
  • Bruce Almighty
  • Yes Man
  • Anchorman
  • Jackass series
  • Caddyshack I & II
  • National Lampoon's Vacation
  • European Vacation
  • Christmas Vacation
  • Vegas Vacation
  • Spies Like Us
  • Three Amigos
  • Funny Farm
  • Police Academy
  • Super Troopers 1 & 2
  • Happy Gilmore
  • Ghostbusters 1 & 2
  • Dodgeball
  • Trading Places
  • Coming to America
  • Coming 2 America
  • The Jerk
  • Meatballs Part 2 (yikes)
  • Thank You for Smoking
  • The Money Pit
  • Elf
  • The Mask
  • Airplane!
  • Shaun of the Dead
  • What We Do in the Shadows
  • Beetlejuice
  • The Gods Must Be Crazy 1 & 2
  • Tremors series
  • High Fidelity
  • School of Rock
  • Melvin Goes to Dinner
  • Renfield

Action and comic-book

  • Commando
  • Predator
  • Twins
  • The Running Man
  • Kindergarten Cop
  • First Blood
  • Rambo: First Blood Part II
  • Rambo series
  • Kingsman series
  • Thor: Ragnarok
  • Doctor Strange
  • Venom 1 & 2
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day
  • Supergirl
  • Masters of the Universe
  • Transformers

Drama and thriller

  • Falling Down
  • Secondhand Lions
  • Stand By Me
  • Forrest Gump
  • The Terminal
  • Catch Me If You Can
  • The Post
  • Fight Club
  • American Psycho
  • The Wolf of Wall Street
  • Nightcrawler
  • Trainspotting
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower
  • My Suicide
  • War Lord
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • No Country for Old Men

Horror and dark

  • Dracula (1931)
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula
  • Dracula (2020 miniseries)
  • IT (modern)
  • The Lost Boys
  • 28 Days Later trilogy
  • The Nightmare Before Christmas
  • the Backrooms movie

Family, animation and musicals

  • The Princess Bride
  • Willy Wonka
  • The Grinch
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events
  • The Iron Giant
  • Ice Age
  • Shrek
  • Aladdin
  • The Prince of Egypt
  • Little Shop of Horrors
  • Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
  • Yellow Submarine
  • The Polar Express
  • Despicable Me 1–3
  • Minions
  • Minions: The Rise of Gru
  • A Minecraft Movie
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid 1 & 2
  • Peter Pan and the Neverland Pirates
  • Jumanji (1995)
  • Doctor Who (1996)
  • Sheep Detectives

Seen in theaters with my wife

  • The Backrooms movie
  • Project Hail Mary
  • Masters of the Universe
  • Sheep Detectives
  • Disclosure Day
  • Supergirl
  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Wholesome ones (good vibes)

  • Minions (2015)
  • Sheep Detectives
END OF TAPE

thanks for staying.

If you got this far, you know most of it now. I'm still making things, I'm still learning, and I'm still going to be up too late with a camera. If something here meant something to you, I'd love to hear about it.

STONE on Bandcamp YouTube Sign the guestbook Brownie Digital GitHub