MAR00N: One Title, Three Forms

A book, a track and a film step into The Hollow Circuit

Some records are built. Maroon was caught.

It began as a freestyle — one continuous take, recorded on the same summer morning Lloyd Lewis closed the final page of MAR00N, the novel by V. Tracer. No arrangement, no plan, no second pass. Just an iPad, a DAW and a pad controller. Under his music alias MSUX, Lloyd sat down and let the book answer back through the speakers. What came out was less a song than a reading of a pulse: an audio sketch of what the story had done to him.

The track took the book's name and kept it. So did the film. One title, three forms.

"I wasn't writing a track, I was reacting," says MSUX. "The book left this low, humming pressure in my chest, and the only honest thing to do was press record before it faded. An iPad, a DAW and pads — that's it. No studio, no setup time, nothing between the feeling and the take through the headphones. Maroon is that pressure with a beat under it. It's a first response, and I've never wanted to tidy it up."

"Calling it anything other than Maroon would have been a lie," he adds. "It isn't a track about the book. It's the same thing in another medium."

Months later, that first response has become something considerably larger.

From reaction to canon

Since that summer session, Art of FACELESS has become the official publisher of MAR00N by V. Tracer, releasing it in ePUB, paperback and hardback editions under the Art of FACELESS ISBN imprint — a full three-format release handled in-house, from editorial through to print specification and distribution.

Alongside the new edition come two brand-new covers designed by Lloyd Lewis (one for the digital version and the other for the print versions), and a further development that connects the studio's music and fiction lines directly: MAR00N is now part of The Hollow Circuit universe.

The music video is the celebration of that union — the moment a freestyle, recorded in reaction to a novel, becomes canon within the studio's wider fictional world. Cyberpunk meets biopunk. Circuitry meets tissue.

"Maroon was never meant to be a companion piece — it just turned out to be one," says Lloyd Lewis. "Once we became the book's publisher and I was designing the new covers, the overlap stopped being a coincidence and started being a map. Bringing the track into The Hollow Circuit wasn't a marketing decision. It was recognising something that was already true."

The video

Shot through in high-contrast monochrome, the film plays like a lost noir reel spliced with a pulp comic and then wired into something alive. Trench coats and fedoras move through rain-slicked streets. A figure sits under a desk lamp, reading some alt. copy of MARooN. A pistol is raised in an alley doorway. A vast eye — laced with cabling and bio-mechanical plating — holds silhouetted men in its iris. Comic panels bleed into faces. Wire-bound skulls float among drifting jellyfish. A wall of television screens in a shopfront window carries a single woman's face at their centre.

It is deliberately ambiguous, and deliberately spoiler-free. The narrative is not a retelling of the novel.

"It's my interpretation, not an adaptation," Lloyd explains. "I've kept it clean of spoilers on purpose — nothing in the video will spoil the read. What you're seeing is how the book vibe feels from the inside: surveillance, the noir detective logic, power, the body being edited. The reader is in there somewhere, being read back."

The process

The video was conceived, produced, directed and edited entirely in-house by Lloyd Lewis — a full single-hand pipeline running across two machines and several disciplines.

3D modelling and animation were built in Reallusion Character Creator 5 and iClone 8, generating the character work, staging and motion at the heart of the film.
Those sequences were then fed into bespoke local engines running on both PC and Mac — an in-house processing stage that produces the film's distinctive glitch-etched, engraved, half-printed look.
Adobe Photoshop handled artwork, panel work, plate preparation and frame-level treatment.
Final Cut Pro carried the hand-edited assembly, with every cut placed by hand against the freestyle's own timing rather than a grid.
Final grading passes and export were completed through Filmora, delivering the finished 3-minute-28-second film in 3840×2160 UHD.
Sound design was layered beneath the original iPad take — ambient drones, glitch textures and room tone built up across multiple audio beds to widen the freestyle into a full mix.

"People assume a pipeline like this needs a team and a budget," says Lloyd. "It needs neither. It needs decades of knowing exactly which tool does what, and the patience to render the same sequence eleven times over eight hours until it stops looking rendered. That's not a shortcut — that's the craft. We build our own engines because off-the-shelf gives you off-the-shelf. And the track at the centre of it was played live on an iPad. The gear was never the point."

Where this sits

Maroon is a clean demonstration of what Art of FACELESS does: one studio holding the book, the cover, the imprint, the record and the film, with each one feeding the next. The novel produced the track. The track produced the video. The video pulled both into The Hollow Circuit. A publishing house, a design studio and a label, working as one body.

"That's the whole point of the studio," Lloyd adds. "Nothing arrives isolated. A book brings a sound, a sound brings an image, and the image sends you back to the book. Maroon just happens to be the clearest proof of it yet — same name, three ways in."

Maroon — music by MSUX, inspired by the book of the same name by V. Tracer. Video conceived, produced and edited by Lloyd Lewis. MARooN by V. Tracer is available now in ePUB and coming in paperback and hardback later this Autumn under the Art of FACELESS ISBN imprint.