Digital breadcrumbs into their world: A fan’s journey on the trail of Two Shell

On December 15, 2023, a rock arrived at my doorstep. Coming in a black box with Two Shell’s logo spray-painted on top, the rock lay in a bed of hay and straw like something from an artisan farm shop. Picking up the rock, it felt like hardened Play-Doh, able to be ripped and crumbled apart, and doing so revealed a shard-like USB hidden inside that looked like it chipped off a larger crystal from a distant comet and landed on my porch. As I plugged it into a computer, a red light flashed at the end of the shard, as though you’d just activated an ancient relic.

At the time, this was the latest in a long, long line of antics that the UK bass-turned-hyperpop tricksters have become famed for, often threatening to overshadow their music (they are suspected of sending body doubles to their live performances regularly, including their 2022 Boiler Room set) and sometimes infiltrating their music (they end their track 'mind_d ᴉ lɟ' abruptly with a robotic voice saying “Disk full”). Each time Two Shell steps out with a new idea, they seem to touch down on a sector of modern DJ culture to add their Two Shell brand of mischief to it.

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Take their show for New York’s The Lot Radio which was streamed just days before the rock arrived. Inserting their own USB just like the one in the rock, the set subverting the spectacle of DJ set livestreams, replacing themselves with low-poly avatars that moved like the jelly men from Gang Beasts, intermittently T-posing and joined by floating monsters ripped from an adventure video game. The mix was a blitzkrieg of high-energy electro, techno and Latin club blended with meta-humour such as a mashup of Avril Lavigne and Aphex Twin’s 'Avril 14th', and towards the end, there’s a fourth-wall breaker that is something out of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared. The camera pans out from beyond the walls of The Lot’s studio to reveal the camera and audio setup behind it, rotating it to reveal that it’s just a box in the middle of nothingness. Then, as though to experience the feeling of looking over a DJ’s shoulder to find out a track, the camera zooms in on the deck display, teasing a collaboration with FKA twigs.

As sure as the sun rises from the east and sets in the west, Two Shell will find ways to fuck with the established norms of club culture. Over the past year, since the release of their 'lil spirits' EP from February 2023, they have ramped up their trickster streak with a series of elaborate meta-games, some of which to entertain its scattered and ravenous community, some to entertain themselves. In doing so, they’ve moved their targeting retina from club culture to pop culture at large, honing in on how artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to make it a veritable dystopia.

In my previous research into Two Shell’s community, I noted how Two Shell has created a community without a centralised hub, instead infiltrating other internet communities such as r/TheOverload, the BlueDollarBillz YouTube channel and the CloudCore Discord server.

It’s a unique fandom dynamic which allows for sudden surprise takeovers of community hubs that lines up with Two Shell’s propensity to seize upon a platform like a circus rolling into town, and this happened all throughout the saga involving this rock of hidden secrets.

Two Shell first teased the “Boring Rock”, as they called it, about a week prior with a corecore-like video spinning, stretching and superimposing the rock on various graphics, including grass that reminds of Windows XP’s Bliss wallpaper. A warbly, very accentuated British voice announced “Something big is coming” atop a cover of Robbie Williams’ ‘Millennium’ and, aptly, ‘Rock DJ’. Despite there being no hint about the hidden Shard USB, the CloudCore server’s immediate reaction was stunned laughter before it whipped itself up into a frenzy, knowing deep down that, like everything Two Shell, this wasn’t as it seemed. At first, the Boring Rock was priced at £5 and a few endeavoured to part with their money to buy this goofy piece of merchandise for reasons of “science” and “rolling the dice”.

But as people bought more, the price started to increase within the launch hour, fluctuating more than Bitcoin and soaring to the point where this plain, simple rock was selling for as much as £400. Perhaps the scheme was designed to hold a mirror up at fans’ compulsive need to buy into an artist’s new limited-time merch drop, but rather than experiencing FOMO, it was those who didn’t buy the rock who looked at those who did with bafflement. The original joke of Two Shell was a piss-take of the celebrity and materialist culture embedded in club music, but at this moment, it felt like there was a danger of it circling back on themselves. Had they got people excited over a rock, or had they just reached rock bottom?

Listening to the Shard USB, it was the biggest insight into the Two Shell vault yet. Inside lay many curios such as the Pinocchio-esque tale of 'Shelley Boy', the 'Avril' mashup from the Lot Radio set, the more techno-leaning 'fable' tracks with a Latin club percussive flair, edits of deadmau5’s 'Strobe' and LMFAO’s 'Party Rock Anthem', and an out-of-nowhere cover of Steve Miller Band’s 'Fly Like an Eagle' titled 'Fly Like a Seagull'. The collection was all tied together with Two Shell’s usual sonic palette of foggy glass textures, voices with Shroud of Turin-obscurity and the sounds of computers whizzing that challenge the computer’s original promise of pristine sheen with the sludgy overload of data that the current-day internet presents us. Every track starts and ends with the same clip of a small crowd applauding, removing any otherwise present feeling of being a solo explorer in the ether.

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As a product, the USB was a high-concept version of the exclusives USB, which has recently become a great way for independent labels and artists to make good money by releasing a catalogue of digital works with a degree of exclusivity. But in Two Shell fashion, they managed to instil a twist that would bring together the Boring Rock owners into a communal mission.

On its journey from wherever it came, not every file on the Shard arrived intact. There was also a series of unlistenable edits of FKA twigs, Jai Paul, Fireboy DML, Craig David and Blackhaine with mangled titles that had sharp bits of corrupted audio. As much as the Shard had given us a bounty of Two Shell material, had the duo really just teased new material in the form of corrupted files to keep up the wild goose chase? Later on, one fan told me that they had a friend who was working on fixing these corrupted tracks, but at the time of publication, they have not yet succeeded.

I posted my rock to the CloudCore Discord server and within moments, people were privately messaging me asking which version of the USB I had. Word on the server was that there were two versions between three people so far, one with 26 tracks and another with 14. My USB had 16 tracks, which fellow rock owners were excited to know about. Over the next week, as more and more Boring Rocks were delivered, it became apparent that each Shard was different with a unique set of tracks, and this slowly expanding circle digitally collected each one-by-one to build a master folder of all the Shard’s tracks. It became a community effort to piece the Shards back together again and make sense of the final collection of over 50 tracks, a journey of continual discovery that turned the idea of the exclusives USB on its head. Without the social interaction of discovering the rock and ensuing banding-together of this self-chosen group of people, us individuals would have only received a fraction of the rewards, and this is what Two Shell planned for.

(Side note: Many of the Boring Rock’s tracks would also be played live during Two Shell’s surprise set at a CloudCore club night at Corsica Studios. Donning all-black balaclavas with neon green shade glasses and wielding the Shard USB, one of the duo left the USB purposely positioned on the side of the DJ table, which a woman beside me noticed. When she asked one of the duo if she could keep it, they said “fuck it” and darted off-stage.)

Oftentimes, Two Shell launches a community event such as this on their ever-evolving website, shell.tech, their self-described “interface to the world”. Load it up and you’ll find a password entry screen that answers to dozens of passwords at any given point. Should you have a correct password, it will grant you access to an unreleased track, file, Easter egg or another part of their cyber-mythic world, and these passwords are found either by clandestine announcements through their Instagram account, information seeped out by an unofficial messenger through CloudCore, or sheer blind luck. It’s the core way in which the duo give fans the feeling of exclusivity by giving breadcrumbs into their world for those paying attention.

“There's something intrinsically game-esque about the way they hide things,” a fan once told me about the website. “It's like playing Age of Empires 2 and spamming cheat codes in the chat box. It hits the same neurons of cheekiness and silliness.” Another fan spoke in broader terms: “[shell.tech passwords] force you to put yourself back in the driver's seat. In an age of playlists and algorithms, it’s rare to have to find music on your own. I find it almost a cherished ritual, maybe from the peer-to-peer/torrent days, to have to search out the tunes directly, go down multiple avenues, and come back empty-handed or with something you found.”

Above all, shell.tech is the main medium through which they operate their internet-based experiments. Another commonality for the modern club music producer is giving away unofficial edits and throwaway tracks in free “packs”, and Two Shell are no different. However, obtaining each track involves taking part in “games” that can take place for several days.

On August 2, 2023, a new password “eternaltree” took users to a new world. On top of a monolithic block stood a series of branching cubes and lines, almost like a tech tree that grew “fruit” and had green gas over it, vaguely looking like a real tree. The fruit was each given a name which corresponded to a track title, and every day, users would get one vote to vote on a “prefruit” to “cultivate”. Once there were enough “cultivators”, it would produce a new track.

Every day in the CloudCore server and r/TheOverload for a week, people would ask what they were voting for today as a morning ritual, rallying others to vote for specific tracks, be it a new version of their famed Sugababes edit titled 'Round', the provocatively-named 'You’ll Never Be Pure' or a cover of Kanye West’s 'All of the Lights'. The main objective was simply to keep coming back to vote, mirroring the wider goal in Keita Takahashi’s Playstation 3 game Noby Noby Boy, in which all players’ scores contributed to a total score that, once they broke a certain score barrier, would unlock a new level and, eventually, the true ending of the game. In a letter at the real ending of the game, the creator Takahashi said the game’s idea was, “I wonder if stretching could bring people closer to each other.” Just like the Boring Rock, Two Shell constructed a game that forced a community effort to collect and organise a new slice of their incredibly uncemented discography.

Downloading music from shell.tech does not solely mean tunes from the duo themselves. Browsing fan-uploaded music has been a throughline running through the site since it existed as a Google Drive folder titled '<✧upload✧>', and in the last year, they have evolved it with more extravagant behaviours and world-building. In conjunction with the Eternal Tree, Two Shell also launched Ghostweaver, in which users could browse uploaded tracks in the form of different textured ghost figures arranged in a long, scrollable single-file line along a tessellated pool of blue crystals.

As exciting as it was, hopping through the sheer amount of Ghostweaver tracks available was a little overwhelming, and their next endeavour - the unofficially titled “Fish Game” (password = “pond”) - would refine this. In the “game”, users can try to catch an uploaded track in the form of a fish. You’re literally “fishing for tracks” until a message reads that you “didn’t catch anything” or are “too tired to fish”, but this limitation on the number of tracks able to be caught in one sitting made me appreciative of each one, and over the course three days of a browser tab left open, I caught 37 fish (don’t all congratulate me at once). “My grandfather was a subsistence fisherman. Now I fish for virtual fish on my lunch break on shell.tech” joked one CloudCore user.

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Uploading was not limited to producers, as to create a fish, users just needed an audio track, an image to texture the fish with and an optional engraving (or message). But for producers, the sudden appearance of the game meant that producers emptied their WIPs, demos and edits onto the site out of compulsion to participate. Couple these two seemingly separate effects together and the result was, for the first time, a much clearer look into the personality of a Two Shell fan. My collection of fish (37, did I mention!) consisted visually of glowing wireframes, buildings folded like cardboard, textures that resemble WipEout spaceship liveries and Aphex Twin faces; sonically of chiptune punk, dubstep wubbers, dingy jungle and hard techno with Middle Eastern melodies; and had messages such as “HUGE bangerino, big deepskits, large gasolina fr” and “Pls whoever finds this listen to the instrumental of kiss kiss by t pain and chris brown”.

This assortment of nerdy reference-heavy imagery, experimental club music and internet humour meshed with the unique feeling of discovery in browsing tracks without prejudice or popularity metrics in a way that I hadn’t experienced in years. It reached back to the feeling of browsing forum pages that are long since dormant - websites such as Dubstep Forum, Grime Forum and Subsekt, which collapsed hierarchy in a way that stands opposite to the social media-driven music discovery process of today. People often place Two Shell as being very “web3”, because of their use of artificial scarcity and democratised AI creation tools, but in actuality, there’s something generally old-internet about them. It’s like they’re recreating the experience of those old forums and sites through the prism of their childlike imagination.

As much as Two Shell likes to involve the community, their stunt in the build-up to their first majorly-released track since 'lil spirits' EP, 'Talk To Me' with FKA twigs, was more like a Derren Brown mind experiment.

On February 19, 2024, BlueDollarBillz - a YouTube curator that has the most comprehensive online archive of Two Shell releases, uploaded a very unexpected new video: "Fred Again + FKA Twigs - Talk To Me”, complete with original vocals from twigs and a video edited like a CapCut fan montage. Thinking back to the end of the Lot Radio set, fans quickly cottoned on that this was not a Fred again.. song but a Two Shell production, poking fun at the producer who has become a whipping boy within corners of the club music sphere as quickly as he’s risen to EDM superstardom. Cue the “Fred Again vibes” gag littered in the comments of the video, before it self-destructed within two days. When I asked BlueDollarBillz privately what was going on, he said that Two Shell sent them the video to upload, insisting on the title. He also said that more “versions” were coming and that it would be revealed as a Two Shell track in a couple of weeks, "when the misinformation has spread”.

What followed was AI-generated pandemonium. One week later, Two Shell’s Bandcamp added a new version of 'Talk To Me' credited to them and featuring vocals by Jungkook of BTS (which would later earn them a cease and desist from Big Hit Music) as well as a lyric video posted on YouTube with FKA twigs’ vocals hushed incredibly quietly as though it were a Japanese karaoke video. At this point, the consensus amongst the fans was that FKA twigs was the original singer, and that this Jungkook edit was deepfaked through an AI model, with twigs the modulator. The mood on the CloudCore server was self-consciously desperate, as one user boosted FKA twigs’ vocals from the lyric video so they were clearer, and was met with a reply from another user, who said, “we’re really picking up the crumbs off the floor here, aren’t we…”.

One week passed and Two Shell teased a “New Song??” with an Instagram countdown, just to release a new AI cover with Frank Ocean as the “guest”, his name dripping in Zalgo text and the artwork showing his face appearing to be swallowed up by digital creatures, as though the AI is starting to cannibalise itself. These covers create the impression that Two Shell is building an alternate timeline where 'Talk To Me' has passed through many hands for it to fall into theirs, or that this song would become a pop standard that has since been covered by megastars. With the r/FrankOcean subreddit posting threads asking what the hell was going on, they were starting to confuse those not in the know (and to be frank, those more in the know).

On March 8, a PinkPantheress version dropped, its artwork flooded with memes relating to Two Shell and the track laced with an audio watermark from Universal Music like the song was a leak from the archives. Where they were once taking the piss out of club culture, this gag makes light of pop culture’s recent history of leaks such as Ariana Grande’s infamous 'Fantasize', furthering the faux-narrative that 'Talk To Me' is some sought-after song that is so popular not even a watermark can prevent it from seeing the light.

Another countdown ensued straight after the PinkPantheress version released, pointing to two hours’ time, and the CloudCore chat started divulging into jokes about which artist was getting the deepfake treatment next (Bad Bunny? Arctic Monkeys? Rick James? Rod Stewart?). 'Č̵͖h̷̠̀r̸͖͘ĩ̶̞s̵̙̓ ̶̲̈́M̴̛̞a̵̡͌r̴̳̽t̷̛̰i̴̋ͅn̵͍͑' and 'Ⱦⱥɏłꝋɍ Ꞩⱳīӻⱦ' versions would release on this day in two-hour windows, sitting between, at long last, a legitimate version with FKA twigs (who weeks later revealed she's developed her own deepfake).

Hearing the organic vocals presented in a sternly lovesick ballad after this journey through so many AI versions was nothing short of a celebration. Initially, because I had heard the original version only once before, I questioned whether the FKA version truly was real or AI, and I believe this is the feeling they were attempting to create. With numerous examples of deepfaked songs fooling people online into thinking they were the authentic work of famous artists, it’s a probable reality that this will only worsen as the technology develops, meaning this era of misinformation we’re locked in is only going to be augmented with democratised AI. As much the average person is quick to believe a deepfake, there’s an immediate apprehension to believe something as authentic when presented with other examples of AI use in close proximity, which lead to me hearing FKA twigs’ voice and then distrusting it Two Shell’s trolling isn’t making a comment on AI-generated music, but by hiding one real song in plain sight amongst several faked ones, they showed us what the future holds by discombobulating our perception of what is real and what isn’t.

If it worked on me for the briefest of moments, it certainly worked on those not clued into the stunt. When I presented the track to the FKA twigs Discord server which was completely unaware of the new song, one user replied flummoxed, saying, “They also have the same song sung by Taylor Swift and Chris Martin? It couldn’t be AI could it?”. A comment on Rate Your Music read, “What is up with their Bandcamp? Is this even real?”. People truly could not decipher AI vocals with FKA twigs’ authentic performance. Some of the deepfake songs were even written about in weekly roundups in Resident Advisor, Stereogum and The Fader, with one writing that the vocals, “sound like a plea from behind a computer screen”. This was god-tier trolling.

If there is one artist that Two Shell is extending a lineage of with this stunt, it’s British dance-pop provocateurs The KLF, the band who famously had a Number One hit, wrote a book on how to do it and then burned one million pounds. Naturally, the theme of destruction and nothing being permanent can be linked between the two, as Two Shell’s experiments, music and even their first published interview are prone to evaporating. But that temporarily instils an urgency in its fanbase to get the files or everything out of the experience while it’s possible. I have almost a hundred Two Shell tracks on my laptop and can pinpoint exactly how I procured each of them.

One could argue that Two Shell has almost reached The KLF threshold where their mythology precedes their music, but there’s a flipside to that: myth-building taken to a high art. It’s like Two Shell have outgrown the song as a canvas and have also moved onto the music industry itself. The articles miswriting about deepfaked songs and every confused comment is part of the art of the 'Talk To Me' rollout. As The KLF’s stunts came to highlight how the systems of the music industry perpetuate a content mill, Two Shell is showing how AI will do the same. It’s no surprise that the KLF often referenced Discordianism, an ideology largely built on, to paraphrase author John Higgs, “the idea to spread so much chaos and confusion that no-one knew what was true”.

However, where The KLF spread a lot of their misinformation through interviews, Two Shell has largely done it all without saying a word. Plus, they are finding solutions for the malaise of music distribution and fandoms in the long-forgotten mechanisms of old-school internet communities, laying out digital breadcrumbs and sequences that fuse the innocent age of internet trolling with a wider commentary, all in ways that bring its fragmented fanbase together. They may push patience up to the last straw, but the reward is invested community interaction and a greater understanding of their unique point of view - how technology can distort the real from the fictional, but also how it can create unforgettable music sharing experiences that cannot be replicated in the physical world.

Nathan Evans is a freelance music journalist, follow him on Twitter