Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. In early summer, 2025, a new band started to gain traction on Spotify. An in-a-rock group called The Velvet Sundown, all fuzzy guitars and psyched pop harmonies. A bit of a throwback to the 60s or 70s. There were four of them. Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Reigns, and the drummer, Orion Delmar, who goes by Rio. At one point in July, The Velvet Sundown had close to a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and appeared on some big curated playlists. Not unheard of for a new band to get attention like this. Only no one seemed to know anything about this band, or where they'd come from. No one had seen them live. They had no obvious online presence. Something fell off to the Canadian journalist Kevin Maiman, who works on the daily news desk for the CBC. I follow a lot of music blogs and stuff like I'm a musician and kind of a nerd about your music happening. So yeah, I started seeing The Velvet Sundown thing pop up all over the place. And it intrigued him. Even though I've talked to some music critics about it and they all say this is trash, this is garbage. But I thought it was pretty good. Dust on the Wind is a really catchy tune. It is catchy. And this was a prolific new artist. There were already two albums floating on echoes and dust and silence. Both released in the space of 15 days in June of 2025. When you search online, you find the pretty typical band photos. The guy is screwing around in the back of their tour van or crammed into a studio recording and eating burgers. But if you look closer, as Kevin did. It took a look at it and it was like, you know, these images are clearly AI. If you know what to look for, it's obvious. No brand names on the instruments. A guitar with a tuning peg missing. Fingers that bend ever so slightly the wrong way. And everything with an eerie yellow tinge, which yeah, okay, I'd probably describe it as both velvety and sundowny. But I wouldn't describe these images as convincingly real. Oh, and in one photo, the drummer Rio is there twice. But the music, I didn't pick it as AI immediately to be honest. So I found that very interesting. I thought there's so many possibilities here, like maybe these are real musicians, but they just don't want to reveal their identities. There's so many different ways this could have gone. Kevin was intrigued enough to start working on a story. I sort of pitched that story about like the mystery of this band with people, you know, debating, is this AI? Is this not AI? It's worth remembering that this was just last year, but even a span of a few months is a long time in this whirlwind AI universe we're now inhabiting. Reddit was crawling with theories in the wake of the velvet sundowns arrival on the scene. Most people were sure the band wasn't real, and they were furious about this perceived deception. Then on July 5th, 2025, a Twitter or ex account called velvet underscore sundown appeared with a one line bio that read, yes, we are a real band and we never use AI. The account started posting frequently, adamantly denying allegations of AI and saying older reporters aren't even reaching out to me or something like that. Now, if there's one guaranteed way to get journalist attention, accuse them of not doing their jobs. And now there was an actual person or people behind a social media account that had opened its DMs. So I, as as many other reporters did, reached out and got an email back pretty quickly from the velvet sundown Gmail from someone who claimed to speak for the band and he was willing to talk. So he said he would answer some questions via email. I said we don't generally do email interviews, can you do a call and yes, that's how I kind of got into it. The velvet sundown had their pick of options for an exclusive at this point. They didn't go with Kevin. Not surprisingly, they chose the legendary rock publication Rolling Stone. And in a piece that came out on July 2nd, 2025, an adjunct member of the band named Andrew Frellen came clean. Yes, he admitted to Rolling Stone. The velvet sundown had used AI to make their music, at least in part. It's trolling, he told the magazine. People before, they didn't care about what we did and now suddenly we're talking to Rolling Stone. So it's like, is that wrong? It seemed in the end a marketing trick. The velvet sundown had just pretended to be a full-on real band in order to generate interest in this otherwise forgettable AI music project. Mystery solved? Well, no actually. I'm Josh Dean and this is Camillean. The weekly show about people and things that aren't quite what they seem. This week, the story of the velvet sundown, a hoax wrapped in a hoax that has us questioning what's actually real and whether that even matters anyway. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck Now, wherever you get your podcasts. Camillean, Camillean. This is Camillean Weekly. My name is Tim Boucher. I live outside of Quebec City. I am an American, but I've been here for 14 years and I like to think of myself as living the American dream of becoming a Canadian. Tim's an artist, but he's also spent years working in the world of tech, specifically in online safety. Content moderation, policy, doing open source investigations into accounts to see if they are really whoever they claim to be or if there's some factual basis in a claim. This work known as red teaming is about testing the security limits of internet operations. Where you try to mimic the techniques and the tactics of an attacker who's trying to manipulate your platform or break your login system or something. Being immersed in this world, it's only natural that these ideas found their way into Tim's art. It kind of like seeps into every part of your brain and changes how you think about things and my art kind of like started to reflect this sort of like meta conspiratorial mindset that I would have to bring as part of my job. Tim says that he was just keeping up with his usual Google alerts on AI art in June of 2025 when he spotted something that caught his eye. A band called the Velvet Sundown that was climbing fast on Spotify. You know, the headlines were like, this band is, you know, gaining traction on Spotify and has 300,000 monthly listeners or something and yet they have no digital footprint. This Tim says, gave him an idea. When I saw this line and I was like, and yet they have no digital footprint, it's like, well, you know, yet. What if his next art project was giving a voice to a band that didn't really exist? That might be fun. I thought about it for maybe 24 hours or something and then I took like an old Twitter account that I wasn't using and I reskinned it to be that band. Tim took the images and album artwork he found for the Velvet Sundown online and added them to his new fake account. Now he guessed, people who went looking might assume he was the real band or was speaking for it in some way. And I had chat GPT right up basically like an angry tweet thread that was like, I can't believe these journalists didn't reach out to us before publishing their piece and everyone says we're so hard to find but we're just here. Like, this is sloppy journalism stuff like that. Tim knew from experience what would happen next. You call out the journalist and then it come like sort of sniffing, not sure what's what and then it reaches like a critical mass. As soon as you opened his DMs, the inbox filled up. I had like every major industry magazine asking for an interview. You know, it was like Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, things that like never in your wildest dreams as a weirdo artist musician. Could you ever plan to get that kind of coverage? Now Tim had a problem. He'd been emailing all these journals, Kevin Maiman at CBC included. But eventually he knew they'd want to speak to someone in person. If he kept dodging and was only taking questions by email, they would likely get wise to the hoax he was spending. At first, I was like, well, fuck what should I do because I didn't want to just lie. Obviously a problem because Tim says he knew no more than anyone else about the actual developments on down. And I had a friend who like, he's kind of a good improviser in the moment, kind of a guy. So I was going to have him do it. But he wasn't available on the schedule because when you start to get this kind of like feeding friends, you have media coverage, you have to go, go, go. If you want to get all of them in within a certain published window. So they're not just copying each other, you know. So finally, I was like, okay, I'm just going to do it. Tim scheduled two interviews on the same day with the titles he thought would give him the most impact. Rolling Stone was an obvious choice. But first, he had a call scheduled with the Washington Post. I was trying to say, you know, we're a real band, we're real people. We use digital tools, blah, blah, blah. But we don't use AI because I was still trying to push this thing if we don't use AI because this is a really good way to get people wound up on social media is just like making absurd claims about AI. And then like standing by statements that are obviously dumb. And just like gunning, you know, like pushing the gas on those statements, it's just like a way to get the engine rev it, you know. To Tim, the whole thing was sort of ludicrous. It's no obviously AI, but saying that it's not AI is just like, there's no word to describe how dumb it is when you have all of it together in front of you. And you know, like, and you know, I tried to stick with this claim of like we, there's multiple people in my, my group of friends and we have like a slack chat and we share files back and forth and we kind of like edit them. And you know, which is partly true, like I do have a group of friends like that, but we didn't do this project, you know. So I kind of was like doing that. And he was trying to ask me like sort of the typical questions of like the influences of the music and, you know, all this stuff. And I just kind of like repeated the things that people already said in the news articles. And it was like pretty boring and pretty vanilla, but I could tell that he like didn't really buy what I was selling, you know, but he was nice about it. And you know, yes, questions and whatever. After the interview, Tim says the journalist called him back. The recorder had apparently not worked and the writer asked for a summary. Tim couldn't remember exactly what he'd said. So he just faked his way through it. So his coverage didn't go anywhere because he had nothing. I didn't give him anything to work with basically anything that was like verifiable because he wanted me to be like, well, if you can somehow verify that you're involved with the band, you know, have them email me whatever I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. So I never did that because I can't do that. It was the Rolling Stone interview later that day, the blue things up. I was warmed up. You know, I knew what kind of material worked, what seemed shaky as the pretence. Tim called the Rolling Stone writer from a temporary number he had set up so that he couldn't be traced and gave a fake name. He asked me what my name was. And I said Andrew Frellen, which in French, Frellen means like a hornet. And you know, like, you don't want to have hornets at your house because like, they're not like, it's not like a bee. When a bee stings you, you know, like, it stinger comes out and then later on it dies. Like a hornet, like, they keep, they keep stinging you and you don't want them at your house. And it was the summertime. And I knew that there was some nearby and like, it was on my mind. So it was just like a concept in my head. So most of the conversation was me being like, Oh, no, no, we didn't do that. It's not AI. And I just said like, well, I'm an adjunct member of the band, which in some world, I am. It depends on how you adjunct that member, you know, you just wanted to press me on whether or not we used AI. And I resisted and said, you know, we didn't use it for this. We didn't use it for that. And then he kind of went little by little and was like, well, is it possible that you just used it for certain elements? And I was like, yeah, possible. It's like an interrogative technique. You know, it's a way to draw slowly a bigger truth of a narrative. And I had never encountered it before, but it seems like a good idea to try it from his perspective, you know, but I was just like, well, I can see where he's going. And I'm just going to like give him enough rope to hang himself on this because he's got already the idea that whoever it is, me or somebody else that they used to know, they did this, they did this. Soono is software for creating AI music. You put in a few prompts, and almost instantly it spins out a whole track, lyrics and all. It's honestly amazing and a little scary. He already had the article written in his mind. And he all he wanted for me was quotes that supported what his pitch basically was in the beginning. It was just so obvious. And he had like written a book about Soono when the company started. And so I just was like, yeah, you know, every time that he asked me, well, is it possible that you also did this? And I was like, look, I've never told anybody else this, but yes, we did, we did that. And he bought it, hook line and sinkered. Tim Bushe's hoax, he claims, was intended to make a point about journalists checking their facts. And the dangers of not doing enough research and how that can help lead to and spread disinformation. He definitely knew what he was doing, but says he laced clues into the interview that should have given the writer a heads up. Yeah, he was sort of asking like, what inspired this or whatever. And I said that I've always been really interested in art hoaxes, you know, like, and I named some of them, which maybe if you're not in the UK, like the leads 13, like, do you even do you know who that is? I did not know. But if you'll excuse the brief detour, this is a great hoax. In 1998, a group of university art students from leads in the United Kingdom, yes, there were 13 of them said that their final year project was a trip to Abiza funded by the university. A work of quote, living art about leisure, youth culture, and the package holiday as a modern right of passage. Only they didn't go to Abiza at all. They got fake tans, bought props, and staged photo shoots all while still in rainy northern England. The press slapped it up and a lot of people were pissed about this public money paying to send students on a sunny holiday to a notorious party island. It went all over the media as though it were really the fake scenario that be posed. But it wasn't. You know, it was an art project. And the whole thing was like to sort of do the media and show how the media works and all their these reactions and stuff to it. Tim thinks that Rolling Stone should have spotted the clue and recognized that there was something else going on here. But the deception was kind of his whole game. I'm not sure the journalist did a chance because Tim also knew that all the journalists chasing him for an interview were on deadlines to get the story out first. If he had spent maybe more time talking about or looking at that specific reference, it might have been like, wait a minute, maybe there's maybe there's another layer here. It's like people are trying to get stories out fast and they want to be the first one with this breaking thing. The Rolling Stone exclusive came out on July 3rd. It confirmed that the Velvet Sundowns music was made using AI, which might have been true, but Tim wasn't someone who could verify that. Given that by his own admission, he had nothing to do with the band. And he quickly followed up the article with his own confession. Because if people didn't know what he'd done, what was the point of it in the first place? Because obviously like once that article hit, it was only just a clock ticking until the real band was like, hey, that's not really us, you know. So he spun up a medium account for a pseudonym and published the post, I am Andrew Frelon, the guy running the fake Velvet Sundown Twitter. Here's why I did it. It was just like a matter of being in the right place at the right time and having some background knowledge of how this works and just being in this space of like playing and pretending and like sort of this flexible idea of identity and how that can be art in itself. Because how do you know who is really what on the internet or the way that the internet and media and technology works now is that things that are fake a lot of times have more power than things that are real. And even if we know that they're fake. This is a topic that Tim, the artist, is very interested in. Like the leads 13 students, he was using his hoax to get attention for his work and his ideas. And if you read that interview with Rolling Stone, it's all there. His hoax was a successful way to platform his actual thoughts on AI and to encourage a conversation. Apart from my claims about being involved with the band and how the band works, everything in that that I said in the interview was like completely my real opinions as someone who has used AI a lot in the arts and who has taken a lot of shit for it. His comments are nuanced and interesting. Should we ignore AI, fight against it, or quote should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet? There's all this conversation around like, oh well, we have to label everything as AI generated or we have to label things that are fake or satire or like x, y, z criteria that people act like, oh well, once we label it, everything's going to be fine. But it's like we know that things are fake and we still perpetuate them all the time. And that's how we sort of share value and build relationships. And it's like, that's a fundamental part of being a person and communicating it. So it's like, we can't just use technology to fix these things about human nature that are just fundamental in the first place. And that's always where the conversation goes. It's like, well, let's use AI to detect other AI and then let's use fact checkers. And there's always this layer of like, oh well, we'll just add this one more thing and this everything is going to be fine and it's never fine. It gets worse and worse. I'm more and more complicated. He's not kidding. Join me after the break when it gets a lot more complicated. As Tim, Kevin and I all dig into the question, I'm sure you're all wondering who actually was behind this mysterious band, the Velvet Sundown. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast, The Deck. I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Camillean the weekly. The same day Tim Boucher posted a confession as Andrew Frellen detailing the scam he'd pulled on Rolling Stone. A message appeared on the official Spotify page for the Velvet Sundown, saying that Frellen had nothing to do with them, just as Tim predicted they would. And whoever was behind that page, DMed Rolling Stone requesting a correction. We ask that reporting on us be based on verifiable sources, not fabricated accounts or synthetic media. In the real band, if there even was one, was not giving any clues. We understand the intrigue our project inspires they said in the DM to Rolling Stone and we're not here to dispel mystery. You know what I'm going to bring up the thread so I can remember a little bit better. This is CBC journalist Kevin Maaman again. Yeah here we go Velvet, follow up. Yeah so I send some questions. He doesn't answer them. He means Tim, who was still Andrew Frellened him at this point. And then the Rolling Stone article comes up. I was like okay I understand now why he's not answering my questions. Yeah so at that point I thought that was probably the end of it. I did feel a kind of personally tricked a person. I was very grateful honestly that you know I took my time a bit with this story and didn't end up in the situation that the Rolling Stone reporter did because you know maybe there's another scenario where that was me. Well this is all the same day. Okay so then I saw the medium article where he says no I was lying to Rolling Stone. The mystery of the Velvet Sundown remained but there was now another story on top of that. The story of the Hoaxer who had pretended to represent the band. The man calling himself Andrew Frellened. And so then I emailed him about that right away. He was like can you talk about this? And he said yes as long as we can use my pseudonym. Just in case you've lost track that's Tim Boucher talking to the CBC's Kevin Maaman under the made up name Andrew Frellen. I was like okay I'm gonna come out in Canadian media because CBC is publicly funded and I think it's cool to have publicly funded high quality journalism. So I was basically did it as like you know my patriotic duty to the Canadian news ecosystem of giving them the real story and my real identity and exposing that there. Kevin did his due diligence. He kept his word and didn't reveal Andrew was actually Tim. But he did check and confirm his background in identity. They did a video call and Tim sent him screenshots of the Rolling Stone interview as well as connecting Kevin to a second source, a friend who corroborated the story. I definitely had a bit of a guard up with him just knowing that he was you know capable of and interested in doing things like that you know pranking journalists. I guess he's maybe friendlier than I expected for someone who would just you know pulled off this hoax and seemed to have maybe a disdain for journalists. Kevin's piece came out on July 5th just two days after the Rolling Stone article. Tim hadn't wanted to be named because he was worried about losing work or experiencing backlash online but the article explained his motivations for the hoax. I'm really exploiting the uncertainty Tim had told him and I think that's the art. The way the whole thing is played out has become like artistic jet fuel. Hey you know wasn't the most red story ever wrote but I think people who were interested in it were very interested. Still Kevin himself wasn't totally satisfied because there was still one very big open question. It got me really wanting to get to the bottom of this mystery right. I wanted to know who is actually behind this band. In a way that totally understandable feeling really underlines the point Tim was making with his provocation. What was real and what was not was becoming increasingly blurred. So like the media coverage after that it referenced you know the Rolling Stone article but it also referenced my media article and then like people started to like copy each other's reporting and things continued to get distorted as they got translated to other languages and some you know major media and other countries kept reporting the original fake claims without you know ever having done any of the follow on research and now it's informationally it's just like a crazy mess. I was kind of getting more and more in my head as he kept posting and being like you know what if he was just being really nice to me. What if he is still behind this band because there's no way to prove an negative right. I couldn't prove without beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had nothing to do with velvet sundown. Then he started teasing this big announcement coming up on I think July 14th big announcement and I was getting more and more nervous and kind of paranoid about it. Thinking oh no he's going to reveal that he was the one behind this all and then nothing came on that date and I think it was three days later he comes up with that medium post saying yeah I am behind it all and when I initially read that I was like oh shit. Tim as Andrew Frellen published a second medium post this one titled so yeah I did make velvet sundown on the 17th of July two weeks later the velvet sundown was never meant to be a prank or art or any of that he wrote this was quite simply a commission test. Now Tim was saying he had been commissioned to create the velvet sundown by a company that wanted to explore the money making potential of AI bands. Velvet sundown he now claimed was a prototype. He emailed him about it was like yeah so I saw the medium article. He emailed back and said oh yeah that was fake you know you can see that it's tag satire. He's right if you look very closely and it was just something they hadn't noticed but it's also very not very noticeable on medium you know it's a little tag at the bottom of the article and it doesn't necessarily mean that it really is satire either so yeah and then we had some more back and forth about it and I was reassured given all the evidence and everything you know that we were talking about that yeah there's no way he could have actually been the guy. No way Kevin believes him but I'm not so sure. Tim has a rich history with internet hoaxes or at least with circling around them many of them involve media and AI. He pulled the same trick he'd pulled with velvet sundown creating a persona for an AI bot journalist called Margot Blanchard who fooled publications like wired and business insider into publishing her writing which was strewn with fake sources and facts. He's engaged extensively with a whole lore around a lost continent called Quattria and watched conspiracy theorists run with it. He's used AI to co-write dozens of surreal world building books which he releases on his own imprint. That one he's the creator of but the others he's claiming to be exposing the AI drawing attention to it but wouldn't it be the perfect hoax and kind of genius if he'd also been the originator to me it would make at least some sense that Tim was in fact the velvet sundown all along and of course we were going to ask him which he obviously saw coming and brought up before we got the chance. So now like every time I talk to a journalist they're always at the end of the conversation they're like yeah well that's that's all really interesting but at the end of the day it's really you right and it's like no I hate to say it's really not me but everyone's assumed that it is because the real band no one else from the real group or artist or whatever ever stepped out and gave any other interview or anything besides that little quote to Rolling Stone and maybe to one of these other like second or third-tier music websites. Tim's interest is obviously attention for his work as an artist and for the bigger points he's making about AI music so if he really is behind velvet sundown it's already served his purpose he'd have little to gain from admitting it and a lot to gain for twisting people like me and nots if someone else is behind velvet sundown it could be for any number of reasons first and foremost for the money that can be made from streaming music the cost basically nothing to make in which case they're probably delighted by the attention generated by Tim's antics but why would they bother admitting it at this point. At the end of his apparently satirical confession post the one he wrote on July 17 Andrew Frellen announced that this was the end of the velvet sundown project he said that paper son rebellion the band's third album released three days prior to the post would be the final album and as of this moment more than nine months later there's been no additional music the velvet sundown is still there on Spotify but any confusion about whether or not the band is real has been wiped away the bands about page now says this the velvet sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction and composed voiced and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence this isn't a trick it's a mirror an ongoing artistic provocation designed to challenge the boundaries of authorship identity and the future of music itself the velvet sundown in the end faded away as quickly as they burst onto the scene a true case of the flame that burns twice his bright burns half as long millions of downloads piles of words from the digital press coverage all in a three month nine day career but they're not completely gone either the band still has 78,000 followers and more than 166,900 monthly listeners on Spotify to this day and despite his very earnest seeming medium confessional tim bushe continues to deny that he had anything to do with the band and for what it's worth he's convinced Kevin the journalist who probably knows him the best at this point that he wasn't the culprit i feel like at some point you have to trust your gut on these things so i am convinced that it's not him although if it turns out that it is him it wouldn't be the biggest surprise in the world and i think from that point we started sort of talking back and forth about our like theories on who it might be and that sort of went on for a little while Kevin was one of several people recruited into a group effort Tim was apparently leading to track down the actual people behind the band there were weeks where we were sending each other emails back and forth maybe five or six emails a day with like did you check this what about this when this just anytime one of us saw a potential lead we kind of throw it in there and be like hey have you seen this and that was fun it was fun to have that you know as a little element to my workday is sort of poking away at this strange mystery Tim says that it was one of the most thorough open source investigations he'd ever been involved with the group followed clues looking for any connection to the original velvet sundown spotify account once they thought they identified someone posting from an ip address coming from Italy but it turned out to be nothing there were many false leads you at one point he brought up this guy who had uploaded all of their lyrics and albums on genius.com and seemingly like immediately upon their release i think there's a point where we both were like this got to be the guy who else would be ridiculous enough to do that but he eventually reached this guy and said that he was convinced after talking to him that it wasn't him then there were the other people who came forward and admitted they were the band including the person who claimed to be behind the bands official website velvet sundown.com that person's name atway saint mark which sounds like one of those obviously fake names the a i cooks up when spamming your inbox about important services it can offer this atway saint mark claimed to be the fake bands manager. he sends me these really flowery funny emails sort of like talks and riddles and he just he can't answer a single question for me he kind of just kept doing this whole thing where he was like you know the ambiguity is the point you know that the the mystery is the point it's like okay you probably have nothing to do with this but he had a good story about how he is managing them he's living on this farm in vermont and managing this ai band and there's a whole network of people around the world that are involved in it and and at that part of it could very well be true i don't know well every lead came up short there are all these signals that exist but they're not consistent with each other and individually they're inconclusive and then when they're inconsistent together you kind of have nothing you know like you kind of have a bunch of signals that don't point in the same direction. we've looked to and ultimately got no closer to solving the mystery than the gang of internet sleuths led by the main suspect. i did reach back out just yesterday to the actual velvet sundown twitter i was just like hey you know now that now the the circus has died down do you want to talk i mean your monthly listeners have dropped by 800 000 so maybe you want to do something to get yourself back in the the news cycle kind of thing but uh yeah i haven't heard back yet i'm not spending a lot of time trying to figure out the mystery at this point but still still poking around here and there. the reality is that the only person who knows who velvet sundown is is probably the person who uploaded the music and owns the twitter account linked to that page if they don't want to be found they probably won't be everything else is just false signals they'd only get more distorted as more hoaxers join the fray even tim claims to be losing track. there are parts of the story that i just don't know you know like the real band nobody's found them and that's so weird to me and it keeps happening with all of these a i bands is like you know there's another one a breaking rust or what's in this another. on december 1st tim published another medium post this time claiming responsibility for creating the country a i star breaking rust. he's also published posts owning up for making other successful a i artists including bleeding verse, eventhys, and anally blue. only some of these posts are tagged satire but honestly who even knows what that means at this point. tim's hoax achieved his goal. it made us question whether our favorite new artist is actually real and whether or not we even care. what comes next and what do we want? i think you accomplished his goal in that respect. the mere existence of velvet sundown has made a lot of people angry. angry that they were fooled angry that a i music is threatening the livelihood of real musicians as well as threatening diversity and creativity in the music we listen to but the reality is velvet sundown worked hundreds of thousands of people listened. as tim wrote in his second confession as andro frellen people say they don't like it and don't want a i artists but the traffic massively says otherwise. the velvet sundown was not the first a i band but a trickle is quickly becoming a stream. i was saying like this is going to be normal very soon and it seems like yeah you know now there's all these a i songs topping the digital charts and yeah in late 2025 an artist called zaniamone became one of the first a i musicians to chart on billboard topping the rnb digital song sales chart and making the hot rnb songs list. breaking rust had the most downloaded country song in november 2025. a i music is real for better or worse it's now part of the landscape. and whether or not velvet sundown was originally intended as simply a bit of a i slop created in 15 minutes the band is now so much more than that. it kind of cropped this all like so many industry around velvet sundown there's so many bands popping up on spotify with the same name or similar names or the same pictures and so it's trying to capitalize on it and yeah then these guys selling trying to sell merch and then i think at one point tim posted a bunch of velvet sundown t-shirt designs although he wasn't trying to profit out of them so i respect that but yeah it did really become this whole thing where it's like who's involved who's not i think then does it matter. this brings me back to something tim said when he was recounting his interview with rolling stone i missed the significance of it at the time i just said like well i'm an adjunct member of the band which in some world i am it depends on how you adjunct that member you know all the people pretending to be the velvet sundown have created a lore a whole story of a band that does have real music whether you want to ascribe any real value to that music or not it could be one person even tim sock puppeting as many voices could be a few people working together or it could be a bunch of online fire starters with no connection to one another each doing their own thing and this confusing mess is honestly sort of fun here's our contribution to that lore let's call it a velvet sundown cover band playing us out with a version of our theme and yes this was made using ais software that's available to anyone and less than 10 minutes yikes who are we anyway a band to scan my shadow play maybe dance maybe doubt but isn't that what i'd say about one more last game the chameleon dance a second glance chameleon is a production of campsite media and audio check it's hosted by me josh teen this episode was written and reported by me and joe barrett our producer is joe barrett our associate producer is Emma ciminoth sound designed by joe barrett and mix by Tiffany dimac theme by ewin leitermywin and mark mcadam our production manager is ashley warren campsites executive producers are Vanessa Gregorioires match share and me josh teen and finally if i can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today please rate follow and review chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word i know everyone says this but it's true ratings and reviews really do help and if you have any feedback tips or story ideas you can email us at chameleon pod at campsitemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 2021 743 8368 add a plus one if you're outside north america. thanks for listening we'll see you next week. i think chuck would approve second chance
