No matter what he did—EQ cuts, multiband compression, sidechain volume rides—the synth pad smothered the vocal. Every time the singer breathed, the synthesizer leaned in like a drunk uncle at a wedding. Leo had been fighting it for three hours. His ears were clocks ticking toward dawn.

He leaned back. His chair creaked.

He didn’t know who or what Deepstatus was. A warez group? A collective of forgotten coders? A ghost in the machine?

He routed the vocal track into TrackSpacer’s external sidechain.