About The Hollow

CREATED & AUTHORED BY DAN HOLLOWAY

The person behind The Hollow

The Hollow is a creative project created and authored by Dan Holloway.

Behind the masks, transmissions, characters and fragments of The In-Between is a real person writing the words and building the world they come from.

I write the lyrics. I create the stories, characters, concepts and mythology surrounding The Hollow. I develop the ideas behind the songs and their visual narratives and direct the larger creative world in which they exist.

The Hollow also uses AI and AI-assisted tools as part of its production process, including in the creation of music and visual material.

I don't hide that, and I don't want anyone who discovers The Hollow to believe otherwise.

But AI is not the author of The Hollow.

I am.

WHERE THE SONGS BEGIN

For me, the songs don't begin with a prompt.

They begin as words.

Sometimes it's a line written in my phone. Sometimes it's an idea I've been carrying around for years. Sometimes it's a feeling I can't quite explain until I start writing about it.

I write and revise the lyrics myself.

Those words become the foundation around which the rest of the song is built: its emotional arc, its sound, its performance and eventually the visual story surrounding it.

The technology available to bring those words to life has changed.

The reason I write them hasn't.

THE IN-BETWEEN

The Hollow isn't only a collection of songs.

The characters, The In-Between, the Archive, the transmissions, the visual fragments and the stories connecting them are pieces of a larger fictional universe I've been building around the music.

Ash. Wraith. Vex. Nox.

They are characters.

They are not presented as four human musicians who walked into a recording studio and performed the recordings you hear.

Their stories allow me to explore things that are much harder to say directly: isolation, addiction, grief, anger, identity, memory, trauma, survival and the things people carry quietly.

Sometimes a song tells you part of that story.

Sometimes a visual reveals another piece.

Sometimes what looks like a mistake in the transmission isn't a mistake at all.

HOW THE HOLLOW IS CREATED

The Hollow exists at the intersection of human authorship, storytelling, technology and production.

Different tools are used at different stages of that process, including conventional creative and production software as well as generative and AI-assisted technology.

AI tools can help turn an idea that exists in my head or words sitting in my phone into sound and imagery that otherwise might never exist.

But the technology doesn't decide what The Hollow is about.

It doesn't decide what I want a song to say.

It doesn't live the experiences behind the words.

It doesn't build the mythology simply because a button was pressed.

Those creative decisions and the responsibility for them belong to me.

 

IS THE HOLLOW AN ACTUAL BAND?

I understand why people ask.

If by "band" you mean four human performers named Ash, Wraith, Vex and Nox performing the recordings together in a studio, then no.

Those are fictional characters within The Hollow universe.

If the question is whether AI technology is involved in creating The Hollow, yes.

If the question is whether the songs, lyrics, stories and world exist because a human being is behind them creating something he wants to say, also yes.

Both things can be true.

I have no interest in convincing someone how they should feel about AI.

There are legitimate questions about what these technologies mean for musicians, artists and creative industries, and people are entitled to draw their own lines.

All I can do is be honest about mine.

ONE THING I WON'T OUTSOURCE

Whether someone considers The Hollow traditional music, AI-assisted music, digital art, multimedia storytelling, or something that doesn't have a particularly good name yet is ultimately up to them.

But there's one distinction that's important to me:

AI is part of the production of The Hollow. It is not the author of The Hollow.

Every song begins because I have something I want to say.

If one of those songs eventually becomes part of your story too, then all of the technology between those two moments becomes considerably less interesting to me.

The words mattered.

You heard them.

That's the part I care about.

— Dan Holloway
Creator & Author, The Hollow   Stay Hollow.