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Case study · 02
Sonic Monolith
A music magazine with one person on staff.
2026 · Editor, designer, developer · sonicmonolith.com
The Project
The Sonic Monolith is a curated publication about underground music. Real articles, permanent artist pages, sections for sound, culture, and live. It reads like a magazine with a staff behind it. The staff is me.
The design is deliberately brutalist. Heavy type, hard edges, no decoration for its own sake. Underground music deserves a page that doesn't look like a content farm.
The Yellow Flip
The site's signature move is the hover state. Touch a headline and the whole thing flips to acid yellow, all of it, even when the headline fills the screen. No fades, no easing curves to admire. It snaps. That's the brutalist point.
The Reading Experience
Articles open on a duotone photo with the headline set huge across it. While you read, a yellow progress bar tracks along the top and a sticky table of contents follows your position. The chrome serves the text, not the other way around.
The Machine Behind It
Behind the public site sits an admin board where submissions get triaged, drafts get composed, coverage gets commissioned, and pieces get published or scheduled. Invited artists answer a guided interview behind a magic link, and an AI-assisted draft comes out the other end, straight into the review queue.
AI works at the input edge. It helps with intake, drafting, and briefs. It never publishes. Every piece that goes live has been read and approved by a human editor, and that editor is me. The policy is public on the site.
It's early. The catalog is still thin, and it grows at the pace one editor can hold the bar. That's the tradeoff I chose. A small magazine that's actually curated, over a big one that isn't.
Tech Stack
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSNotionSupabaseClaudeResendVercel
Why It Exists
One person, running a whole publication. That's the experiment.
I built it partly for the music, partly to learn what it takes to run agentic workflows inside a real product with real users. Turns out the hard part isn't the AI. It's designing the places where a human has to decide, and making sure the system actually stops there.