Broken Flow

"Broken Flow" is a multimedia project and compilation album released by Clean Error Records in Fall 2025. It’s a sonic experiment in IDM, glitch, and post-rhythmic architecture, but more than that, it represents a narrative fragment within the ongoing Clean Error Universe. In a world shaped by corrupted systems, phantom networks, and fragile memory structures, Broken Flow is both an artifact and a warning.

From a design standpoint, it posed a unique challenge: how do you design for something that is, by its very nature, unstable?

Our Design Philosophy:



The visual identity for Broken Flow emerged from a series of guiding contradictions:

-Glitch vs Precision
-Futurism vs Decay
-Stillness vs Motion

Our goal wasn’t just to make a pretty cover. We wanted to create an object that felt like it came out of a simulation crash. Something broken, yet functional. Data that refused to die.

Process: From Prompt to Prism

We began with generative exploration via Midjourney using keywords like: "glass data prism," "cube with glitching letters," "vaporized color chromatic dispersion," "holographic terminal," "error beacon".

The cube motif arose early - a shape representing containment, yet when twisted and rotated, it revealed broken interior logic. The final render uses a 3D prism box refracting the words "BROKEN FLOW" across impossible planes, captured in a shifting animation where letters glitch in and out of sync with the prism’s spin.

We then exported this to Blender to give it real-world lighting dynamics, glass refraction simulations, and micro surface scratches to reflect wear.

In Sora 2, we extended this into teaser footage: rotating data cubes, terminal feeds that collapse mid-input, and hacked livestreams from fictional characters talking about what "Broken Flow" means from inside the story world.

Clean Error’s releases are never just about music. Each track connects to a character, a system, or a collapsing sector. Broken Flow introduced themes of:

-Musical fragmentation as a metaphor for identity decay
-The slow death of the IDM genre and its rebirth through error
-Artists trying to log out of corrupted systems but leaving behind sonic residue
-Each visual element was designed to reflect that - from terminal syntax posters to cyberpunk classrooms where students record glitch logs before memory wipes.

The teaser campaign, featuring short bursts of these assets on Instagram and YouTube, created pre-release buzz across glitch/IDM and underground music communities. The phrase "My genre is dying", pulled from one of the lead tracks, became a resonant quote in the promo cycle.

Listeners connected emotionally with the visuals ... not just as design, but as emblems of a culture on the verge of disappearance and reformation.

Broken Flow is now live, streaming across platforms, and embedded deeper into the mythos of Clean Error.