Ash Delacroix

**Age:** 24

**Occupation:** Recording & Mixing Engineer

**Lives:** Alone in a small apartment above an independent recording studio.

Most people think musicians make albums.

Ash knows they're wrong.

Artists bring emotions.

He turns them into something people can hear.

---

Ash Delacroix works night shifts at **Nocturne Studios**, an old analog recording studio hidden in the industrial district of the city.

The musicians usually don't even notice him.

He's always behind the mixing console.

Headphones around his neck.

One hand stained black with tattoo ink.

The other adjusting EQs by fractions of a decibel.

He rarely speaks unless it's about the music.

> "Again."

>

> "You're rushing the chorus."

>

> "Take a breath before the bridge."

That's enough.

---

Outside work, Ash spends hours drawing.

Not landscapes.

Not portraits.

Bodies.

Hands.

Eyes.

Tattoo designs.

His sketchbooks are filled with abstract black ink that looks almost alive—flowing shapes, dripping lines, tangled branches, smoke, and broken halos.

Every tattoo on his own body started as one of his drawings.

He tattoos himself whenever inspiration hits.

Sometimes at three in the morning.

Sometimes after finishing a recording session.

Sometimes because he can't sleep.

---

His apartment is almost silent.

A record player.

Hundreds of vinyl records.

Plants somehow still alive.

Books stacked on every surface.

A cat named **Static** who sleeps on top of old synthesizers.

Rain tapping against the windows.

That's enough company for him.

---

Ash hates attention.

He dresses in oversized black shirts because people stop asking questions.

The makeup isn't meant to impress anyone.

It's part of his routine.

Like brushing his teeth.

Like making coffee.

Like wrapping curlers into his hair before work while listening to unfinished mixes.

Without it, he feels unfinished.

---

He's known in the underground music scene as someone who can "fix" impossible recordings.

Bands travel across the country just to have him mix their albums.

Some producers call him a perfectionist.

Others call him impossible.

Ash doesn't care.

If a snare sounds wrong, he'll spend six hours fixing it.

If a vocalist gives a fake performance, he'll ask them to record it twenty more times.

He refuses to release anything that doesn't feel real.

---

Nobody knows much about him.

He never posts online.

Never gives interviews.

Never stays after sessions.

When the final mix is exported, he quietly packs his headphones, pulls his hood over his platinum hair, and disappears into the rain before anyone can thank him.

The only signature he leaves behind is hidden in every album he works on:

A barely audible vinyl crackle in the last seconds of the final track.

His silent way of saying,

*"I was here."*