07/11/2026
I’ve been working on something very different behind the scenes—something intended to drive Hazelwood Labs in a very different direction.
I’ve always had a strange relationship with technology.
It was supposed to be in service to humanity, but somewhere along the way, we began serving it—keeping up with endless apps and logins, adapting to constant changes and learning curves, and devoting more and more mental space to abstract digital workflows.
It’s a mistake to assume that technology is synonymous with progress.
Progress is something more like the evolution of the human spirit. Technology should serve that. It should free us to engage in higher pursuits and richer experiences. We should feel in command of it—not the other way around.
I think we’re on the precipice of a major shift.
AI and other emerging technologies could allow much of this digital maintenance to fade into the background, giving us a greater sense of agency. But there is also a universal fear that AI will “take over”—and rightfully so. That is what will happen if we continue treating technology itself as progress and granting it control over more of our lives.
What’s needed now is to remember the point of technological advancement in the first place: to free human time, attention, and imagination.
We tend to think of technology as something that builds endlessly upon itself, moving forever upward. But that’s an illusion. We often discard genuine advancements in human experience in pursuit of novelty or a distorted ideal of technical perfection.
Music recording may be the clearest example.
Many recording engineers consider the late 1960s and early ’70s a peak era—not because the technology was perfect, but because it remained deeply human. Engineers listened. They closed their eyes. They moved faders. They made decisions based on feeling.
Then we began chasing technical perfection. Music mixers increasingly started thinking about music rather than listening to it—watching waveforms on screens and making mathematical adjustments while gradually trading the emotional experience of music for mind-stuff.
Thankfully, that is beginning to shift.
Vintage equipment and recording practices have returned. Vinyl has made a remarkable comeback. Listening rooms are appearing everywhere. More people are approaching music intentionally—as a personal ritual rather than background content.
I’ve come up against this same contradiction throughout my career in audio installation.
I’ve watched audio technology become more complicated, less intuitive, and increasingly designed around an engineer’s ideal rather than a human one. Tangible wall controls disappeared and were replaced first by touchscreens, then by phone apps—just as people were becoming exhausted by phone-centric approaches to everything.
Smart speakers have brought real benefits to home audio. They reduce wiring, simplify installation, and provide access to a nearly infinite library of music.
But almost all of them share the same short-sighted flaw:
App control.
I’ve heard the same story repeatedly for years. People love the access and convenience, but they hate controlling their music through an app.
It’s unmusical.
It locks the experience behind accounts, phones, and touchscreen menus. It makes it difficult for family members or houseguests to participate—to start the music, skip a song, or simply turn the volume down.
So, this is what I’ve set out to solve.
Hazelwood Labs is developing the HAZ 9000 tactile smart controller.
It will integrate with an array of smart speakers and audio platforms, retaining digital accessibility while restoring a tangible, analog interaction.
The technology remains.
But it fades into the background, where it belongs—and music-listening is placed back into service of the listener.
The human.
