M. Shawn “Clown” Crahan has opened a permanent home for four decades of his work, and used it to introduce a new musical project built with artificial intelligence.
The Slipknot percussionist launched theclown.com this week. What began as a cryptic teaser has resolved into a hub gathering his various ventures in one place — his side projects, his podcast “The Electric Theater“, and his Slipknot No. 9 Iowa Whiskey brand among them.
The launch arrived alongside O’ Day Monster, a new project fronted by Crahan‘s writing, and its first single “Un Life“, which came with an AI-generated video. The project has its own site at odaymonster.ai — the domain itself a fairly direct statement of intent.
Anyone expecting something adjacent to Slipknot should adjust. As with Crahan‘s previous outside work, O’ Day Monster shares almost no musical ground with the band that made him famous.
In a section of the site labelled Thoughts, Crahan posted a long introduction explaining what the site is for and how O’ Day Monster came about. It reads:
“Welcome everyone, to the new home of all my artistic endeavors. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know it’s been a challenge to get the .com to a place where I feel I can contemplate, and present, all my creative memories caught with one brush – or several brushes combined. And yes, sometimes there’s no brush that can express the deep inner self.
It’s been difficult for me to share all these expressions of mine, mainly because of time. With that said, I believe I’m at a crossing where my heart is telling me to share the life I have lived. It’s been an incredible journey so far, and I need to utilize some time and get busy now, to reveal all that has been hidden behind the curtain. Forms and brushes, like fingerpainting when I was young.
My mother and I shared the love of writing; she encouraged me to write exactly how I truly felt. And to revise, revise, revise so the work could be it’s truest self. Then there’s painting, drawing, performing, directing, producing, single frames, moving frames, Polaroids, scans, 3-D animation, AI images, coding, level creation for video games, recording my songs in Pro Tools, using plugins to expand my experience, exploring gear, connecting dots, and my newest path – modular synths controlled voltage, frequency, vibration and circuitry. There’s much, much more to find and explore in the lane known as my life. It’s time to grab it all, and move it to it’s new home, here at the .com.
This is where you get the unedited me. The no-filtered me. The no-paraphrasing me; you’ll get no lies from me. Just the racing thoughts of imagination that make their way to some sort of canvas or canvases, time-stamped and put here, in it’s resting place.
As always, it’s going to be a great while before it’ll all be up, if indeed it can be put up. It takes a lot of work, but that’s what’s next – the time to explore all this together. I can’t wait to go down this wormhole and share thoughts with you about vision and one’s self, concentrated on output.
I was told once I was like a Renaissance artist, meaning I would do a little bit of all of it, and that’s exactly what I’ve done with my life. Make the love I have for art be the introduction to creating further interests. This has been my personal hobby to create, calculate, and then demand output. You can use all methods, old and new. I’ve come to learn to utilize fear and misunderstanding to dig so deep within my own ability to conjure the scratch. To dream about shedding a tear because of the depth of the subconscious, and the ultimate need to then bring it to life – to feed the knowledge and hopefully set forth a possible understanding that brings lives together, or apart.
One last thing before I am done here. Check out my new project called O’ Day Monster on the feature page here. I’ve entered a time in my life where I wanted to create something I could conduct and drive, with words. I wanted to create the spaceship I could drive with my words.
I’ve always wanted to have someone sing my words with the conviction that the subject matter demanded. Many close friends and I came together to help bring the battle of ‘me against me’ to life. This has been my suffering, and salvation, my entire life. You know, the ‘I’m my own worst enemy’ kind of situation. I am very blessed to have several friends who believe in me, the music, and my words enough to bring all this new color to life to taste and smell. To hold and connect with.
Either way, the choice is yours. I just know I’ve never had a choice – in the end, it just simply is me. And I want it to find those to whom it speaks, those who take something from it. I hope you enjoy this world I’ve created. Maybe the feeling you get when you arrive is an internal feeling. One that feels like you’ve been here before. Familiarity would be nice. So explore, and hopefully I’ll see you somewhere here beneath all the shadows.
To all that helped bring my art, my vision, and my scratch to life: Thank you with all my heart. I hope you all enjoy what we have put together for you. It’s not much yet, but it will keep expanding outwards – until it is no more.
Until then, ‘Enjoy, thank you, and live your life’.”
Crahan‘s use of AI here is not a sudden turn. He argued the case publicly last December, framing the technology in economic terms — as a way for an artist to work without a gatekeeper.
“What’s the difference between me pulling out my pocket producer [AI]… or me trying to get a famous producer that might not even work with me and could potentially cost me $150,000… who will only give me one or two ways – I’m not mentioning any names!” he said at the time.
He also argued that resistance to it is generational:
“Our generation is going to hem and haw about AI. Do you think some kid in fourth grade who’s grown up on it agrees with you and I about how horrible AI is? This is the implemented tool of life today.”
That view puts him at odds with a significant portion of the audience for heavy music, where opposition to generative AI has been vocal. The objections tend to centre on two things: that image and audio models are trained on existing work without the consent or payment of the artists who made it, and that automating creative labour displaces the illustrators, animators and session players who would otherwise be hired. Supporters of the technology make roughly the argument Crahan does — that it lowers the cost of production and hands independence to artists who cannot afford studios, crews or name producers.
Crahan has not addressed those criticisms directly, and his statement does not engage with them. What it does make clear is that he treats AI as one item on a long list of tools, sitting between Pro Tools plugins and modular synthesisers.
The same page points to a further musical venture, Die A Wolf, with no details attached so far.
Crahan, 56, co-founded Slipknot in Des Moines, Iowa in 1995 and is the band’s only remaining original member. Beyond the drum kit and the barrels, he has directed the band’s videos, shaped its visual identity, published photography, and released music through several projects outside it.
In May he disclosed on Rick Rubin‘s “Tetragrammaton” podcast that he requires surgery for a problem with his heart’s electrical system, discovered after Slipknot‘s most recent tour. He described the procedure as straightforward and said doctors expect him to feel better afterwards.
