Familiar problems.
Unusual delivery.
An experiment in making cybersecurity conversations memorable enough to survive the meeting.
Residual Risk is a personal music and humor project by Carter Manucy. The songs start with things people working in IT and operational technology recognize: the supposedly isolated network, the reassuring vendor answer, the software bought before anyone asked IT, the backup nobody has restored.
The joke needs to hold up.
The technical premise matters. So does who the joke is aimed at. A monitoring system can be useful while the organization fails to act on its findings. An operator can have good reasons to resist downtime while the risk remains unresolved. The songs explore the excuses, incentives, and assurances around those problems.
Let the genre carry part of the story.
Compliance fatigue found a home in dark electronic repetition. Everyday IT frustration became country heartbreak. OT overconfidence became loud group-rap swagger. The different sounds let the project change perspective while returning to familiar questions: who owns it, what do we know, and what are we going to do?
How the records are made.
The process uses writing and AI tools, including ChatGPT for developing and revising ideas and Suno for generating musical performances. It involves repeated lyric changes, technical scrutiny, alternate arrangements, and occasional negotiations over how a machine pronounces an acronym. The development notes preserve experiments; the catalog follows the released track lists.
The song notes explain the premise and the real issue beneath the satire. They are interpretations and creative context, rather than transcripts of particular organizations or incidents.