Baby Lights and a New Secret: Pretty Lights’ Codex Clues Give Us More “Soon”

Pretty Lights is dropping hints again… and we can only speculate on what it’s for. Put your size 8 tin-foil jibs on and strap in for a conspiracy-laden swirl down the rabbit hole that is the nebulous blossom of possibility. We’ll unpack every angle of the clues so far and hopefully stir up some scavengers and code breakers to help unlock the mystery.

An Enigmatic Start to the Year

Derek Vincent Smith, professionally known as Pretty Lights, has consistently blurred the lines between music and interactive art. Beyond his genre-defying soundscapes, Smith has woven intricate puzzles and cryptic messages into his music, transforming passive listening into immersive treasure hunts.

Via Instagram, the elusive and enigmatic figurehead recently announced that Pretty Lights – now a collective composed of Derek, Michal Menert, Borahm Lee, Alvin Ford Jr., Chris Karns, and enough additional crew names to fill a phone book – would be performing “the only band event of the summer” in Buena Vista, Colorado the weekend of June 27-28. Amidst that announcement was news that Derek and his partner-wife-creative-director Uma are having a baby. The news also mitigates the accusations that Smith is in fact, an alien sent here to make phat beats stretch for mad blocks. No one can say for sure yet.

The Clue You Probably Missed

With Pretty Lights’ devout following, the fans were beside themselves with happiness and excitement for the couple. No doubt, this news nearly overshadowed the event itself. However, what went completely under most people’s radar was a clue at the bottom of the post, reading “codex : kovisac.” What could it be a clue to? Well, no one can publicly say for sure yet, and anyone who knows has probably signed an NDA punishable by death. Nonetheless, it tells us something is coming…soon. The term codex traditionally refers to an early manuscript, a collection of bound pages used before modern books. But in the world of Pretty Lights, it might as well describe the layered, puzzle-laden universe Derek Vincent Smith has been building for over a decade.

Looking Back on Taking It Forward

As I mentioned, Pretty Lights has been known for cryptic messages and secret games, especially since returning from a 5-year hiatus in 2023. In September 2024, anticipation buzzed around Pretty Lights’ Halloween-adjacent performances in Las Vegas. Amidst the promotional material, Pretty Lights announced a hotline number related to the Vegas event: 1-855-728-3751 (or 1-855-RAVE-PL1). Calling this number greeted fans with a stylized message hinting at “special multi-sensory explorations” slated for October 25th and 26th at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The recording alluded to a “dual fusion unity” event occurring “across all dimensions” and definitely did not help with the cult allegations.

Dual Fusion Unity

Further deepening the intrigue, a cryptic directive emerged from the social media post: “To unlock a doorway, find the eyecon.” This clue led fans to the official website, where a discreet eye-shaped icon hid among the social media links. Clicking this ‘eyecon’ redirected users to a password-protected page labeled ‘swirlbridge.pl/dualfusion.’ The password? Simply “secret.” Unlocking this digital vault unveiled ‘Dual Fusion Unity,’ a five-track EP accessible exclusively through a retro-style Winamp player embedded on the site – and the only music Pretty Lights had technically released to the public in ages. This collection, though not available on mainstream platforms, showcased Pretty Lights’ commitment to offering exclusive content to his most dedicated fans and echoed a nearly stale tweet from 2016 that certified “I’m no longer satisfied making ‘music’ to ‘release’ on ‘albums.’ Different is coming.” He didn’t say “soon” after all.

In related posts, Pretty Lights encouraged Las Vegas attendees to seek out “the man in stripes,” followed by cryptic Ace Ventura references. These clues led a lucky few to receive jump drives and even a VHS with even stranger and more cryptic video excerpts of Derek and Greg Ellis talking in what appeared to be documentary-style interviews. Were these clues to the future or remnants of the past? The question still remains.

Take a look at the most recent cryptic post and pay close attention to the details:

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Now here we are again with obviously cryptic clues and posts with a vocabulary so unusual we can only speculate whether it’s allusion or absurdity. My one-man obsession over deciphering the code began with those words: “codex : kovisac” and fans across Facebook, Discord, and Reddit gave their own wild theories, though no speculation led to anything concrete.

“Could it just mean cul-de-sac?” said some sarcastically, while others joked that it may be a pre-sale code for tickets. Some went deeper into the root linguistics, referencing Hebrew. “Kovi” is said to mean “my dear one,” and sac is “a cavity enclosed by a membrane within a living organism, containing air, liquid, or solid structures.” None of that led to what I had hoped for: anything we could listen to…

Deciphering the Mystery

As for Kovisac, I tried deciphering it a few ways. I tried dozens of methods too tedious and nonsensical to even write about, but I’ll share the most intriguing and comedic. Firstly, no anagrams seemed to make sense, though “Caved Icon Sox” was interesting, I suppose. Next, I tried mapping the letters to numbers both in the alphabet and within a keypad.

That was nothing but confusing. And the letters were meaningless if I couldn’t figure out where to apply them. I tried returning to the secret eyecon site and inputting as many possible passwords as I could before considering different angles.

Ciphers

Next, I tried a few ciphers to search for hidden meanings. A Caesar Shift is a simple cipher where each letter in the message can be shifted forward or backward in the alphabet by a fixed amount. For example, with a shift of 3, A → D, B → E, and so on. I tried this +1 through +26 (every possible variation) and nothing particularly clear arose.

An Atbash cipher is another simple letter reversal cipher where A = Z, B = Y, C = X, etc. Codex Kovisac just gave me: X L W V C P L E R H Z X. At least it had a PL in it! I tried referencing local airport codes for the original and reversed letters, thinking maybe it could be a tour location list, but no dice.

Conversations With The Singularity

Finally, I turned to ChatGPT to reference a few more advanced ciphers. First, I tried a Vigénere cipher, a more complex version of the Caesar cipher that uses a keyword to determine how each letter shifts. The keyword is repeated over the message, creating a shifting pattern of letter substitutions. Earlier, I began noticing other oddities amongst the post: phrases such as Yahn Dawn, Luminescent Emergence, Luminous Crossing, my personal favorite Lemon Meringue, and the use of the phrase “Waking Up To Pretty Lights” partially written in the old Pretty Lights cursive font. So, naturally, I tried all of these phrases and essentially just came up with nonsense.

Next up was the Polybius Square, where letters are converted into two-digit coordinates on a 5×5 grid. For example, A = 11, B = 12, etc. Similarly, a Playfair Cipher uses a keyword to generate a 5×5 letter grid and encrypts letter pairs instead of single characters, making it harder to crack.

None of these seemed to give me any answers, but ChatGPT indicated that there appeared to be some significance between Codex : kovisac and the phrase Lemon Meringue, which Pretty Lights used multiple times throughout the announcement. It offered this conclusion when running a Playfair cipher forwards and backward, but I wondered whether it was telling me anything of value. As I deciphered hundreds of nonsensical phrases and number sequences, I continued putting them into the password prompt on the secret swirlbridge site and even inputting them into the cryptic hotline used for Vegas. Nothing. Honestly, it all was starting to make my head spin, and nothing seemed significant enough to go off.

Nerding Out

I even went so far as to analyze the source code of both Pretty Lights’ primary website and the swirlbridge.pl site looking for hidden content or clues. At this point, I realized I truly had too much time on my hands. Unsurprisingly, I found nothing surprising in the code.

Lemon Meringue

Running out of ideas, I finally took a bite out of “Lemon Meringue,” only to find a song by Fishbone from 1993, that was also published again in 1996. Pretty Lights recently themed night two of Las Vegas with 1996 Rave and has been working with Studio Ninety Six on visuals, so my crazy swirling conspiracy brain thought maybe it could mean something? Digging deeper, I found that the album “Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe” had a cover containing a strange heliocentric monkey and solar system allusion.

This almost made sense with the recent allusions to space. Furthermore, the album title is a quotation from the Discordian religious text Principia Discordia. Discordianism is a belief system based around the Greek goddess of discord and has been defined as a new religious movement or act of social commentary in which alternative perspectives and unusual takes are heralded as viable truths. Sounds pretty in line with some PL philosophy, if you ask me. Furtherfurthermore, Pretty Lights connects with a lot of their fans via Discord… COINCIDENCE? Probably.

All in all, I spent hours connecting dots that probably haven’t been fully revealed yet. My guess is that more clues are needed to really unearth the latest PL secret transmission, and all my musings are virtually meaningless. But it’s fun to theorize, isn’t it?

Taking Up My Precious Time

The one thing that I can’t brush aside, however, is the use of the phrase “Waking Up To Pretty Lights” on the announcement poster, partially written in the old Pretty Lights cursive font. The font was supposedly written by none other than Michal Menert, the other founding member of Pretty Lights alongside Derek Vincent Smith. The post mentions “PL Typography Michal Menert” supporting this. But why is that significant?

Well, the fans know every Pretty Lights album title, aside from Passing By Behind Your Eyes, A Color Map of The Sun & The Hidden Shades EP, comes from a poem also penned by Menert. The poem reads:

Waking up to Pretty Lights

Waking up to Pretty Lights is one of the last lines that hasn’t been used by either Pretty Lights or Michal Menert in his solo albums. Perhaps that’s just a coincidence too… but to me, it seems like a clue. And in this case, it would be the mother of all clues. Fans and haters alike have been waiting for Pretty Lights to drop a full album since his last album A Color Map of The Sun was released in 2013. Since then, there has been endless speculation and rumors of music that Smith has been working on. Before PL’s five-year hiatus, there were rumored sessions with Rick Rubin and sessions with his old band configuration, Analog Future. Even videos of recording sessions have popped up on various band members’ social media over the years. What happened to that music is anyone’s guess.

In the new era, there are still rumblings of “soon” to come. Since 2013, Pretty Lights has played somewhere between 50-80 unreleased tracks and countless more “Swirls” or variations of on-the-fly jams. I would say that’s almost enough for a pretty hefty discography for some artists and yet still no album… but perhaps that is soon to change. Perhaps these clues are pointing to the long-awaited promised land: a new Pretty Lights album. Or perhaps they’re just more videos of Derek’s Taco Bell order, as was the case with the enigmatic jump drives handed out in Las Vegas.

What Does It All Mean?

My guess: not only will we be receiving an album – perhaps not in the traditional format we imagine – but we will also get a vibrant documentary pulling back the curtain on this enigmatic voyage of the last decade or more. And hopefully very soon. My only hope is that the fans decipher the clues and we get where we’re trying to go.

Whether it’s obscure website URLs, hotline numbers with eerie voicemails, or mysterious symbols tucked into tour visuals, Pretty Lights has turned music discovery into an immersive, collaborative experience. Clues often feel like they’re lifted straight from the pages of a lost manuscript—fragments of a larger story waiting to be pieced together. Most recently, whispers of the Codex Kovisac have emerged, setting off a fresh wave of speculation. What is it? A new album? A deeper lore within Pretty Lights’ universe? Or just another breadcrumb in the ever-expanding maze of soon™?

Obviously, I can’t tell you yet… but the beauty of a codex is that it holds secrets within its pages, waiting for the right eyes to decode them. For Pretty Lights fans, the question is no longer if there’s a hidden message—it’s where and when it will finally reveal itself.

Keep Up With Pretty Lights:

Access Pretty Lights most recent Dual Fusion Unity EP here using the password “secret.”

And check out the upcoming tour dates to witness the magic.

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