SPATIALx Universe Wiki · Project REPLICA
Cole Ferris
Active · Resident of Project REPLICA
Cole Ferris (born 14 December 2004) is a rock artist from Oceanside, California, and a resident of Project REPLICA — the fully replicated reality layer of the SPATIALx.io continuum. Signed to FARA Records, he is the lead vocalist and guitarist of Red Tape, known for a raw, nasal, strained lead vocal and hard downstroked pop-punk guitar built on one principle: audible effort is the identity, not a flaw to be polished away.
Cole came up in San Diego County's skate-punk and DIY all-ages scene, and writes from a simple instinct — name the mechanism causing the frustration before abstracting it into something bigger. He is the first impulse inside Red Tape, the one who turns a private irritation into sound quickly, with Wren Castillo's precision arriving to shape what he starts.
Early life
Cole Ferris grew up in Oceanside, California, inside San Diego County's skate-punk and DIY all-ages world — the same stretch of coastline that produced a chunk of pop-punk and skate-punk history before him. Music started at skate parks and all-ages shows, then became a guitar and a voice pushed hard enough, night after night, that studio cleanliness stopped being the goal. The worn, shouted-for-hours vocal texture became part of the identity rather than a defect to fix.
Forming Red Tape
In Red Tape, Cole is the first impulse — the one who tends to start with whatever has irritated him enough to become sound quickly. On the band's debut single, Permission Denied, that irritation is aimed at the permission structures a young person meets constantly: content moderation, school compliance, terms-of-service agreements, the sense that basic expression keeps arriving with an approval box attached. The collaboration gets stronger when that first pressure is shaped by Wren Castillo's arrival at the bridge, but Cole's own character stays direct, impatient and willing to name the mechanism rather than the person.
Musical style
Cole's lane is raw Southern California pop-punk and melodic hardcore: hard downstroked power chords with a slight buzz and fat distortion, a nasal, strained lead vocal with selected high-note cracks deliberately left uncorrected, and choruses built to survive being shouted back by a room. He names concrete mechanisms before abstractions — forms, warnings, debt, queues, access gates — and keeps political frustration attached to lived systems rather than party slogans.
If the voice sounds tired, it was probably supposed to.
Public image
Onstage Cole is direct and a little confrontational, in exactly the way the genre expects and rewards — forward body language, guitar used as physical punctuation rather than a fashion prop. Off stage he's dry, impatient with institutional language, and careful to keep his anger pointed at systems rather than people; he'll name the mechanism that frustrated him before he'll turn a frustration into a personal enemy.
Cultural impact and fandom
Red Tape's audience has taken to shouting the gang-vocal choruses back as collective release rather than treating the songs as one person's complaint — exactly the transformation Cole writes for. He's known for engaging fans communally and respectfully, without manufactured intimacy, more interested in whether a room can carry a line together than in performing frontman charisma.
AURA Live
Project REPLICA gives Cole a stage built for the same forward pressure that defines Red Tape's records. AURA Live, SPATIALx's evolving system for bringing Project REPLICA residents into physical venues as full-scale live holograms, is built to carry that urgency into a real room: hard daylight-adjacent stage light, a crowd close enough to shout the chorus back, and a full-scale presence that doesn't need spectacle to read as immediate.
Realisation
Cole Ferris is composed and voiced by artificial intelligence (Suno) under human creative direction. The lyrics, persona and direction originate with SPATIALx Media's writers and directors, who curate, re-prompt, edit and master every take before release. We're open about it — the making of the record is part of the record.