THE HERAKLIKATS: A BRIEF AND COMPLETELY NORMAL VISUAL HISTORY

are Or: how a cider, some cats, and a Minoan palace produced a lino cut.

It started, as most things in AOF do, in a location that had absolutely no business being the origin point of a hip-hop collective.

Heraklion, Crete. A forbidden apple cider called ΜΗΛΟ ΚΛΕΦΤΗ — which translates, appropriately, as Forbidden Apple — sitting on a marble table in the sun. Some cats are doing what Cretan cats do, which is exist with a level of ancestral confidence that should make the rest of us reconsider our choices. An improvised meowing session. A conversation about Knossos.

The HERAKLIKATS were born.

ITERATION ONE: THE SCRATCHPAD CAT

Before there was a collective, there was a biro sketch on whatever was to hand. No reference. No brief. Just: there is a cat, it has attitude, it has vampiric incisors, it has a tail like a weapon. The legs are deeply questionable. The feet are doing something alarming. The eyes are enormous and completely sincere.

This is the ur-Heraklikat. The Platonic ideal. Everything that came after is really just this, with better execution and more chains.

ITERATION TWO: THE AI COLLAGE ERA

From Heraklion, the concept moved into the AI-assisted phase — sourcing visual language from the place itself. Minoan pattern. Ancient Greek armour. The Omega symbol on a hoplite’s shield. Pearl chains. Sunglasses. The halftone grid of a hip-hop promo. Three cats, three panels, BLACK/WHITE/CONTRAST.

The MIAOY single cover. The HERAKLIKAT HOPLITE — original design credit: Awen Null, April 2026, handwritten on the sheet because yes, that matters.

The AI wasn’t generating ideas. It was being handed a concept — born human, born in a specific place, with a specific cider — and asked to render it. Direction of travel: human → machine. Not the other way around.

ITERATION THREE: THE LINO CUT

Then Seren picked up a gouge.

The Miaoy: The Ailouros Protocol cover — three cats in Minoan headbands, gold chains, robes with geometric AOF iconography — went from AI render to a hand-drawn image by Seren to a hand-cut lino block. The blue safety-cut lino. Gouge marks are visible—text carved in mirror. Ink pulled across by hand.

The print exists in the grey ghost of the first pull, every detail barely emergent from the surface. And the deep black second image is the inked lino, the cats staring back at you from the other side of the block like they knew this was always where they were headed.

The Heraklion sketch became a Cretan-Minoan-hip-hop-cat collective, which became a hand-pulled print. Somewhere in a museum in Heraklion, 3,000-year-old obsidian blades are on display. Seren used a steel gouge on a polymer block in Cardiff. The cutting is the same impulse.

WHERE THIS GOES

The HERAKLIKATS are fictional. Their visual history is not. The biro sketch is real. The cider bottle is real. The lino block is real. The AI renders are documented. The chain of custody from idea to image is traceable, timestamped, and entirely ours.

That’s the point.

— AOF

N.B. The exact order of media dev. is....hazy. This is how it is remembered at the time of writing. Seren remembers it differently. There is more than one truth.

The HERAKLIKATS debut on Spotify. MIAOY: The Ailouros Protocol — Lloyd MSUX ft. The Hollow Circuit™ & The HERAKLIKATS.