Hello everyone, and thank you all for your patience over the many, many months we've been wrangling things behind the scenes. We're happy to say we have an absolute, 100% set in stone release date for EXPANSION, our double album covering the Expansion Era of Blaseball.
EXPANSION will release on November 6th, 2026.
If you've already ordered the album, you'll be able to download from Bandcamp on the day of. We'll be organizing a listen party closer to to celebrate the release and have one last good old garages hang.
Our inbox is open for any questions, comments, concerns and such! If there's something about your specific order you want to discuss, shoot us a message, and we'll figure out the best way to sort things.
Thanks again to everyone for your patience. We're so excited to finally open up the vault.
💬 0 🔁 0 ❤️ 5 · Bertie talks expansion (pt5) · Ok, I’m moving to a new format because it was getting too long, but if you’re not up to date
15. --d ---r--g- (‘Drag’)
Today’s post is going to be so quick, because I cannot say shit about the nature of this song without ruining the experience.
I’m happy to be corrected by others but from memory, this song started from me posting a meme idea in a chat, and then instead of people shooting it down (like they should), they yes anded it into a final delightful state.
At time of posting, I am still finalising the mix on this one. It’s 90% there, but the remaining 10% id really be make or break. The mix thesis is:
• closed but open
• focused but not singular
• old analog smear but modern clarity
If those feel contradictory… yes.
Wrap up
I intend to write a post about every song on the album, but from here on out, every couple of songs will require me to be a little coy or circumspect. I hope these posts are still enjoyable though.
Drag is my Favourite Child because it’s a love letter. It’s dynamic, it’s nostalgic, it’s chameleon and gosh dang it: don’t let your memes be dreams baybeeeeeeeeee.
Hello!!! Welcome to my very wacky attempt to somewhat summarize the Coin's journey. See below for content warnings and also credits for the designs of indivi...
blaseball animatic moments!! it took me over a month :) 125 players :) so much happening :) coin my beloathed :) have fun
CONTENT WARNINGS for: foul language, descriptions of murder and violence against teenagers, and bright sequences from 2:56 onwards
The first episode of The Blaseball Exhibition Radio Hour is here! Let's recap some important messages, wacky weather shenanigans, and the strange new party favors that seem to be replacing decrees.
The Blaseball Exhibition Radio Hour is a blaseball podcast written by rory @doctorwhoisadhd and snow @whales-are-gay, with new episodes every day from now until the end of the Era. Listen to it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Ok, I’m moving to a new format because it was getting too long, but if you’re not up to date the rest of the thread is https://www.tumblr.com/bertiefromseattle/822811561304424448/20-a-tr-n-mis-ion-missy
💬 0 🔁 133 ❤️ 112 · 20. A Tr-n-mis-ion (Missy) · Fourth Strike, ey batter?
I didn’t work on this song, so I don’t have any production or m
Sen-
Today’s post is about my other solo songwriting credit on Expansion, Sen. It came together really quickly, and it’s in many ways my ode to the maximalism of the Expansion Era in blaseball. Case in point, when it made it’s songwriter listen party debut, these were but a handful of the responses:
Musically, Sen has a lot going on. For those familiar with my writing style where I’ll often throw metal elements together with electronic elements, this one should feel comforting. It just does it turned up to 11. But the song is also maximalist in terms of intertextuality, both between blaseball source material and garages material.
One of the discussions I remember early in the life of expansion (like, before we even started writing any songs) boiled down to “is expansion a rock opera or is it a thematic concept album”. The crux of the question was, given the sheer volume of events that happened in the expansion era of blaseball (as compared with the comparatively shorter Discipline era), is it possible to actually make an album that covered everything? And even if you could, would it be a desirable outcome?
The discussion was pretty robust, and where most people landed was somewhere closer to using some specific fence post events to scaffold the album, but to broadly work from themes instead (of which there were ample).
Sen ended up being one of the songs that is rooted to an event, but that also encapsulates themes and ideas from across blaseball. And then it’s also about me.
Sen is not about blaseball
I’m pretty upfront about it, but the Hades Tigers’ captains on the Blaseball discord are the reason I found out I have ADHD. Mid pandemic, one of them mentioned they had a shortage on their meds and that all their symptoms were coming back. And all their symptoms were just things about me that I thought were moral failings.
I have a very successful mother who loves me dearly and wants the best for me, but who fundamentally never understood my brain growing up. So I’ve had a string of experiences in my professional life (and schooling before) where I would arrive full of excitement at the newness and novelty, perform amazing things that wow’d those around me, and then slowly start to fall apart as the executive dysfunction kicked in. I’d then escape the place when it got too much towards the next shiny opportunity, leaving behind mess I’d tried to hide in my wake.
Sen is about firewalking, but it’s not about those who are hurt by the flames. It’s about being a golden child and a failed son, and what made you firewalk in the first place.
Sen is about blaseball
Ok, sure, so the song is emotionally loaded for me. But also I’m a smart ass who loves word play, and lemme tell you, Sen is about blorbos.
Off the top of the dome, it has:
lyrics from the perspective of 4 different blaseball entities;
6 discrete sets of wordplay to reference specific blaseball terms in the opening 8 bars;
The first direct reference to a particular blorbo by the Garages;
Direct nods, lietmotifs or reprises to 3 other songs on Expansion, and 2 more garages songs.
I genuinely recommend listening to the song for the first time by itself, then the second time with the Wiki open. Even the song title is wordplay:
Sen is my Favourite Child because it’s maybe the most BERTIE song I’ve ever written. And sometimes you gotta be proud of who you are and what you’ve done, even when your first inclination is to burn it all down and move on even after all this time.
So, Terrier is another song that I provided production assistance and mixing on. The songwriter had gotten it to a great point composition-wise, and a few other people had hopped in to provide instrumentation (including some truly lovely piano parts). To get it over the line, the song just needed a few garnishes to fill out some sonic space, and give some dynamic range. So of course, instead, I added new sections… (in hindsight, who let me cook?)
My initial addition was a little structural change, adding a post chorus (that also doubled in the end as an intro) to let some of the vocals shine through. These included some new piano parts (mostly focused on the left hand) that ended up being the scaffolding for the additions I made across the song. The other big change that ended up helping was re-recording some existing guitar parts so that I could use different amps through out the song on them. They originals were really well written and performed parts, but one of the challenging things about mixing songs can be where a particular element is tonally not quite right. The net result was the song could float gentle early on, and then round out at the musical climax to be fuller and crunchier.
Another mix element that took quite a while was vocal production. I’m really thankful for how keen the songwriter’s ears were on this, because mixing vocals is notoriously one of my weak points. They provided really great EQ-ing and automation insights about when various backing vocals should be more or less pronounced. This even went to the level of what reverse and delays should accent different parts, and made my final production job much easier.
Terrier is my Favourite Child because I think it both stayed true to the original composition, whilst also giving me room to strategically (ha) throw spaghetti at the wall until the right stuff stuck. I mentioned it back in are earlier post, but it’s also the perfect lead in to Side B of the album.
Vinyl reversed
In my personal opinion, each of the sides of Expansion have an identity. But like, not deliberately. But also not accidentally.
In Blaseball, nominative determinism constantly collided with coincidence and our collective pattern brains go wild. An example from the Tigers:
Landry Violence is so named, and fans make fiction that leans into his Violence name. Nominative determinism.
Landry’s stats lead to frequent aggressive plays at bat, and reinforces the “violence”. Recursively, these moments create moments that become lore.
Landry, in a critical game, is incinerated. This act of violence against him again feels like it conforms with nominative determinism, but instead is just random coincidence that he died at the right time for it be significant.
We all start saying RIV into eternity.
Likewise, I think the four sides to Expansion all kind of map to particular macro elements of the Expansion Era. And sure, lyrically that makes sense given we divvied up the plot elements of the era to make the album.
But it doesn’t intrinsically make sense that 5 of the 6 songs on side B ended up being some of the more softer songs on the album. It doesn’t intrinsically make sense that Side C has the most synths and throbbing baselines. There’s certainly nothing inherent about [REDACTED] that screams “AUTOTUNE”, but that’s on me.
And yet somehow each side has wound up with a sonic identity (again, in my humble opinion):
There’s something Coin-ish about side A. All the anxiety under a polished presentation.
There’s something inherently Reader-ish about side B. There’s introspection amidst ornamentation.
There’s something Lootcrates-ish about side C. There’s hidden elements to uncover amongst the darkness.
There’s something event horizon-ish about side D. There’s the slow approach of distance and endless space.
I hope when you all listen to Expansion for the first time, you can likewise find the patterns amongst the album that spark joy in your feral blaseball brain as much as they have for me.
Were any of the songs on Expansion from the original bandcamp list cut? Like what I mean is the song list says there are 21 tracks, is it less than 21 now?
The Bandcamp track list remains current (if still partially scattered).
The trio of songs mentioned in my Missy post were already withdrawn by their artists before the tracklist was first uploaded to Bandcamp.
