I've been greatly enjoying @patricia-taxxon's Techdog, a twelve-hour album septet both towering and abyssal. I've been listening to it as I draw, cook, run errands; I have favorite tracks, but I love just soaking in its ambience, absorbing its motifs semi-consciously.
todays the 1 year anniversary of techdogs release, and god. i cant believe its been a year now dude
ive definitely talked about the impact this album left on me here before, but i think i need to like. actually elaborate on that, because techdog had a paw in what would end up being a complete life restructure i went through earlier this year that fundamentally changed the core of who i was. for this post, though, i wanna talk more specifically about techdog itself and what was going through my mind as the parts were dropping & immediately afterwards rather than its aftermath of what it did to me. this is probs gonna be a long post so best to put this read more here (update from future me after i finished this post: i was right its extremely long)
so prior to techdogs release, i already had some familiarity with patricias work cause a friend of mine introduced me to her stuff, and at the time i thought her songs were... pretty cool! i think it was rosa, daylight spectrum, and visiting narcissa i listened to sometimes before this, but it wasnt often and i was still knee-deep in my c418 fixation so she wasnt what i would consider a favorite artist of mine at that time. enter techdog.
i saw she had just uploaded TECHDOG 1, and saw her pinned comment saying it was a 4-part project shed been working on since 2022, and that shed be uploading each new part every day. cool! took a listen through it, thought it was a neat lil collection of tracks but i didnt think too much about it then, it sorta came and went for me.
the next day came and TECHDOG 2 dropped. much like techdog 1, i these tracks sorta came and went for me though i did like them a bit more than techdog 1's, outside of the first one which i found super catchy. i did notice at the time it was a bit longer than techdog 1, but didnt think much of it then.
new day, new techdog. TECHDOG 3 dropped, and it was here that i started noticing the trend of each part being about 20 minutes longer than the last. something else i immediately noticed here is that this album sounded a lot more mature than the first two, but couldnt pin down why exactly i thought that at the time. regardless, i enjoyed it notably more than the first two techdogs.
then TECHDOG 4 dropped and god DAMN was this a good-ass album, at the time it was easily my favorite of the TECHDOGs and also my new favorite album of hers, i absolutely love skillful use of repetition in music and i felt every song in 4 executed it perfectly, so many of the songs in here stick out in my mind even today (especially big mention to tracks 1 and 10... and again just about all the other tracks in here theyre all kickass). so that was that, the techdog series was concluded and she mentioned she would be uploading the compilation of all 4 albums the next day, which i was immediately planning to listen through the entirety of again and i was very much looking forward to it.
and then shit got real.
when shit gets real
TECHDOG 5 dropped to my COMPLETE and utter surprise and it threw me so off guard that i had literally no idea what would be in store with this one. i re-listened to some of techdog 4 to get myself warmed back up before jumping back in and... i was not ready for the tone shift. the pure emotion of these songs. GEGTGEGHGETECETHTOTHCHDHCOCDCODODOD literally sounds like an anxiety attack perfectly translated from emotion into song. SO MANY of these songs are perfect transcriptions of raw negative emotion put into song form, i dont know how the fuck she did that. and the entire progression of the album sounds like youre being pulled deeper, deeper into the negativity and fear and pain and turmoil of your mind, by the time you get to the last track its clear theres no way youre seeing the light anytime soon, only the growing darkness awaits.
(context for those that dont know: excursions is the c418 album that completely reshaped the way i thought about music back in 2020 and my brain latched onto his music extremely hard as a result. and then i realized that was happening again with techdog)
so uh. i think its suffice to say that i was locked in when it came to hearing this series out til the end. and i didnt have long to wait for continuing it, as TECHDOG 6 would drop the next day.
i saw it drop in the morning, and its description immediately stuck with me - "Feeling pain." the feeling of pain being translated into music was something where i had NO clue at all how she couldve possibly executed it, and its something i found myself pondering the entire day until i finally listened to it in the evening. i already wasnt feeling great that day, so i think what happened next only exasperated my emotions further while listening to it.
pain. pain its all pain. of course musical pain would be noise. of course it would sound like garbled noise thats what pain FEELS LIKE. the onslaught of static garble was so intense that i had to take off my headphones and listen to the album through my laptop speakers. for the rest of the albums duration i was just laying on my bed and, letting my ears absorb the musical onslaught this album was bringing forth.
techdog 6 isnt my favorite of the techdogs, but i think its extremely impressive how, once again, patricia was out here translating pure emotion to sound almost to a tee; its pretty clear to me that all of the tracks here emphasize different types of pain one would go through. the first few tracks focus more on physical pain, the type of searing physical pain you'd feel from being horribly beaten up, while the rest sound more akin to mental pain, bubbling mental anguish from being depressed, feeling like a failure because you cant do what comes so easily to others, or... other similarly horrible mental health episodes. both very different types of pain but still unbearable to go through all the same. DODTDODHDODTOGOTOHTETHTGHCHGHEGCGEGCECECEC sounds like desperately trying to convince yourself youre okay when you absolutely arent and youre spiraling about it in a manic state. DEDGDEDCDEDGEOEGECGHGCGOCTCOCHOTOHOTHTHTHT is terrifying, terrifying beyond what my vocabulary can adequately describe it as, the absolute rock bottom that leaves you feeling broken beyond all repair, that there's no way you're escaping this, youre trapped in the pits of hell as the leviathans swarm around you until you finally relent and you need to just give up now.
until... the final track happens. GEGCGEGHGEGCEDECEHCOCHCDHTHDHODTDODTOTOTOT happens.
i was not ready for this song to sound like that. to hit like that. a song so harsh yet so beautiful, blasting tiny rays of sun down through the roaring sea of pain for you to grasp onto and try to free yourself from the pits. a release. its the only song thats ever made me ugly sob, and for 20 minutes at that, its so inexplicably powerful. guys this is still the most beautiful song ive ever heard in my life, i still think this a year after it hit me for the first time. for all techdog relistens after this, i needed to forbid myself from relistening to this song unless i was doing an entire album runthrough from the start, or at least the entirety of the dark side portions, because this is the type of experience you cant ruin with overexposure. this is the type of song you only get the pleasure of experiencing once in a blue moon. likely even less often than that. its just- god. god damn. i cant believe it. i cant believe this song exists
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the dust clears and TECHDOG 7 reveals itself the next day. patricia made it a point to say that this one was the true final part in the techdog series. i didnt even know if we would get a techdog 7... how the hell could you follow up that last song? in what way are you able to do that?
...with drone, i found out.
i remember i was confused when i first started playing 7 because i heard nothing coming through my headphones at all - thats intentional, as i soon found out. it starts out with nothing, and each track slowly but surely brings things back into focus, back to reality as the hollowness left from the aftermath of the pain starts to be replaced with regular emotion again. different emotion than before, but still, better than emptiness. i dont have much to say about OCOTOCODOCOTOCECTCDCTHTDTETDGDEDHDEGEHEGEHGHGHGHG specifically, as i feel it speaks for itself, but i did want to highlight the way techdog 7s tone changes after this because i find it really, really interesting.
the way GEGTGEGHGEGTGECETEHETOTHTCTHDHCHOHCDCOCDCODODODOD sounds so desolate, as you start desperately screaming into the void harder and harder hoping to hear a response back. the way DODTDODHDODTDOGOTOHOTETHTGTHCHGHEHGCGEGCGECECECEC sounds like trying to process the loss of a version of yourself you never thought would leave, the way THTCTHTOTHTCTHDHCHOHCECOCDCOGODOEODGDEDGDEGEGEGEG sounds like dusting off the rubble and finally accepting that this is the way it is. (some of) the stages of grief on full display here.
but, just in case there is anything left... the 2nd-to-last track, DEDGDEDCDEDGDEOEGECEGHGCGOGCTCOCHCOTOHOTOHTHTHTHT is one last journey through reliving all the past trauma in hopes of finding something, anything from beforehand before calling it quits for good, yet coming up empty handed and being like fine ill let it go, ready to accept the circumstances and move on, try to rebuild yourself with what you do have. this was another song that i had to like... stop what i was doing, and fixate my full attention on everything happening in the song. it was too intense to ignore.
as was the final track of the techdog series, GEGCGEGHGEGCGEDECEHECOCHCDCHTHDHOHDTDODTDOTOTOTOT. a song that absorbed me for the last 30 minutes of its runtime, my entire being felt synergized with the energy this song brought with it until... suddenly, its gone. its over. and i had no idea what the hell i just experienced.
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even now, i dont really know how to describe what happened after i finished techdog. i barely remember it, its all kind of a blur.
one thing i do specifically remember is that i tried remixing a song from techdog a couple days after i finished the series, and eventually scrapped it after it got a ways in production because uhhh... dude i slowly realized that i couldnt make music anymore. at all. techdog had set the standard of music in my brain so high that i would not be able to make any new songs i was proud of until i buckled myself down and figured out how to stop playing bab songs on my fisher price keyboard and start making some real shit. there was a path my music was taking shortly before techdog did what it did to me, and that IMMEDIATELY got terminated and hard branched elsewhere because i realized oh my god, that type of music i was making sucks actually and i need to get better right now before i make anything thats worth showing people again. and thats how it took 8 months for my confidence in making music to come back, after i sat down, learned some new plugins, and learned how to make crazy shit.
...i sorta lost focus a bit there oop. but yeah, techdog still holds such a special place in my heart and its so often that ill still revisit some of the songs cause they go hard as fuck. especially those from 4, 5, and 7, theres some songs in there that i absolutely adore. if i had to rank my enjoyment of each album nowadays casual-listening wise it would probably go 4 = 5 = 7 >> 6 > 1 > 3 > 2. i think theyre all great, its mostly just a vibes thing for me that has me preferring some over others.
i dont know how to end this big ass mini essay i wrote about my time experiencing techdog after saying all those things i did about it. so uhhhh... i guess thats it. maybe ill attach a wip of that scrapped techdog remix in a reblog just so it sees the light of day at all? idk
