#vylop

[vyl3tpwny]

"Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow, and its Life as an Afterthought)"

My new album releases on February 3. Learn more about that here.

[vyl3tpwny]

ANTONYMPH (and the things that made it)

art by @voreburger

—

It has been one year since I released Antonymph. This song seriously changed my life and, it would seem, the lives of many others. I am grateful for the apparent impact it has had on people and I'm hopeful that the reach of its message will continue to spread.

I wanted to talk about how we got here.

Between the months of November 2020 and July of 2021, I experienced a gauntlet of emotional trauma, hardship, and declining physical & mental health. These things came after being newly out as trans, kicked out of my home by my family, transitioning from being a college student to a totally independent adult within the span of a month or two, moving away from my home of 21 years to somewhere I've never been before, and then trying to balance all this with the onset of COVID around the world. In January of 2021, all of these things adding up and weighing on me led me into this rabbit hole of thoughts about my life in the past, present, and future. Namely, though, I thought about my home in San Francisco, where I was far away now. I thought about the memories and things that made me who I was up until that point, especially the bad stuff. The whole project of CUTIEMARKS was an analysis of my life's mental struggles throughout my childhood and budding adulthood, examined through the characters of MLP:FiM.

And you know, it wasn't all everyone and everything else. Growing up, I had felt inclined to be a lot of negative forces myself. To be honest, I'm not precisely sure where it came from, and though I'm glad I grew from it, I still used to be that way. When considering a lot of the things of my past I encountered two things that would eventually become the hallmark reasons for creating Antonymph:

I was a dick to people. In so many ways, I was just an asshole for a lot of my life. I still kind of am sometimes, but I think everyone is. I really mean I was a cunt. This overinflated ego, this desire to shut people down for what they liked, this idea that I was always right and I know best about everything. I acted on this a lot and hurt a lot of people, even my closest friends (many of whom are still around me today, and I'm endlessly thankful they stuck with me through my worst).

I was also made to feel the same way, both directly and indirectly. I talked a lot about how it felt like there was pressure from the people closest to me to only like certain things and other things are not good enough to be enjoyed. This comes especially in the case of music, where it felt like there was a lot of disdain around me for pop and non-traditional music. This extended to all types of media though. I wouldn't have been caught dead being perceived as enjoying something like My Little Pony for a while.

So conceptually speaking, my desire to write something like Antonymph came as a rebellion against these things; against the ways I treated people and the ways I was treated.

At this point of my life, I had also recognized this sort of perpetual depression and negativity that pervaded me at all times. Any type of positive emotion would either be subdued or otherwise disappear within moments. It felt like I couldn't love things and I was always just clenching my shoulders preparing for things to hurt all the time.

So, back to January 2021. Sophie Xeon, a musician who I looked up to and felt comfort in, has just died. Very few celebrity deaths have ever affected me, but this one was very personal and intense. I remember going to bed shaking and feeling sick. It was an uneasiness I'll always be able to picture vividly in my head. In the spirit of her unabashed creativity and love for everything, I started conceptualizing a project that would be as bold as I felt she was.

The first, and only, title for this project was "CUTIEMARKS (and the things that bind us)".

A deep dive into SOPHIE's work and her peers' work led me to examine the inspirations for PC Music. From there I rediscovered my love for the dancepop of the late 2000's and early 2010's. Carly Rae Jepson, Kesha, Katy Perry, etc. Around the time I started really using the internet, I secretly loved this music even though it felt like I was going against everything I was supposed to stand for at the time. I grew up in a cishet, Christian, potentially elitist music space. Things that evoked anything other than that induced guilt to enjoy. But I very, very, secretly, quietly, loved that stuff.

So I decided to make some synth patches that evoked those feelings

That's what led to this:

Antonymph (demo1)

Musician, Producer & Singer. (She/They/It/Pony) Profile art: https://linktr.ee/NekoSnicker All my music: https://vyletpony.bandcamp.com You

Once this demo was made, the path became rather clear for what I wanted to do. Around the time of the songs that inspired it, I was getting really into Tumblr and all the glittery, kitschy parts of the internet. I had been talking a lot with @voreburger (Pico) at the time of this and had a feeling he would be super into the idea. It started out as just wanting to have Fluttershy coming out of her shell with the help of internet culture. It was after pitching this idea to Pico that he sent me back a rough draft:

The idea was really coming together it seemed. What really drove it was his use of the Gir hoodie, really solidifying the internet time period(s) we were after. The Nintendo DS, the browser extension toolbars, and all that; he was onto something incredible.

By the second draft, I still only had "Antonymph (demo1)" made on my end. Taking inspiration from the art he was doing, I started writing lyrics and programming some drums:

Antonymph (demo2)

art by voreburger — I messaged somepony Over Tumblr last night. She said “RAWR X3” so it’s true love at first sight. Throw on my kandi br

After I had these additions to ground the idea, I started getting more ideas for the art direction of the song.

By this point I want people to understand how much Pico was instrumental to the conceptualizing and execution of this whole project. We bounced so many ideas off of each other and worked to string everything together. It wasn't a case of me commissioning him for a few things and calling it a day, it really wouldn't exist the way it does without him.

In order to test chroma key stuff, he sent this icon that he made.

It was here that I realized that Antonymph could be something bigger. There was now a few pieces of "Fluttershy in a gir onesie" that could be used for a semi-animated music video. I said to Pico the words "we'll create an entire culture around one song". That was essentially the manifesto, how deep I wanted this whole thing to go.

So I got to work. (This also appears to be the first mention of "Fluttgirshy" in our DM's)

I ran the lyrics by Pico in a group chat and we talked about the lyrical direction of the song. After coming up with some stuff together we ended up with demo3:

Antonymph (demo3)

art by voreburger — I messaged somepony Over Tumblr last night. She said “RAWR X3” so it’s true love at first sight. Throw on my kandi br

Between March, 2021 - May, 2021, I took time off from the Antonymph studio sessions for a few reasons:

The visual aspect of the project was now in full effect. I was messaging many of my favourite mutual artists and pitching Antonymph to them and explaining what I needed.

Focusing otherwise on lyrics.

I was working on the other CUTIEMARKS songs, now that the album was no longer a small EP project (which it was originally intended to be, as it always ends up with my music).

It was intimidating to work on Antonymph. It was very clear by this point that it was going to be a big project and a big song, likely to be heard by a lot of people. We all expected this from the start, though it ended up being even more than we imagined. Still, knowing this made it harder to work on the song because the pressure was really on.

Now at this point, many other concepts have been injected into the idea of Antonymph too:

Queerness needed to be a big part of this. Making a song about self acceptance and expression had to entail queerness (like many other aspects of CUTIEMARKS, anyway).

I wanted to help heal my homesickness a little bit, so the music video would start to include video clips that I took in California (most notably, the intro of the music video shows my BART route from San Francisco to Daly City).

I wanted my friends to be a part of it in some way. I couldn't include everyone, but I did a lot to make sure that the people I cared most about would be included in this project, knowing it would be seen by lots of people. I wanted to bring them along for this whole thing. Lots of clips in the music video include videos of my friends, and I took lots of suggestions about the song from friends in servers and group chats.

As a spiritual sequel to "Lesbian Ponies With Weapons", I wanted the song to speak to a lot of the issues our generation is facing around the world especially in the wake of civil rights and economic inequity.

Between May 17, 2021 - May 27, 2021 there were two more Antonymph demos:

Antonymph (demo4)

I messaged somepony Over Tumblr last night. She said “RAWR X3” so it’s true love at first sight. Throw on my kandi bracelets Now I’m heade

ANTONYMPH (demo5)

Written by Vylet Pony, Voreburger, AstroEden, CalamariSpider Music by Vylet Pony Vocals by Vylet Pony Produced, Mixed & Mastered by Vylet Po

After demo4, I asked friends and patreon subscribers if they wanted to be included in the song by way of putting a group of everyone saying "hell yeah" in the second verse. demo5 is where this first is implemented, but all the voices wouldn't be included until the very final version of the song.

art by @sterfler / @uzon

Slowly but surely, everything came together. I worked endlessly on coordinating all the art stuff and doing the video editing and graphic design, until eventually:

ANTONYMPH (Final)

Written by Vylet Pony, Voreburger, AstroEden, CalamariSpider, Sylver Stripe Music by Vylet Pony Vocals by Vylet Pony Produced, Mixed & Maste

It was done. February 24, 2021 - May 28, 2021.

I don't usually talk about finances, but I know for certain that the Antonymph project itself had costed well over $1.5k to make. This is disregarding everything else I had invested into the creation of the CUTIEMARKS album entirely, and is limited purely to Antonymph by itself. And as this project has helped to grow myself as a musician, I should be able to make more projects of this scope in the future.

A few days later, I premiered the trailer for it on June 4, 2021:

And then of course, what followed was the music video itself.

And just like that, it felt like I had taken my first breath of fresh air in a long time. I braced for the response to this, and what followed was extraordinary. Across social media, the #antonymph and #fluttgirshy tags were filling with people making fanart of the interpretation of Fluttershy that Pico and I, along with the many other incredible artists, spent many months getting just right. It all went to even inspire the parody project on SiIvaGunner's channel:

Antonymph was born from the ashes of my trauma and memories, and was forged between me and a dedicated team of incredible visionaries to become this thing that a lot of people connect with now. If I was going to put out a project of this scope and reach, I wanted to make sure it was positive and inspiring, and had the potential to live past its release as something that would continue to influence people for the foreseeable future.

So, Antonymph feels like a HUGE explosion of colours and emotions. And that's because it is. Everything had mounted up to that point. Endless amounts of hardship and mistakes, culminating into something that would be unabashedly beautiful.

I am forever grateful.

Thank you so much. + Thank you so much to Pico for making this project one of the best ever.

Oh, and as an extra special thank you, the stems to ANTONYMPH are now freely available to everyone: https://we.tl/t-j7WJ9dQ6tT

art by @astroeden, made specially for the one year anniversary of Antonymph <3

[vyl3tpwny]

loudness in music.

you may be listening to music that is lesser in quality than artists really intend.

(pictured: a visual guide of FabFilter Pro L2's metering section)

this post is mainly aimed to talk to non-musicians and non-audio engineers, but if you're one of those and also feel for this post, cool. but i want to put this into perspective for people who aren't in music (recording and production in specific). i'm going to attempt to explain a very complicated concept as simply as i can fathom.

there's a lot of stages to the creation of a song or album. there's the writing, recording, production, mixing, and mastering (to simplify). what i'm going to be talking about has to do with "mastering", the final stage a song goes through before it's considered 'final' (in a sense).

mastering, in short, is the process of taking a fully recorded, produced, and mixed song; cleaning it up and preparing it for people to listen to it. a mastering engineer will often add some equalization adjustments to the overall song, adding some compression to bring things together and unify elements, and other stuff like that.

but the duty of establishing the "perceived loudness" is imparted on the mastering engineer.

loudness ≠ amplitude. amplitude is the true measurement of an audio's volume. but "loudness" is a measurement of how loud we actually perceive something. there are technically quiet songs that you perceive as louder than they are, and loud songs that you actually perceive as quiet. this is because loudness ≠ actual technical volume. amplitude is measured in Decibels (db) and perceived loudness is measured in Loudness Units Full Scale (LUFS).

audio processing and transmission always has a limit. for example, if you turn up the volume up too high while listening to music on your headphones, distortion and crackling may occur. this is called "clipping". the threshold for clipping varies from one device to another. cheap earbuds may distort without you even pushing the volume much. other headphones may be really hard to even get audio to clip.

(image source: MTX)

thus, because of the limitations of how audio works — both in the digital and analog domains — the mastering process of music seeks to finalize a song to be loud enough, but not so loud that it clips in a way artists and listeners don't want.

enter: The Loudness War

in the 90's when digital music studios started to become a thing, people started mastering songs louder and louder because things didn't distort as much when you pushed them in digital spaces. you can get stuff to clip in the digital world, yes, but it was much easier to push things louder than on purely analog equipment. ever since then, songs have been getting mastered louder and louder. we've called this "The Loudness War", because people compete to have the loudest mastered songs.

something you must understand is that the louder you try to master a song (without it clipping above a digital threshold) the more squashed the song gets. the methods for mastering a song really loud often make it lose quality and fidelity. for some people this is fine. stuff like dubstep usually benefits from the squash and the distortion (although it's a personal preference). nonetheless, people have actively chosen to master songs loudly to compete with each other, but at the cost of a song's quality and dynamics.

quick side note: a song's dynamic's is a measurement of how quiet the quiet parts are, how loud the loud parts are, and what the ratio is between these are. so a VERY dynamic song will have very quiet parts and very loud parts. a NOT VERY dynamic song will have mostly everything in the same volume range at all times.

so ok. artists and engineers have been fighting in this loudness war. everyone wants to have loudly mastered songs even though the more you try to push a song to be loud the more it will lose fidelity and the more compressed it will become.

below is a video containing three versions of my song "bonnie". the first version is the original master. the second version is being pushed into a mastering limiter hard. and the third version is being pushed into a mastering limiter VERY hard. a mastering limiter is usually the last part of the signal path of a song's master. i've (very roughly) gain matched the examples so that instead of hearing the loudness differences, you will hear the quality differences. they should be roughly the same volume, but the quality differences will be what you hear. pay close attention to the waveforms getting progressively more squashed the more the song is being pushed into the limiter.

keep in mind, this example is extreme and unscientific, only meant to demonstrate the kind of quality deterioration that occurs when you try to push a song to be potentially too loud. these quality issues often exist at least a tiny bit in songs that are mastered to be really loud.

so we know that trying to master something loud comes with tradeoffs. but people still really like to do it and sometimes it can be pulled off just fine. but not every song handles these treatments equally.

but what i really want to get at here is the fact that mastering things super loudly in the modern day is kind of pointless! the main exception i can think of is club mixes, DJ's really like to have loud stuff to work with because of the complications that come with DJing in venues. but aside from that, there kind of isn't a point to mastering that loudly anymore.

streaming services like spotify and youtube follow broadcasting standards and automatically adjust music to be roughly in the same range. this is so people listening to music on these platforms, especially through playlists, won't be bothered by a discrepancy in REALLY LOUD songs and really quiet songs being in the same space.

i've been thinking about all of this for a long time. i've been learning how to master my own music for maybe 4-5 years now? but recently an audio engineering youtuber, white sea studio, came out with this video:

i highly recommend you watch it if you have the time and are interested in learning more on this aspect of music. but to divulge upon the points and information they talk about...

...it's unanimously recommended to master your music to be at least ABOVE -14 LUFS. there are two kinds of misconceptions. the first being that you should try to have your song reach EXACTLY -14 LUFS. wytse explains in the video how this is wrong, and that experts instead recommend you master just to be above -14 LUFS, not exactly and certainly not lower. popular and loud music is being delivered at around -5 and -4 LUFS even. this is really loud and you can imagine there are lots of compromises to quality to get songs to be that loud. but as wytse continues to explain, there's clearly not much point in doing this if streaming services are going to be turning loud songs down anyway.

we're in an age where the loudness war really shouldn't exist. not only has it caused lots of songs (including my own) to be finalized and delivered with compromises to quality and dynamics as well as unfavourable distortion, but it's established this misconception that songs need to be mastered super loudly in the first place.

if it were so simple though, i don't think we'd be talking about this at all. to speak from personal experience, i actually feel self conscious if my music isn't as loud as other songs in the same genre that i'm making. i've found myself not even checking if i'm making it above -14 LUFS, often times i'm just trying to get everything to be as loud as possible. and this is a huge problem for me because i make music in every genre. period. my album CUTIEMARKS mixed dubstep, pop, rock, acoustic, ambient, and so many other genres in one place; but i worked so hard to get everything to be consistently the same loudness. the reality is that it's so hard to pull that off and i'm pretty sure the album is lesser in quality because of it. i already have frustrations listening back to things like "nonexistent meet-cute" and "how to kill a monster" from that album because i tried to push them to close enough loudness to a dubstep song lol.

but despite knowing all of these things very transparently, i still feel very self conscious about it. and i feel like this conversation actually needs to extend beyond musicians and engineers. that's why i'm writing this. i want listeners and fans to know that there's this thing going on and it's been going on for a while and it causes a lot of stress and misconceptions. i'm especially self conscious because i'm actually going to try to actively master my next album quieter than all my other ones on purpose. to try and combat all of this. even if it makes me self conscious to listen to some of my favourite albums of this year and know how much louder they've been mastered compared to mine. but i think it's really important we let songs breathe and not try to compromise quality anymore. it would relieve a lot of stress from me personally to be able to know this is all ok.

if you ended up reading this whole thing, thanks so much. this is a thing that's actually been affecting a lot of musicians who do their own engineering a lot. and it's been affecting all audio engineers anyway. this is an extremely complex topic and to anyone who knows as much as i do about it, trust me i KNOW this post is EXTREMELY simplified. but i want to speak to listeners and fans, not musicians and engineers specifically.

[vyl3tpwny]

ANTONYMPH (Vylet Ponystep Remix)

art by @astroeden

—

So I just released my remix of Antonymph, and you can read my original Tumblr post about the original song here if you want to.

There's a lot of substantial stuff going on under the surface with this remix that can be broken down into two major things:

Breaking out of burnout

Fulfilling a childhood wish

The former of these things is something that I've been dealing with since the release of CUTIEMARKS. I suppose I don't necessarily mean I've been experiencing burnout in that I haven't been working on stuff. Rather, the response to CUTIEMARKS (especially seeing the reviewbombing done over RateYourMusic) left me feeling like I wasn't quite good enough for some reason.

I think I'm good enough though, I don't think this feeling occurs because there's any merit in these thoughts. Rather, I feel oddly self conscious now about appealing to the more widespread music critic world. A lot of music in the spaces I create in (namely electronic dance music) is often looked down upon in the 'higher echelons of music enjoyment'. Paired with the fact that I do very colourful pony music, it makes me a rather big target for people to come down on.

Going into making Fish Whisperer, I specifically set out to make a project that would both criticize and appeal to the critical music consensus. I've done my part in doing that, now, and I feel more able to try and work through these feelings of self consciousness. This remix is one of the first things to aid me in doing that. It ties in very heavily with the fact that it's a style of dubstep that has been considered "uncool" and out of trend since probably 2015 or 2016. It's a really melodic, complextro-ey, Bend +/- growl type of song.

I used to try making this style of dubstep rather often. However, a quick tour through my discography revealed to me that I actually never completed and released something in this style for the near decade I've been releasing music publicly. I came to this realization only after I had actually completed the remix. This takes me to the second point I established, in that I am now fulfilling a childhood wish.

It's a huge deal to me to finally release something in this style of music. I haven't really innovated on it much and it's hardly more than the sum of its inspirations, but it also makes me super happy anyway. I was not skilled enough or had the attention span to actually accomplish a song like this when I was younger, and when I finally was able to, it was already out of style and not worth pursuing at the time.

So here I am pursuing it.

I think the whole thing of trends in the EDM community is really annoying actually. In some cases in can drive new ideas to new heights, but it can also really oversaturate other things even though there are really cool things to support it. Things like Big Room and Future Bass are considered really cheesy and silly right now, but I think that's because nobody is innovating on those things and making them fresh. I think that needs to happen, I want to see lots of genres become consistently innovated and reimagined. You see this happening widespread with a lot of genres that seem to have this trend agreed upon, like the rise of breakbeat inspired stuff in the indie electronic scene again. I think we should just consistently innovate things. Sound is kind of infinite, so it's always possible.

Anyway. The Antonymph spirit of everything is to create things for yourself and to feel as whimsical and in love with the smaller things in life as possible. I think I'm going to do a lot more music that is considered out of style and not very trendy in the EDM community. And I definitely need to regain my ability to not care what critical people think of my work. I can improve the fundamental stuff on my own time. If people really get upset at me for the styles and content matter that I write about, so be it. I'm writing for the weirdo in the corner of a school dance, not the people dancing.

Love you poniez.

P.S; the art that @astroeden made was inspired by the galaxy dubstep cat that showed up in every other dubstep compilation in 2014 or something. (You can see the full art on her page instead)

[vyl3tpwny]

rediscovering childlike novelty in the context of creating art

theres been a lot of gatekeeping and judgementalness and cynicism that permeates the music spaces i've occupied ever since i started releasing music on the internet. a lot of habits and insecurities i've developed over time, i've slowly been deconstructing and breaking down.

a few things in my mind had become established that were eventually bad habits:

don't use presets

prove myself as a musician, only write what i can play

the first of these tenets is a more obvious hindrance. if you're unaware, there has been — if declining — a stigma from certain musicians with regards to the use of presets. presets are essentially instrument and synth patches that have been programmed and designed by other people (usually by the team behind the instrument or synth).

(the preset menu of the repro-5 synth vst)

i think a lot of people outside music creation may find this stigma odd. what's wrong with using an instrument you didn't make? guitarists don't often build their own guitars, or amps, or anything, rather they curate the parts they think sound best to them. such skepticism is correct and indeed warranted.

yet, there are lots of musicians who will assert that using presets is bad. this mindset permeated my life for a while and anytime i used a preset, i did so in secrecy. the purist would have you believe "ah you must construct every single synth patch you use from scratch or else you are unoriginal and lazy". i'd like to see the same argument be applied to a plumber who didn't make their own wrenches, or a painter who didn't stretch and assemble their own canvas.

it affected me for a long time, especially after my 2017 release of Mystic Acoustics, from where i felt the need to ""prove"" myself as a musician. i started to play lots of piano and guitar and physical instruments outside of my computer and controllers.

but over the past couple of years, i've come to appreciate presets and the diversity they allow me to have in my musical ideas. i am really good at sound design and creating sounds from scratch, i'm not going to be modest about it. i have spent countless hours learning and practicing, mastering sound design and all its fundamental and equally advanced concepts. and yet. despite this, i think there are millions of presets that i simply wouldn't come up with on my own. as an artist, you find the things you're comfortable with and often create out of intuition. the better you get, often times the more you will become comfortable in what you know. exploring and using preset instruments allows me to experiment and play with ideas i didn't actually consider before.

would you ask an illustrator to design and create every single brush from scratch? i feel that this is rhetorical, but i'm inclined to state anyway: no.

if a song sucks, a song sucks. no amount of original sound design or preset using will actually establish this. some of the songs i've hated the most have been completely original from the ground up, and many of the songs i adore have used presets that i could point out to you in my own plugin lists. what matters most is how the artist conjures all these elements together, at whatever personal cost.

this leads me to the other tenet of bad habits: only writing whatever i could play by hand.

as i had mentioned, in 2017 i felt the need to start ""proving myself"" as a musician. i developed this habit of only writing melodies and progressions that i could play by hand. as a result i started to become much more proficient in piano and other instruments. but the fact remained that i was beginning to constrain myself.

i'm not the greatest piano player or anything like that. i don't really want to be either. i just wanna make the best songs i can make. and to do this, i think i should be able to use any tool and idea at my disposal.

still, i fell into this habit of writing stuff based on if i could play it or not. there are some exceptions to this, especially in fairytails. but overall, i've felt like programming and sequencing melodies and progressions wasn't fulfilling enough. not because it wasn't, but because it didn't make me feel like i was proving myself enough.

consider the fact that most classical composers either never played anything that they wrote themselves, or only played one instrument in the composition. many composers, all they did was write down notes on pieces of paper and direct the musicians who would then play it. is this not the purpose of a musician in the songwriting sense?

i'm not sure what changed my perspective exactly, but lately i've been finding myself able to let myself write more stuff through sequencing and programming rather than ensuring i can play it on piano. in tandem with allowing myself more to use preset instruments and synth patches, i feel like i've unlocked a level of creativity that unbinds me from a particular burnout rut.

the be-all, end-all consideration i beg from this musing is to recognize that art is about the artist's vision. it isn't always to do with the specificity, that's up to the artist. i'd like to create a more intensive investigation and examination into these concepts in the future. but i think it's important for people to know that the only cheating that exists in art is if you're stealing or copying something in its entirety 1:1, and even worse if you claim it entirely as your own. art and music is a conversation with the giants whose shoulders we stand upon. none of us invented music or art or any of that. we're just vessels for the ongoing story.

[vyl3tpwny]

SOUNDSCAPE DIARY

art by @astroeden

—

I love this song a lot! There's not too much background to it or extremely deep thoughtful things I can say about it, but there are a lot of fun details about it.

Foremostly, in the description, Canni describes destroying a music box and creating a new instrument out of it to create the pats of this song. Well, we actually did this for the album! A lot of the foley recordings and sound effects were recorded and made by me and GalaxySquid. We set off one day to record the sounds of an antique shop. It was there that we found a little music box that still worked (as well as a typewriter), and so I bought both of these. When I got home, me and Namii took a hammer to it and smashed it open to reveal the components inside (it didn't open up any normal way). We mangled and manipulated the tines to create weird harmonic sounds, recording every bit of it. A lot of the sounds in the song are made with the recordings that came from that.

The first section of soundscape diary at around 40 seconds in is actually my interpretation of a song I heard in a dream of mine. It was originally titled "lulamoon lullaby". One night in January of this year, I had this very vivid dream of a song that was playing. Once I was able to sit down and work on it, it became this part of the song.

Lastly, the song samples a lot of my older works in the background. I don't actually remember all of the ones I sampled anymore! But I do know that I sampled my old song Letter & Requiem (which you can hear in the section at 3:13 of soundscape diary) and Our Story Begins (and I don't remember where this is in soundscape diary). I wanted a sense of bringing my naivete as a musician and my childhood along for this thing.

I hope you all love it!

[vyl3tpwny]

rainbow crash

[vyl3tpwny]

Fish Whisperer

art by @astroeden

—

Fish Whisperer was the hardest and most intimidating song to make. I don't think I usually overthink title tracks, but this one was the most important of all my albums thus far to get just right. There were a total of 6 unique ideas that were attempted for this song. I settled on the final one.

Poetically, Fish Whisperer found me enduring a lot of struggle and burnout to write. The huge, explosive wall of sound that the song is known for is quite literally the sound of me breaking out of all of those things. When the idea for the song was clear, everything fell into place in this sort of cascade of ideas and instrumentations.

Mostly, the story for Fish Whisperer (the whole album) was done prior to most of the songs being written. So almost everything in the album was written around the story itself. Every song needed to fit the narrative of the chapter it was essentially standing in for. I think that's another reason why Fish Whisperer (the song) was so difficult. It's not the end of the album, nor did it actually have to articulate a complex part of the story. Rather, it needed to be significantly wrapping up loose ends musically. The effect I think this ends up having is that the last 3 songs (or 2 chapters) is like a sweet hug and a frolic in a field. All the concerns and reservations at this point of the story have been wrapped up with Fish Whisperer, so the rest of the album can be spent in the fresh air. The fresh, fishy air.