hello! i officially have a domain for this site, im pretty happy i was able to get it ^_^ i was originally going to make an entry in my journal a few days ago but i got very sick and i couldnt really get out of bed but i think i feel a biiit better now aside from the occasional aches and the obnoxiously sore throat

on the bright side, i release an ep! i wanted to make an entry on here specifically about some of the creative ideas i had in mind for some of these songs. some of them i think were more practically made than others but i had a lot of subconcious influences i was pulling from for these songs.

this track took probably the longest to put together and is the track i spent the most time with overall. it started to honestly become an issue for me ^^;; it was a track that started because i had added a new physical modeling piano to my library and i wrote the initial opening melody line and chord progression to try the plugin out. heres that original audio before i changed up the instrument.

i really like how a lot of the percussion came together on this song. i was intentionally holding off on using any sort of premade drum loops or things like breaks unless i felt it absolutely necessary to get an idea across, i felt like it became too much of a crutch for me and i had much more fun programming the drums from scratch and i feel much more satisfied with them as a result. my main compositional influences were definitely artists like cornelius and aoki takamasa. both artists have very fun composition styles where percussion is often sparse, blocky and shifts around in very mechnical ways, each beat feels very intentional and bold and so i wanted to try that style myself. the large, sparkly crescendo around the halfway mark was heavily inspired by "heart throbs and apple seeds" by the bird and the bee and cornelius.
as for a lot of the melody stuff, i had been playing a lot of pokemon at the time and taking in a lot of inspiration from the gen iv games specifically. i remember when incorporating the organ bass sound that it reminded me of the eterna city team galactic hideout music from the pokemon platinum soundtrack and so i started to lean in to the sort of syncopated funkiness of the groove as a result lol. it felt like a cool fit, i liked how it complimented the realistic drumkit sounds as well. in the time i spent coming up with the sonic palette for the rest of the song, i was reading about the cicada broods of the united states and so its made me want to include very bug-like sounds and even some actual cicada soundscapes in the song like those you hear in the outro.

i think this song is definitely a good reminder of when to call a song complete. i found myself really caught up in the idea that if i never gave it a chance to be released then i could just continue to add more and more things to it, but i felt it starting to get crammed with too many ideas and information and it didnt quite feel like a finished song to me until i finally published it on to bandcamp a whole year after i originally started the song. it felt very ambitious perhaps and that made it hard to let go of, but realizing i can just try again and still appreciate the things ive previously made helped me let go of the song. for awhile, i even attempted to scrap the song entirely and start over lol.. but it was ultimately very hard to recpature what made the original version so special so i came back around to it, although a bit reluctantly at first.

this track was significantly easier to write lol. it actual resamples holotype in a weird way and is a bit more conceptual. for awhile i kept writing songs (that i might share in a later entry!) in which i wanted the life force of some beast to be heard. i had tried different ideas such as the afformentioned bug sounds, like aphids and cicadas, and another idea of a large creation beast sleeping in some cosmic space. i think this track is some strange offshoot of that idea and it feels most closely tied to the album art and what it symbolizes. although not intentionally what i was going for, i ended up taking influence from "everything is working" by games. that same pulse in that song reminded me of the beastial heartbeat of the large being that emintates an aura of creation in waterfall.

i think both demo tracks could be talked about briefly. crawlspace was a jam (showed off in my revious entry!) that left not a lot of room to be tweaked in the usual ways i like to do things, so it is basically a half idea that i ended up liking enough to appreciate as a demo. i might do more with it in the future but it remains a decent checkpoint.

stylet became a demo not by choice necessarily... the project file for it corrupted and broke some pretty significant channel strips that were integral to a lot of the texture and timbre of the song. i was hoping to do more with it but what i ended up doing was just sharing a piece that i exported earlier in its life so it could maybe be something i revisit, but its a bit unlikely unless i become very motivated lol.

i think after spending a few months sitting with how it feels to finally have a few more things tacked on to my discography, i see plastertones as an attempt to take flight once more and as me trying to unstick myself. its an ep that i wanted to release to show that i can change and do drastically different things because i refuse to stagnate. ive had a tough few years going forward with my life and i see what i decided to publish in 2024 as me saying, "no more waiting or sitting around!"
im hoping this year to release even more and i want it to be even more true to what i want in my life. i hope people enjoy it, but regardless of if they do or not i will continue to make things until i die and i do not want that to change.