Il-Advised Records

Hey y’all! Chris here again, AKA Dated. In today’s blog post, I wanted to take some time to announce something I am pretty excited about.

Horror manga is near and dear to me. Western horror very rarely achieves the level of engrossing, gothic, bizarre horror that Japan manages. Popular J-Horror films like The Ring (Ringu) and The Grudge (Ju-On) have shown western audiences just how different and terrifying the Japanese take on ghost stories can be, however horror manga has the same level of unique flavor, but applied to so much more than just ghosts and curses. Lovecraftian terror, body horror, surreal atmospheric horror, and a myriad of unsettling locations make horror manga a special type of experience, not only the best in horror comics, but some of the best horror period.

As many of you may have noticed from a lot of the imagery and themes around the channel, I am a huge horror manga fan. It is a big source of inspiration for me, and I have samples quotes from anime adaptations of it, names songs after horror manga series, used visuals such as GIFs directly from horror manga, created a lot of artwork for the label in a horror manga style and have even released horror manga videos on the channel on rare occasions. Needless to say, I’m really into this stuff.

This is why I’ve decided to start a second Youtube Channel specifically for horror manga content. This won’t affect the way I upload to the main channel at all, and is mainly a way for me to release as much of this type of content as I want without feeling like I’m bogging the main channel down. Youtube also works in a very unfortunate way, where if I upload a horror manga video and lots of people don’t click it because they came mainly for the music, Youtube may actually stop putting any of our videos in their feed - something that may be happening to you for your favorite channels without you realizing it. For this reason, I felt it was best to keep things separate.

That said, I have noticed a pretty big overlap with fans of horror manga (or potential fans who haven’t heard of it before), and listeners of dark lofi music. My hope is that I can funnel everyone who it interested from the main channel into this second one so that I can give you lots of horror manga content.

The main content I’ll be making on this new channel will be reviews of specific titles, spotlights or essays about certain authors, collection tour videos, and “unboxing” style videos when I get something new. My hope is to provide a lot of detailed content about horror manga which doesn’t seem to really exist out there, tailor-made for those who are as obsessed as I am and newcomers alike.

Hey everyone! Chris here again, AKA Dated, and this time I wanted to talk a bit about our new podcast series, “The Weather Channel”. I want to talk about what this thing even is for those who might be new around here, as well as what my intentions are with it, what the inspiration for it is, and all that good stuff.

So to start things off, I’ll talk about what this project is. The Weather Channel is a radio-themed podcast in which the eponymous “Weather Man” gives you updates regarding the news and weather, as well as playing a few songs. The twist being that these reports are coming from a strange town in which all manor of creatures, paranormal events, bizarre customs, and eldritch horror are commonplace. This series started out as a number of skits from the Dated albums “The Weather Channel” 1 & 2, on which there were many 1-2 minute long “weather report” clips which would play in between every few songs. These skits proved to be fairly popular as weird bits of media amongst fans of the the label, and they established a sort of “lore” which other mixes and releases have tied into somewhat. There was a foundation there for a larger narrative and more material, so a full podcast program felt like the logical next step.

Before I get into what my plans for the podcast are and where it is going, I want to talk a bit about the inspiration behind it, as that will make it easier to describe how this is different from other similar media. The most obvious source of inspiration for this podcast would probably be the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast, however I would say it has has less of an influence than some might think. I’m a fan of that podcast, though I’ve only listened to ten or so episodes, but it has more or less been something in the back of my mind more than a primary source of inspiration. I would say that my biggest influence from that program is Cecil Baldwin’s delivery. I would say that as far as subject matter in my actual writing goes, my main influences are actually more in-line with the larger analog horror genre, and things like Local 58, Gemini Home Entertainment, and things like that. I am also very influenced by older horror cartoons from the 90s and 2000s, such as Courage the Cowardly Dog. While this is a common theme in something like Night Vale as well, there was a real trend when I was growing up of shows for kids that centered around scary stories, all of which just sort of expected what they were depicting as totally possible, and they would just jump from story to story, assuming that you were along for the ride with no explanation as to how any of it would work. Some stand out series in this vein were “Freaky Stories” and “Tales from the Crypt Keeper”.  In more modern times, the reddit board r/NoSleep has also played a role in my inspiration, as it is similarly a place for people to tell stories in first-person as if they are recounting actual events that the writers have experienced, and the readers of the board are expected to suspend their disbelief and just accept that all of the stories are true. This tradition of extreme suspension of disbelief extends to analog horror as well, which is always more fun when you treat it as if it were real media, and you are part of its world.

So that brings me to what my plans are for this series, and how I believe it will stand out from the rest. The biggest difference for this podcast when compared to something like Night Vale, at least for now, is the short-form nature of the individual updates. I don’t have any plans at the moment for multi-episode narratives in which you need to have heard a past episode to know what is going on, and I don’t plan to have long stories within any of the episodes which take up a substantial portion of the episode. That isn’t to say there won’t be recurring characters, locations or events, but that there wont be some ongoing saga with crucial plot points found in earlier episodes, which you would have to have heard in order to fully know what is going on. This is also not to say that every news or weather update will be super short, some will be longer than others, but I always want to keep that feeling of each episode giving you a lot of different information, as if it is really covering all the recent happenings of this strange town. Another plan for this series, as many of you may have seen, is that I will be creating little lore tie-ins and other bits of media elsewhere on the channel. Our ‘emergency weather update” videos are a bit of visual analog horror which will generally foreshadow something from a future episode, or generally tie into the lore of the podcast. There will also be references and tie-ins found here and there on future musical projects, as ‘The Weather Channel” tapes had done before, though some of these will be less obvious than others.

And that’s all I have to say for now! At the time of writing this, the script for episode 2 is finished, and I’m about to begin recording it. There may also be another emergency weather update on its way soon.  

For those looking to check out the series, you can find all the links to it on various streaming services here: https://illadvisedrecords.com/the-weather-channel

Hey guys, Chris here again! Sorry it’s been so long since the last post!

one of the reasons it has been so long is because we’ve been hard at work here putting out a ton of new releases. This marks a pretty big shift in focus for the label, and I wanted to take a bit of time to go into detail about the overall “sound” of the label and what our goals are - and really always have been.

I’m sure that most of you reading this probably found this label sometime around Halloween, and it was probably either through one of our annual Halloween mixes, or the Dark Lofi Hip Hop mix, both of which feature beats by Dated (me). Those mixes blowing up the way they did was a crazy surprise that I could never have anticipated, and it really was the spark that turned this label from a quiet place to post my own beats into the beginnings of the real label that I wanted it to someday become.

The dark lofi is near and dear to me, and will always form the core of what this label does. We aren’t, however, a dark lofi hip hop label, and never really were. I myself didn’t start out by making these dark beats, and it took years of experimentation before I even thought to attempt that sort of sound. Before that, I was just making chill/oldschool boom bap type beats, and just having fun playing with dusty old samples. I was sitting at a bus depot waiting for my ride home from work one day while I jotted ideas for a new tape down in a notepad when I came up with the idea for The Weather Channel, and all the dark lofi hip hop that I’ve become known for since then has all stemmed from that moment.

Around that time however, we were still putting out other regular lofi beats, both in my own random side-beats, as well as the beats of Wayvee Tapes, who collaborated with me on the Half-Baked Beats tape. The dark lofi was one new direction of what I hoped would eventually become a wide-spanning range of different sounds as we found more talent for the label.

Fast forward to now, and you’ll find lofi hip hop, dark lofi hip hop, synthwave, experimental/industrial, darkjazz, trip hop, plunderphonics, and we have plans to branch out still to lofi house, synth house, and plenty more. With all of these different genres being released, what they have in common that makes them relevant to this label might not be immediately apparent.

If I had to describe our music on a really short tagline, I would probably just describe it as lofi and retro music. That pretty much covers all the hip hop and retrowave stuff, but it doesn’t really describe the core “essence” of what makes a release fit in here. our tagline often throws around the term “internet music” in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way, but it is probably one of the more accurate descriptors. What genres like lofi, retro, experimental, trip hop, dark jazz, all sorts of electro, etc. have in common is that there are a lot of bedroom producers out there who are experimenting with the their genre, and who are more focused on doing something creative and honest than making the cleanest, over-produced radio music. What we primarily want to release is music by underground artists who love what they do, and who either bring something totally new to the label or compliment our established sounds well.

If you’re out there thinking “man, I have some cool music, but I don’t know if I should submit it”. the short answer is: yeah, submit it! The longer answer though, is does the music fit into a trend that is already proving popular on the label? If it does, we will almost certainly want you on board if the music is solid enough. For example, the dark lofi is easily our most popular genre on the label. I can almost guarantee that anyone who submits a really strong sounding dark-lofi project (not even hip hop, necessarily) is probably going to get signed, because the appetite for it is the largest. Fitting in isn’t the only way to get signed, however, as we also don’t want to paint ourselves into a corner. Our recent release by BROOK is super far outside of our most popular dark, brooding material, and that was one of the reasons it was appealing to me. it represented a range of emotions that have a place on this label, that work with the other material to provide something for everyone to listen to, no matter their mood. First and foremost however, that project just had a real soul to it, and some incredibly catchy tunes, which made it stand out immediately.

Going forward, we’re doubling-down on this mentality. You’ll see a lot more dark lofi material, but also a lot more music that spans other genres and moods. We’re also looking for ways to make this label more of a home for our artists than just a faceless Youtube page that spam-posts songs and tapes. as you may have noticed, we’ve just put out our first LOFI LIVE set, which will be the first of many. The plan is to put out sets by as many artists on the label as possible, complete with collabs and crossovers. We’ll also be looking into putting out more collabs between artists on the label. The eventual plan is to also start putting out more production-focused videos, either process vids or vlogs, or even tutorials on specific production techniques. The plan is to make this less of a song machine, and more of a bunch of cool folks that you want to keep up with and chill with while we share our art with this awesome community.

There are a ton of new things coming, so I hope you are already to come on this ride with us!

Hey guys, Chris here again!

You probably know by now that I produce music on this label under the name “Dated”, but what you may not know is that I’ve also produced the upcoming Cyberghost album as my first real Dark Synthwave album. This is a pretty sharp left-turn from my usual work in lofi hip hop, so I wanted to go into a bit of detail about why I started making this sort of music, how I learned to do it, what I used to make it, and what inspired this project.

This story begins where all stories about getting into something new in 2020 will - quarantine. While I run this label like it’s a day job, I actually have a “real” day job as an administration manager for an art gallery. March came along, and so did the COVID situation, and I found myself laid-off for about 4.5 months straight due to a lockdown. The first few months were mostly spent playing videogames and watching movies, but after a while I started to get the itch to use the time a bit more productively. Around that same time, I happened to come across a track on Youtube which I hadn’t hear in a few years - Carpenter Brut’s “Escape from Midwich Valley”. While I had heard his music before, and enjoyed it quite a bit, I never really looked into more tracks by Mr. Brut, and had mostly just listened to the odd Perturbator album as my experience with dark synthwave. This time, however, it just grabbed me, and I spent days just listening to dark synthwave music and wondering how they all made it. As someone who has always worked with samples and knows absolutely nothing about music theory or sound design, I have always been mystified as to how people actually make “real” music. For whatever reason, the obsessive part of my personality kicked in right then and there, and I found myself looking for synths to download and searching “how to stay in key” on Youtube.

What followed was a solid month of spending about 16 hours a day doing absolutely nothing but looking things up, working on my own tracks, and watching 80’s horror films on Shudder every time I had to stop working to eat something. My girlfriend was coincidentally out of town for the month, so I was able to just go in hard on this whole dark synthwave thing. The first thing I found that really made it all possible was the “stamp” feature in FL Studio’s piano roll. As if magically, I could just pick a key, see what notes were within it, and then just always be on-key if I stuck to those. It took some time to figure out my timing and how to write something that didn’t sound terrible, but at least knowing I wasn’t falling out of key really gave me the confidence to play around with notes until I felt my riffs were getting catchier. The other biggest game-changer was buying some paid synths. Free synths are great and all, but their main issue is that they are generally built to make a pretty wide-range of sounds, and I found myself getting buried in massive preset libraries rather than being able to find those authentic 80’s sounds I wanted. I picked up U-He’s Repro-5 (which comes bundled with the Repro-1), as well as the TAL-U-NO-LX, which despite only being $50 USD is hands-down my most used synth. The TAL is lightweight, has a nice simple arpeggiator, and I honestly don’t think is capable of making a bad, un-80’s sound. The Repro was also great, and allows for much more full, complex sounds which still ooze 80’s vibes, but since it is a much more resource-intensive synth, I found myself using it less often due to the need to bounce sequences out to WAV frequently to keep my DAW from lagging after a few layers. That said, you can hear all 3 synths on pretty much every Cyberghost track, as well as a few later additions such as Serum and Mono/Poly.

That bit of research had the technical bits sorted out, but an album doesn’t write itself. The actual process for creating the tracks was loosely built around a concept - that of a mysterious, isolated town in the woods, being investigated by someone who gets pulled deep into darker events than they had anticipated. If that sounds a bit vague, well, that is intentional. I wanted enough of a concept to help me decide which tracks to make and how to arrange them, as well as what to title them and what album art to produce, but didn’t want some beat-for-beat script I had to illustrate through music. Also helping things along were the avalanche of 80’s horror films I consumed during the time I wrote the album (and consistently afterwards). Some standouts were Manic Cop, The Mouth of Madness, Sleepaway Camp, and Pieces.

It took about a month to get the first 6 of 8 tracks finished, and then I finished the remaining 2 tracks (which were Midnight Detectives and The Ritual) over the course of another month or two once I had returned to work. I drew a few designs for album art and picked one, which I posted in the last blog post, but later scrapped for what would become the current album art (the inks for which can be seen above). I’ve been a visual artist for a long time, so that was probably the most approachable part of this whole project.

And that’s the story of how a guy who can;t play any instruments or write music, and had never touched a synth before wrote a synthwave album in a few months. Whether it turned out well or not will be up to you folks once you can hear the full thing on the 11th, but I’d like to think it turned out pretty decent. If you’ve ever thought about learning to create something new, but thought it was out of reach, I’d urge you to push that negative voice down and just jump into learning about it without thinking. You’d be surprised how things can sort of fall into place, and the process of learning can carry you to a point where you can actually start doing without thinking so much about it.

The full album comes out this coming Monday, January 11 2021. If you want a sneak peek at the album, you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/HkBylYMa6wQ

Hey guys, Chris here (AKA Dated).

As you may have seen, I’ve recently put out a new drum kit with some dark, lofi samples. If you’re into that kind of thing, you can check it out here: https://illadvisedrecords.com/shop/dateds-dark-lofi-drum-kit

I’m not here to talk about that, though. I want to talk about how I make my drum kits, why I do it, and why you should probably be doing it as well.

I’ll start with the why: it’s easy, and it is another way to make some passive revenue over time. As a producer, you have to look at many different ways to make money, not just relying on streaming revenue (which is pretty inconsistent at best). The best way to make a little extra is to look at the things you’ve already made and utilize them.

As far as the how goes, well, you’ve already done it. In a way, at least. See, all it really takes to make a drum kit is to have made a bunch of tracks, and to generally mess with your drums while you’re making tracks. I don’t know about you, but when I make a track, I rarely just drop in a drum sample and do nothing with it. Most times, I’ll stretch them, layer them, add all sorts of effects, pitch-shift them, and so on. By the time you start with some generic drum sound and you make it yours, you’ve probably created something that will be a new flavor for people looking for new sounds to work with.

Whenever you finish a tape, just go through your project files, isolate your drums, and bounce those WAV files out. Give them some spicy names, maybe make some loops to put in there too, find some FX you were messing with, and just compile as much original stuff as you can. Boom, there’s a drum kit.

I don’t want to make this sound like some cheap way to make easy money either. There is serious demand amongst producers for this sort of thing, and the fact is that most people just aren’t thinking about making drum kits as much as they think about making music.  If every producer I look up to put out a kit, I’d buy all of them, because I’m always trying to figure out how I can make something that sounds like something else that inspires me. People may want that from you, too.

For anyone who wants to see an example of how I put my kits together, there is also a free drum kit that I put out a while ago in the shop here: https://illadvisedrecords.com/shop/dateds-filthy-fing-drum-kit. If you like what you hear, consider picking up the new kit as well, as every little bit helps me keep doing what I do.

Strange Times In Elderfield

Hey everyone, Chris here! Welcome to our first Ill-Advised blog! We’ll be posting these blogs fairly regularly to keep everyone up-to-date on what we’re working on, and giving you a behind-the-scenes look into how we operate.

As you have likely noticed with our recent NETCULT release, we’re branching out from just lofi hip hop music into some other genres, namely dark synthwave next. Our next upcoming album, “Strange Times in Elderfield” by Cyberghost will mark our first major, full-length release in the genre. This album is likely to scratch an itch that fans of artists like Carpenter Brut, Perturbator, Gost, and others left in the time since their latest releases years ago. With this release, we’re hoping to fill a recent void in dark, aggressive synth music that also makes use of catchy riffs and melodies, as well as plenty of 80s nostalgia.

This album has been complete for about 5 months now, and we’ve been itching to share it with you. We’re taking things a bit further with this one, and in addition to offering Cassette and Digital formats, we’re also going to be offering CDs, as well as limited edition Type II Cassettes, which allow for much higher quality audio while still being compatible with all cassette players. The first 100 CDs as well as all 100 copies of the limited edition cassettes will also come with an 11x17” signed poster of the album art, and the limited edition Cassettes come in a special box. Links to order these will be in the video description when the album drops on Monday, Jan 11th.