#vylop

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.