The life and times of a weirdo

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~ Chapter 1: But Only Truly Backwards ~

There's a site I lurk and very rarely post on known as Battle of the Bits.

The general premise is that people can host Battles, music-making challenges designed to be completed within a set timeframe, most often only one hour, with restrictions both in format and theme. It's very much chiptune/tracker music centric, but there are formats that are inclusive to all types of gear - notably, the format "allgear"! These are the battles my scant few contributions to the site have mostly ended up in, and while I've never been a regular, I do genuinely credit doing OHBs with making me a better musician.

This was mostly just a couple week stint back in 2018, though, and many factors have kept me from participating more often than just a couple luckily-timed battles here and there - not to mention I took a two-year break from seriously making music at all also starting in 2018. However, one fateful December day last year, I was feeling nostalgic and full of creative energy, and loaded the site back up hoping to find a challenge to contribute to -

Only to discover that there was a whole extended series of autumnal allgear challenges that had wrapped up mere days prior. They had a cutesy name and everything! FALLGEAR! I was aghast! That's my shtick! I'm the autumn bitch!!

Dejected. Despondent. Defeated and desolate. The fates had dangled their red string in front of my face, a pane of glass between us, and I had just smacked into it with such raucous and foolish force I'd broken my nose.

This wouldn't stand. Thus began my own One-Hour Battle against the shifting sands of time itself. It ultimately took two hours, but thankfully, an old and constant companion of mine found me in my hour of need.

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~ Chapter 2: All I Wanna Do ~

These manic bursts of creative energy have historically always been how I've made my music, and to some extent, they still are. These self-imposed time limit challenges have mostly taught me how to make the most of them, and how to summon that energy at will instead of it simply manifesting at its own whim.

Even so, it is incredibly difficult to explain the struggle I have with executive function.

I can think to do something. I can feel the impulse welling up inside me. I can push and pull at my body, trying to fire the appropriate neurons. I can scream bloody murder at myself. I can cry my damn eyes out. Sometimes, none of this is enough to make my body move.

If it was a matter of desire, it would be easy, but wanting something simply isn't enough. There is a great, wide gap between me and the things I want to do, the words I want to say, the people I want to love, and I've built my bridges and flying machines and telephone wires to make that gap smaller but on my worst days all the therapy and mindfulness and medication and agony and longing in the world just isn't enough.

If you also have ADHD, this all might sound familiar to you.

It feels a lot like heartbreak.

I've made my love of the band Prefab Sprout known publicly many times over at this point. Paddy McAloon is maybe my favorite songwriter of all time, and for good reason - I struggle to think of anyone else who can pen such mellifluous and heart-wrenching words with such effortless precision.

I've drowned in that same longing. So, yes, maybe I Wish That I Could Fall is simply my take on Bonny with a pop chorus - But Kelly Clarkson did it with Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I'll sing my throat raw to both Maps and Since U Been Gone.

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~ Chapter 3: I Would Give My World To You / In Simple Repetition ~

alright lets cut the bullshit and talk about Original Characters. this is why this post is so long

I've only discussed it publicly once or twice, but given that I wrote a whole song about it, it isn't really a secret that most of my leitmotifs and a solid chunk of my past two albums are also about my OCs. "Also" being a key word here - songs like I Wish That I Could Fall and Greatsword / Love as Fire and People Posture Play Pretend ultimately pull substantially more from my own life and experiences than they do from any derangement I may be experiencing over my Guys.

That being said. Some people draw their OCs. Some people make playlists for their OCs. Some people RP their OCs. Some people make massive Scrivener documents of worldbuilding with the goal of assembling a crack team of their incredibly skilled friends in other creative disciplines and making a game or something with their OCs. and for the record I am also that person but that's besides the point.

I assign my OCs little melodies and then shove those melodies down everyone's throats every five seconds in the pop songs I write.

This is Paisley Pudge.

She's a wizard. She's a cat, but also kind of a lizard. She has an airship. She has a hand cannon that shoots spells out of it. She's a felon. She's a wanted criminal. She's a theater major. She's dead, except she isn't. She experienced intense amnesia when she died-but-got-better and forgot who she was beyond the mythos other people thrust upon her so she's been consigned to perpetually playing a part of a goofy genki bastard because the parts of herself that aren't at the forefront scare her to death, except her whole arc is about finding herself again in the midst of a grand political struggle and revolutionary movement she found herself in the center of on account of also being a known felon. She has secret genders. She's the first person to run away to leave the circus.

This is Kalia Vibte.

She's a bird and she's 42 and tired and miserable and scared of losing any more people she loves to war and she bears massive scars and missing limbs as a consequence of getting embroiled in conflict years ago but it's all coming back in full force all of a sudden and her wife (paisley pudge) has this deranged and manic look of almost joy on her face when she fights and she doesn't know what to do with herself. There's a long and winding path she goes down to deal with this and she comes out the other end of it reinvigorated as the most 2008 kind of chuuni like straight up her character inspo sheet has Maka Albarn and Edward Elric on it i'm sorry but she's cringe. She also has secret genders, but mostly known genders.

sorry what were we talking about again. right the song

I Wish That I Could Fall was originally a Kalia song, and it still bears a lot of her and Paisley's motifs. It still is, to some extent, but there is a third piece of this beautiful toxic yuri triangle.

The art above is by my girlfriend, my darling dearest, the person that I've written so much of this with, Nancy - and I will link her Bluesky account but I need to warn you that her account is very much 18+ and explicitly NSFW because she draws a lot of remarkably buxom catgirls for FFXIV players. If that's your sort of thing though do follow her.

She has a character, too - miss Errianna Nollau.

The full melody is longer than that but I have to tie this back to the song or it's gonna get dire!

She is simultaneously a terrifying masked force of nature operating as the human embodiment of a fascist empire's supposed might and a deeply bitter and suicidal one-track-minded weapon of a woman who had everything taken from her by said empire and who is hellbent on fashioning one Paisley Pudge into a war hero worthy and capable of committing the necessary acts to see that horrific nation burn to the goddamn ground, killing her in the process. She gets better though and then her paisley and kalia kiss #lesbian style probably

Now I'm going to level with you all and let you know that I don't really know where I've been going with all this beyond finally explaining some of the leitmotif usage in my music and showing you the characters behind them

Um

I love my girlfriend and I love writing bullshit with her and I made this gay longing song that uses a melody associated with her OC because I love her

Yeah!

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~ Chapter 4: A Fire Lit Within My Chest ~

Longing is a central theme of this album - the album motif is a thesis statement, really! The conflict between what currently Is and what you Want is at the core of basically every song, and IWTICF leans so heavily on said leitmotif because, in my opinion, it is the one song that sums up Constant Companions as a whole the best.

I had originally intended for there to be a secondary motif alongside the melody, in the form of saxophone. I've always been a very big fan of how sax sounds, and the only reason I didn't play saxophone in middle school band was because my parents didn't want to deal with hearing me practice sax 24/7. That being said, they instead let me become a percussionist, which in hindsight makes absolutely zero sense if noise was really their concern so I don't know what was up with that.

Ultimately, the sax motif idea didn't really pan out, but it still exists very prominently in both IWTICF and Cadmium Colors. Whenever I manage to finally properly pre-plan one of my albums before I start working on it, I swear, I'll be unstoppable.

I Wish That I Could Fall is also one of two MVs for the album that were filmed and edited by yours truly! I wanted both IWTICF and Machine Love to have a similar visual style, and the disconnect between the artificial (computer screens, projections) and the tangible (live-action footage) very much felt appropriate for both. There's an inherent longing to me, being on one side of an impassable pane of glass and trying to find connection with what's on the other side.

That being said, it was a pain in the ass to film and an even worse pain in the ass to edit. For some godforsaken reason, I decided to use exclusively Final Cut Pro for all my motion graphics work that would've been far better suited to something like After Effects or aviutil or even Apple Motion, for god's sake. The project files for these are all hundreds of gigabytes large. Please don't be like me.

Anyways, it's maybe a silly point of pride, but I would like to point out - There is no stock footage used in either Machine Love or IWTICF!! Every single bit of live-action footage seen in both MVs was filmed either by me or by someone I directly asked to film it. For years now, I've been filming random moments of travel or motion, and I finally found a use for a bunch of it!

...My next video will hopefully be smaller in scale.

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~ Chapter 5: To Do You Right ~

The art in IWTICF's MV was done by my good friend Bear, aka BEARVAMPS!*

We'd previously worked together for the song 🤼‍♀️, and he's genuinely one of my favorite artists to work with. He immediately understood the vibe I wanted to go for when I mentioned the MV's theme of repetition, and was shockingly quick with producing it. That being said:

GUMI is not dressed like Sans Undertale she is a bluejay her design is invoking a bluejay I know that she looks like sans with the hoodie and she's even got the one glowing eye thing but she's not supposed to be sans she's a bluejay oh my god it hurts it hurts it hurts

Here's art Bear drew of me while I was having an emotional breakdown over a game of riichi mahjong last night

*I've told a white lie to you for the sake of this post's structure. Truth be told, Bear was not solely responsible for the art in IWTICF's MV! Who is this other mystery artist, and what did they draw, you may ask?

Well, it's my girlfriend Nancy once again!! And she drew the ending shot!!!!

Constant Companions is decidedly GumiTeto propaganda, and I stand by this, but Nancy insists on Gumi and Miku, and who the hell am I to deny her this?

Finally, I'd like to extend my most heartfelt thanks to Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs for jumping into a lake for me. They drove multiple hours on a whim just to jump into a large body of water and film it on camera for my music video. Like genuinely, they just went there, jumped in the lake, and then immediately drove back. I love my friends so fucking much

AND WITH THAT!!! I think that's actually everything!! My word, apologies for how long today's post is. Actually no, no diminishing myself. You're welcome for how long today's post is.

Tomorrow... I may have to delay a day depending on if I get it written in time. But whether it's tomorrow or Saturday, I'll see you back here for Cadmium Colors!!

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oh baby mental health

Last post, I mentioned as an aside that I have OSDD-1b - a kinda complicated diagnosis that is defined by not quite being Dissociative Identity Disorder but being similar enough. And obviously that's super reductive but I'm not an expert on this I just have brain peculiarities. I won't fully explain how this functions, or every intricacy of how I deal with it, but I can try to convey what it feels like.

My sense of self is comprised of parts. Not an exceptionally high number, but nonetheless distinct parts that fit together like puzzle pieces to make a full individual. They talk to and interact with each other, and most times it is one specific part that takes the lead while the others simply follow, but ideally, they all move in sync and work together.

This collaborative effort is relatively new and was an incredibly hard-fought state of being. For many years, it felt much more like there was just me and a bunch of nightmare voices in my head constantly lashing out violently!! My own inner monologue felt completely out of my control... and it ultimately turned out that it kinda was, but not for the reasons I thought.

Showing those voices kindness and starting a conversation was the big moment of revelation for me, that there was this whole other half of me that had been locked in a box for god knows how long. She was scared and lonely and just wanted to be understood, and really, that was all I wanted as well.

Writing these self-directed songs of love and companionship became a really important part of becoming 'whole', in some sense. Not that there are no more individual parts or anything!! Just that my inner monologue these days is far more of a conversation between friends.

...

Constant companions, if you will.

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As a couple people have pointed out, this song is very much a counterpoint and companion piece to weathergirl, a song by my band FLAVOR FOLEY! Neither song was originally written with the intention of complimenting the other, but the parallels simply emerged naturally, and it only felt right to reinforce them. At 2:14 in Breeze Blows, you can even hear the icy little keys motif from weathergirl front and center!!

On that note, while I would love to make MVs for every song on the album, Breeze Blows is the one song I am dead set on putting out an MV for no matter what... A yellow, very natural aesthetic to contrast with weathergirl... ANRI in a sundress, fluttering in the wind and clutching her hands to her chest...

the fucking yuri...

Of course, this song was a collaboration with some other dear friends of mine, Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs! We've been fastidious friends for freaking forever. Marcy, especially, has been with me through thick and thin - together, we've gone on road trips, worked on Homestuck music, bounced countless ideas off of each other, embarrassed ourselves in front of each other's parents, queued for probably a triple digit number of FFXIV instances, and of course, collaborated on some of my favorite music I've ever released. Not to discredit Marlow or anything!! These two are genuinely some of the coolest people I know, and I love them wholeheartedly. Hopefully we can play some mahjong again sometime so I can kick their asses and feel like I'm even a tenth as cool as them

Our initial ideas for this song came together while we sat at the piano at my parent's house, aimlessly banging out chords together while I left my phone recording on the other side of the room just in case. Ultimately, the voice memo barely sounds anything like Breeze Blows, because the process of translating things to MIDI on Marcy's laptop also introduced a lot of defining creative choices, but it's still at least amusing to hear.

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I'm usually pretty good about letting go of the things I make and letting them live imperfectly, but there is exactly one released song of mine that I've ever been actively unhappy with the final product of, that I haven't been able to let go of my displeasure with.

Honor Majesty, off of Autumn Every Day.

It's not that it's a bad song, or that it didn't have good ideas! In fact, I genuinely think it shares more with the music I make now than a lot of my older work does. Rather, it was incredibly rushed and full of uninspired choices I made for the sake of completing the song rather than making it the best version of itself, and it ultimately ended up falling incredibly flat relative to what I wanted it to be!

I really like the intersection of synthpop/electropop and fantasy. One of my favorite musicians ever is Baths, whose album Romaplasm is chock full of this exact thematic and sonic intersection, and it's so deeply inspiring to me that it still gets put on whenever I want to dream things up. I've always wanted to make things like that! Bubbly and fantastical, brimming with a sense of magic so pervasive it makes even the mundane seem mystic.

...Also I'm just a fantasy dork okay. I like wizards and shit. Sue me

I've been wanting to make a grandiose and fantastical story song for years, and my single attempt to do so felt like it missed the mark entirely. I did touch on fantasy a couple times on Bittersweet, but ultimately, when I started working on this album, I knew exactly what I wanted to take a second crack at.

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The intended story in question here is fairly vague, but to sum it up as literally as possible:

A rebellious, disobedient, gender-questioning prince has mildly inconvenienced "his" royal lineage one too many times. Their solution is to invoke magicks widely regarded as heretical - what's a fantasy monarchy without some hypocrisy - to seal their "son's" soul within an automaton body, rendering "him" a perfect, subservient doll.

This doll is promptly spirited away under cover of darkness by a mage, and is granted free will once again. She experiences the crushing weight of newfound self-awareness and nearly spirals out of control, before realizing the mage who saved her is the same - a doll. It turns out being a magical-mechanical construct has its perks if you are TRANSGENDER. then they overthrow the monarchy and fuck nasty or whatever idk this is where the story gives way to things like "metaphor"

this is a song about artifice and being transgender

Seriously, though, I know that being an electronic-music-producing transgender lesbian with a thing about dolls or robots or whatever is a major endless-store-shelves-of-identical-buzz-lightyear-action-figures moment on my part, but dammit, I own a copy of Logic Pro and a genuine leather wizard hat, I inject estrogen into my stomach fat every Wednesday, and I think ball joints are cute. I'm posting this on Tumblr, for gods sake, I am unconcerned as an active choice

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With the exception of Liaison, the entirety of Constant Companions utilizes only three unique vocal synth characters - ANRI, Gumi, and Teto. This trifecta was born organically from simply being the vocal synths I enjoy using the most, and in this song, I wanted to use all three of them almost like one single singer, freely shifting intonation based on the context. I messed with this idea before on Ballroom, my voice meshing and melting into Gumi V3's voice, but it felt especially appropriate for this context; Plus, I feel like there aren't a lot of examples of vocal synths being used/recontextualized in this way, and that's a shame in my opinion!!

I really want to do more story-driven songwriting like this in the future as well. Now that I'm a bonafide VocaloP I've been floating the idea of doing a song series with this trio... I'm mostly just worried I'll want to get too ambitious with it.

Off the top of my head, Object of Affection references at least eight other songs of mine - Honor Majesty is an obvious one, but it also directly samples parts of Autumn Every Day, and lyrically references genuinely just a bunch of things. I'm probably forgetting some, even!

I know I'm the Leitmotif Lover, but it's a lot even by my standards. However, this song's entire existence already served to satisfy a fairly self-indulgent desire, and these days, I don't deal in half measures. I think the final product serves as a lovely little look back at where I've come from, though, and perhaps even a little glimpse into the future!

That all being said, Object of Affection in some sense is also a love letter to a beloved part of my creative process - the voice memo. A lot of the audio I've provided with these posts have been recordings off my phone for good reason! Not only are the chops at the beginning of the song entirely comprised of edited recordings I got on my phone, but the sample at the very end happens to be from a particularly legendary recording, never before heard by the public...

Until now. I present to you an excerpt from "the worst beat on planet earth", featuring none other than unit.0.

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Every time I first embark on the process of making another album, I always think I know what the final product will look like. This is a fairly recent phenomenon, born of the part of me that thinks that planning things out and being somewhat disciplined in the act of creation will ultimately lead to a better final product. That's fair and all, but it's also genuinely never how things actually shake out, as I almost always toss that out the window and just start writing shit the first chance I get.

Constant Companions, however, is the closest I've gotten to actually following through on those initial ambitions. Well, maybe not the initial ambitions - without fail, every time I finish an album, there's a two week period where I start writing new material thinking "this next album's gonna be the MOODY one" and it's never the moody one - but rather the plan I developed once my pile of works-in-progress started looking album-shaped.

There's always been some amount of self-referential leitmotif-loving song-series energy in what I've written - Imaginary, Effervescent and Secret Girlfriend; sampling myself on Too Much Autotune or Second Hello; that little four note motif. I had been leaning even further into it with People Posture Play Pretend and 🤼‍♀️, bringing the little interconnected background radiation straight to the forefront, and I wanted to keep going.

So, I would take that mindset and write about motifs - the things that have stuck with me and gotten me to where I am - the hopes that I've clung to, the dreams I want to make real, the patterns that I keep finding myself in. The things that haunt me and the things that keep me living.

...

My constant companions, if you will.

wait didn't i already do that bit. what was i talking about when i did that

This might be incredibly obvious if you've already read the Closeup for Breeze Blows, but yes, this is another song about being plural.

Like I said previously, writing these self-directed songs portraying internal conversations has been a very big part of finding peace within myself. Having to confront a part of myself both alien and overly familiar with seemingly a mind of her own is, understandably, scary as shit in countless ways! If nothing else, it feels like sometimes I can't even talk about it out loud without sounding completely gone.

But it's made me realize and really think about something I think most people take for granted, something that feels silly to even say out loud given how obvious it is but that has completely changed my relationship with myself - you are always a part of your own life.

The overwhelming, ceaseless negative self-talk I lived with for however many years never went away because it was a part of me, and no amount of compartmentalizing or boxing-up or repression or anything helped even in the slightest compared to the act of showing her kindness and patience, letting her be a genuine part of me, being a friend to her. Doing so revealed to me a happier, more hopeful part of myself I thought I'd lost forever.

Letting yourself be yourself, and loving yourself for who you are, is the best way to be!

or something. that feels so fucking dr seuss of me to say whatever we're corny here we will Be corny

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The working title of this song was "Hathaway", inspired entirely by my friend Lexie messaging me one morning about a dream in which I had released a song named as such. Naming and writing songs based on dreams is maybe my most beloved bit at this point, but my girlfriend ultimately convinced me to make the title My Darling, My Companion. Mostly because she (correctly) thought it'd be cooler than just a pure title track.

The verses were written by sampling my own previous demo for a title track, turning it into a call-and-response between me and GUMI, and the chorus was lifted almost word-for-word from another demo of mine using Teto. That second demo was partially inspired by the character Morgan from the visual novel Heart of the Woods - which I mostly bring up because it's just a really good yuri VN that is near and dear to my heart. And also because my friend Teffi voices the character Tara in said VN. And also because I recorded my vocals for this song at her house. And also because the voice that says "me when I'm goated as fuck" right before the second verse is in fact Teffi in the recording booth with me. Yuri runs deep in my veins.

Speaking of which, this song, in my mind, is one dedicated to advancing my agenda of GUMI x Teto, albeit subtly and in a roundabout way.

See, GUMI has always been something of an idealized voice in my other work. The songs of mine she sings historically have always been hopeful, upbeat, expressing some sense of comfort - I Wish That I Could Fall maybe being the only exception, and even then still offering some hope in the end.

On the flipside, there's a part in verse two where my voice is swapped out for Teto for a couple lines. I couldn't really tell you what it is, since it's not in terms of timbre or range, but Kasane Teto - her Synth V voicebank especially, but really all iterations of her - is the vocal synth that feels the most like a stand-in for my own voice. And really, writing with her almost seems to bring out parts of myself that are a bit too honest.

These two juxtaposed against each other made perfect sense. It helps that they have The Color Scheme, too.

Finally, this song is basically just one big reference to my song Destiny, from back in 2018, and it even closes out with lyrics based very directly on its closing refrain. I don't have much else to say on that front - but there's another Jamie Paige song this bears some shared DNA with, and a blatant reference to it is hidden in plain sight right as the bridge transitions to the outro.

Do you know what it is?

That's the post! If you have any questions, feel free to send them my way - I'm planning on doing a big AMA style bonus post after the album's finished!!

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Let's circle back to the very first track, Dyad.

In that track's closeup, I mentioned the main sonic touchstones of this release relative to my previous ones being guitars and vocal synths. The whole guitar rock thing I think I've gone into detail enough about, what with all the inspirations I've rattled off in other posts, but there likely is still a burning question for some long-time listeners.

Why vocal synths? Why am I not singing on like half of this album? I thought you were a singer, Jamie Paige, so what is this Hatsune Miku robot Vocaloid crap?

Truth be told, the Vocaloid scene and community has always been a massive source of inspiration for me. So much of my favorite music ever, music that inspires me or touches my heart or makes me go apeshit, has been sung by synthesized vocalists in a language I don't even speak. I grew up with it, and it's grown up with me - music just as intricate, mind-boggling, twisted, fun, and ridiculously creative is being put out every single day by vocal synth producers, and nowadays it's coming from English speaking musicians in droves!

Before this year began, I'd made at least one major contribution to the culture, but in spite of my genuine adoration of everything vocal synth related, I felt like I was just looking in from the other side. Caught between worlds, existing outside of any communities, simply gesturing vaguely towards what I wanted to do.

But I wanted more! I wanted to make the same kinds of things that stirred my heart and made me want to write! I wanted to sing with those same voices! I wanted it to be true - to be like you!

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I won't lie to you and tell you Kasane Teto has always been my favorite vocal synth. That title used to go to GUMI, and in general, I wasn't particularly attached to any UTAU voicebanks as a younger vocal synth fan. (Nowadays, I genuinely open up OpenUTAU just as much as SynthV because I've fallen deeply in love with Adachi Rei, but that's a story for my next album.) Obviously, I knew of Teto, and found her presence in things like Triple Baka delightful, but for the most part, she was mostly something of an oddity, a wayward piece of vocal synth history that had her Fans like any other.

However, there was one Teto song I've been inexplicably attached to since the moment I first heard it - Song of the Eared Robot, by nwp8861. I was introduced via this particular cover, which I love, but I quickly gravitated to the original. Something about the warbly, childish nature of her very first voicebank, the ambitiously orchestrated and unabashedly digital instrumental, the lyrics referencing fundamental frequencies and Markov chains and compiling code all just spoke to me!

That song stuck with me, laying in a part of my heart that had been collecting dust, all the way to April of 2023.

Now, yes, Teto wasn't always my favorite, and I had other vocal synths I was attached to, but I don't live under a rock, and I still understood how monumental the announcement of Kasane Teto's Synth V voicebank was - to the point that I interrupted a call full of FFXIV-playing friends who knew barely anything about vocal synths and gave them an impromptu TED talk because I was so excited.

(An excerpt of a summary of that night's events, written the morning after. i was up my own ass a little bit but in my defense Kasane Teto had just been announced for Synthesizer V)

I was watching, in real time, a dream made manifest. It's literally one of the Bits with Teto! That she'd be a Vocaloid one day too! And here she was, on the fan favorite engine, sounding genuinely fucking incredible. Especially in hindsight, it's such a beautiful and perfect twist of fate for her.

I saw myself in her. A weird little outcast, explosively reborn and thrust straight into a community's open arms with love. I wanted it to be true - To be like that, too.

It didn't fully hit until later, hearing another cover of a song I'd almost forgotten.

Machine Love, my love letter to the entire world of unbridled creativity and artistry surrounding vocal synths filtered through one sentimental little song, was fully written by the start of May, maybe 4 days after I had gotten my hands on Teto SV and long before a certain compilation album was even a glint in my eye.

If you haven't heard DAEMON/DOLL yet, you really, really, really should go listen to it - yes, I mastered this album, many of my friends and collaborators are featured, and I have two entire songs on it, but I genuinely mean it when I say I believe it's some of the best fucking music that's come out this year in general. In many respects, it also feels like a companion (hah) to Constant Companions.

I had finished writing Machine Love by this point, but it was working on this album in its entirety - discovering artists like Anh Duy, Eggtan, and beat_shobon through it, and hearing everyone in top form making this twin-drilled chimera fucker sing her heart out - that not only made me confident in my decision to go down this artistic path, but that made me fall completely in love with Kasane Teto. And honestly, how could I not? She feels like a microcosm of everything that makes vocal synths so special, this community of creatives all leaving their marks and touchstones along the trail of a great big shared folk mythos. Yeah, maybe the folk hero we're all collectively mythologizing is an anime girl, but yknow maybe Odysseus could take some branding cues from hatsune miku idfk

Basically, even if he says he wants to kill me, I owe fucking everything to rice for inviting me to work on DAEMON/DOLL.

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On that note, my vision for Machine Love's MV was pretty clear from the beginning.

the actual factual setup for the above shot, which was done entirely in-camera with my laptop, a tv, and two video files manually synced using VLC

The fundamental idea was always there - live-action shots of animation playing back on various screens, edited together to feel somewhat seamless. However, I really struggled with what exactly was going to be on said screens for a while; Big commissions were very far out of my budget, but I knew this song needed something grandiose.

Ultimately, what I arrived at was exactly the kind of scrappy, DIY bullshit it was always meant to be.

I asked my Twitter mutuals for help. And spent a couple months in Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion hell turning all the Teto art I got into a bunch of tiny little mini MVs, some of them parodying real vocal synth MVs, some of simply just evocative of vocal synth MVs, all of them painstakingly edited by yours truly and filmed with the help of some friends over the next couple months across two states and many more cities just to be painstakingly edited and synced up again by yours truly.

THE NEXT MV I DO WILL BE SMALLER IN SCOPE

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And with that, I believe that's the album!

There's a reason it ends with Machine Love, and not with the title track. I do think that in some respects My Darling, My Companion would have made a better closer, but that song only really resolves one of the thematic strands running through the album.

There isn't really a definitive answer to the specific question "Baby, do you know what you wanna hear?", but it evokes a theme running through the entire album - wanting something, knowing that you want something, and simply needing to find the courage to do it or say it or be it. My Darling, My Companion is in many ways a declaration of intent, an acceptance of what needs to happen, but Machine Love, to me, is that action being done. The words being said!

And now, if I may give this a somewhat selfish tint - with the explosive response my works from this album have gotten, my contributions to things like DAEMON/DOLL and Flavor Foley, the collaborations I've done and that I still have in the pipeline, the friends I've made and the community I've found a spot for myself in, and the newfound voices that I can lay my heart bare with -

Well, shit, I know what I wanna hear, and I've gotten to hear it. I'm a vocaloP. It's real!

Thank you all so goddamn much for reading and listening. I'll see you back here either tomorrow or Monday for the bonus AMA post thing!! Make art and be gay, motherfuckers.