It’s been a super busy year, but here’s one last music release from me before the end of 2022, the Voices at the Edge of the Universe EP!
Featuring an assortment of faux-sampled hip hop, shoegaze, space folk, and electronic pop, this is a sampler of tracks from the soundtrack to Studio Élan’s in-development yuri visual novel Summer at the Edge of the Universe!
Today, Studio Élan released the visual novel Please Be Happy, for which I composed all the music. The soundtrack is 18 tracks of (mostly) warm and comfy music, and you can get it now from Bandcamp!
It features Michaela Nachtigall on violin and viola throughout, and the opening track is sung by Dottovu.
The beautiful OST cover artwork was done by adirosa, who also played a huge role in the creation of the game itself.
The soundtrack to Heart of the Woods is coming to vinyl, in a beautiful 2LP set from Very OK Vinyl with new artwork by adirosa and two bonus tracks by me! Preorders are up now!
Future Human is now officially released! You can get it from Bandcamp as well as most other music services.
Preorders are now live for my synthwave album Future Human, releasing May 6th! This one’s been in the works for a long time and I’m thrilled to finally be putting it out soon. You can hear the first three tracks now on Bandcamp!
Studio Élan has recently announced two new projects slated for 2021 releases, Summer at the Edge of the Universe and Lock & Key. Summer is a romantic adventure story centered around space travel, and Lock & Key is a story about retired magical girls investigating a series of murders. I’ll be providing the soundtracks for both, and you can hear a preview of the Summer at the Edge of the Universe soundtrack now via SoundCloud:
Studio Coattails has released the first two chapters of the visual novel National Park Girls! I provided its soundtrack, a peaceful acoustic folk and bluegrass fusion with quartet strings. The insert song “Broken Wings” features vocals by Lisa Reimold. You can find National Park Girls on Steam and itch.io, and the soundtrack is available there and on BandCamp.
Two weeks ago, Studio Élan released our debut visual novel, Heart of the Woods. The response to it has been overwhelming, and we’re absolutely thrilled that it’s meant so much to people! I contributed half of its soundtrack, released on the OST “Snowfall”, including the music from the trailer above.
You can find Heart of the Woods (and its soundtracks!) on Steam and itch.io.
A year ago today I released PC LOVE LETTER, a six-song EP that went from concept to release in only seven days.
It started, as most things do, with a dumb joke. I was awake in bed one Saturday night when the phrase PC LOVE LETTER intruded into my thoughts, and I thought “that should totally be someone’s vaporwave pseudonym”. I thought for sure the too-obvious pun on “PC load letter” would have been claimed by someone already, but a quick search around online surprised me: this dumb joke was mine for the taking. So I decided I would do a vaporwave project. I had never even considered making vaporwave before that moment, but there I was.
In some sort of crazed state, I wrote three songs the following day. They were simple and messy in a way that was exciting.
At the time, I had been in the midst of a years-long struggle to complete Future Human, which was planned to be my third proper album and had been “nearly done” for about two years. I badly needed a break, and this was a good excuse.
There had seemingly been two things slowing down my music work: obsessive focus on production detail, and overambitious songwriting. I had a tendency to either create lots of undeveloped 40-second song snippets, or spend years trying to perfect the drum sounds on a song that was already basically done. To avoid getting similarly bogged down here, I aimed for a rough lo-fi sound and allowed songs to be simple vignettes if they wanted to be. I love the cozy and mysterious atmospheres that lo-fi production can create, and on PC LOVE LETTER it helped give each song its own color and space, like different rooms in a house.
Vaporwave is best-known for slowing down and reprocessing samples of decades-old music, but I didn’t want to do that here. Rather than digging through archives for old pop songs to repurpose, I was going to do vaporwave my own stubborn way: from scratch, while still aiming for that same sound and feel.
The three songs I wrote on that first day were Customer Service Beam, Art Bits, and Cipher. I based the first two solely on my vague concept of what vaporwave was: weaponized music-on-hold, reprocessed infomercials, a love for old computers, a nostalgic reclamation of corporate art. For Cipher I took a more dark and somber direction, loosely inspired by a Phil Collins song featured in a strange 1989 anime of the same name. I wrote Empty on the second day, going deeper into that nocturnal direction.
The dreary vocals on Cipher and Empty began as upbeat dancefloor-type clips from a royalty-free vocal pack, the closest thing to traditional sampling anywhere on this EP. I threw them into Reason’s pitch editor and transformed them beyond recognition, rewriting the melodies and stitching together entirely new words — I’m convinced that Reason’s pitch editor is some sort of alien magic. I also slowed them way down to get that lethargic, exaggerated articulation common to vaporwave vocals.
PC LOVE LETTER’s warm lo-fi fuzziness was mostly created using Reason’s built-in effects, and was then enhanced further by slowing most of the songs down a bit in Audacity afterwards. I gleefully committed the grave music sin of writing and mixing with the intense effects processing already coloring the master output, letting them completely define the sound from the beginning. The finishing touch came from my longtime friend Tom Pritchard, who recorded the finished songs through his tape deck at home for that last bit of authenticity.
With each new song, I couldn’t help but get more and more ambitious. I decided to try taking the faux-sampling idea a bit further by building Liminal Space around a short repeating clip from an unreleased experiment. I isolated a few notes that looped interestingly, and added a tinny synth bassline and some bits of percussion to sound like the loop had been pulled from something more complete. I stacked some fuzzy synth chords and a deep bass drone on top of the loop, and Liminal Space started to take shape.
At that point I had completed five songs in three days, so I was feeling ambitious and ready for anything. The final song to be written was Funeral Benefits, and it proved to be the biggest challenge. I decided I’d start this one by writing a classic-sounding song in its entirety, to use as source material for sampling. The source-material song came out great and I was excited to start playing with it…until my hard drive died and I only had a backup from the previous night.
I salvaged Funeral Benefits’ source material from an MP3 I had excitedly shared with a friend that night, and started chopping it up and layering it with new parts to expand on it and compensate for errors and oddities that I no longer had the ability to fix in the source itself. It still wasn’t quite complete, and I was already entirely neglecting my overambition guideline, so I wrote another source material song to chop up and use as an intro before it kicks in. I’ve always loved Timeless by John Abercrombie and I took some direct inspiration from that as the starting point for the intro here.
With Funeral Benefits successfully rebuilt from the ashes, I now had six songs done in six days, and I was thrilled with them. I decided to release it as soon as possible, suspecting that if I didn’t strike quickly and call it done, I would probably let it sit on the shelf for years. But I still needed cover art for it.
After a brief aimless attempt at HyperCard-inspired cover art, I decided to try my hand at collage-making. Most of my friends are familiar with my love of Robert Pollard’s music, but he’s also a formidable collage artist, and I took a lot of inspiration from his artwork here. I went through a bunch of old computer magazines and ancient machine-parts catalogues on archive.org and took a screenshot of anything that looked like it might be useful, and started assembling the pieces together in Photoshop with no plan in mind. I came up with three possible cover collages that morning and ended up choosing the second one, which seemed like the best fit for the songs.
I released PC LOVE LETTER a few hours later.
In some ways it feels less like I created PC LOVE LETTER and more like I summoned it into existence from another dimension. This EP came together more quickly than any other music project I’ve done before or since, and I’m still not entirely sure how its creation went so smoothly. (Yes, I am seriously saying this about a week in which my hard drive crashed and needed to be replaced.) However it happened, I’m glad these songs chose me to create them.
I have PC LOVE LETTER to thank for lifting me out of a creative rut and for kickstarting a far more prolific year than I thought I was capable of. It also, incredibly, directly led to my being given the opportunity to compose for Subserial Network, Sol Hemochroma, and Heart of the Woods.
Thank you, you magical little EP.
PS: If you enjoyed PC LOVE LETTER, you might also enjoy Transmission Control, a followup created as the soundtrack for Aether Interactive’s Subserial Network.
My latest music release is a hazy guitar-focused dreampop EP called Piaculum Arcana, which was written as the soundtrack to Aether Interactive’s Sol Hemochroma. They’re both out now!
Also, if you haven’t played it yet: Studio Élan’s yuri visual novel Heart of the Woods has a demo out, and I contributed a lot of music to it! The demo was recently updated with a Chinese translation and some additional art. The full release is slated for the end of this year, and you’ll be able to pick up the soundtrack then, too. In the meantime, you can hear some of my songs on YouTube now!
I also recently wrote up a post for the Studio Élan Patreon, going into detail about some of the decisions I made while working on Heart of the Woods’ soundtrack. You can read about it if you’re a $10 patron or higher.
