Mess remembers a feeling that will never return.
Mess is "almost" accidental.
Mess wants to forget.
Mess fakes a smile to make others happy.
Mess can't be itself around others.
Mess is redundant for a reason.
Mess doesn't want to be alone.
Mess might not be worth your time.
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Mess is my first full-length album, and you bet I'm super proud of it! Released on October 10th, 2021, it contains songs I've been working on from late 2019 to mid-2021 and it got its name from the lack of direction and eclectic nature of the songs. You can listen to the album through Bandcamp below and if you scroll further you will find a little description for each track.
Let me quick clarify, the name of this track is pronounced "And Or". This song was written about the 1983 Namco arcade game, "Xevious", or more specifically, the enemy called the "Andor Genesis" from said game. Xevious is one of my most favorite arcade games of all time, and I wanted to show that love through music. It's kind of interesting because not a lot of songs exist about Xevious so I guess I'm one of the few now. You can hear parts of the game, like the background music, coin insert sound, and even the latter half of the song takes a part from the Andor Genesis theme from the Japan-only sixth sequel to Xevious, called "Solvalou". I decided to make this song after I had already made the next track in the album, 'Genesis'. I thought it would be funny to put the two songs together in the tracklist so that it says "Andor Genesis" when read together. I'm sure this is like a joke that maybe 2 people will get and everyone else will be confused, but at least I think it's kinda funny. Another fun little fact is that a lot of my inspiration for this song's structure and sound design came from "Le Perv" by Carpenter Brut, which is featured in the soundtrack of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. The entire soundtrack of the DSi-Ware exclusive game "X-Scape" was also a huge inspiration.
I started writing this track by messing around with a synthesizer, and it had sine folding distortion, which I thought sounded kind of like something you'd hear from the Yamaha YM2612, which is the sound chip used in the Sega Genesis video game console. Listening to sounds produced by the chip and the sounds from this song side-by-side, you will quickly realize that they sound nothing alike. The song sat stagnant for like half a year until in November of 2020 when I picked it up again and made some serious progress. I wanted to capture the feeling of these dissociative episodes I sometimes get, where I can recognize my surroundings as being my home, my room, my school, et cetera, but for whatever reason they just don't feel like those places. I use that word because I don't have a better one to describe it, I don't know if it actually qualifies as dissociation. I don't want to falsely diagnose myself of something.
I wanted to make a single-synth solo piece that encapsulated the emotional state of having no active thoughts and floating in the mental abyss. I think I did a pretty darn good job of capturing that feeling. The synthesizer I used is called "Dexed", and it is supposed to replicate the 1983 Yamaha DX-7, which was the first successful digital synthesizer. Dexed had a preset called "Cascade 21", and I tweaked it slightly and then used it here. I have no clue why the preset is named "Cascade 21", but now it's the name of one of my songs.
This song is the oldest on the tracklist, having been created on January 21, 2020. I just wanted to make a song that had a more upbeat and danceable feel to it. I wrote the majority of the song in 2020, it stagnated in progress for maybe half a year, and then I finished and polished it up in 2021. Pretty happy with the sound design. OOH, WAIT!!! There's a bonus fun fact that I absolutely can't forget! The drum sequence spells "LMAO" and "PENIS! HA" at several parts in the song! I've included a picture below to show what I'm talking about.
The second oldest track in the album, Ethereal was made AND completed in April - May 2020. I wrote the song out of anger that when I tried to use my qwerty keyboard as a midi keyboard in Mixcraft, I couldn't play a 4th triad (notes 1[C], 4[F], and 5[G] simultaneously). In response to this frustration, I made a song that played the notes individually in sequence. I then added rain to make you feel connected to the world while trying to get lost. This song is meant to represent the feeling inside that I feel after listening to really peaceful ambient music. I put a couple of other real soft instruments alongside the piano to bring some flourish to the piece and make it feel somewhat otherworldly. You're trying to lose yourself in the sound, but your fears are holding you to the ground. You need to open your heart and let go of those fears. Fun fact about this song: the project file for it is called 'Friend'.
I came up with the short, repetitive melody for this one day, and I thought it would be really cool if it was played by a backwards piano. I wrote the melody, wrote it again backwards, exported the audio of the backwards melody, and reversed the audio so it was playing the forwards melody, but with a backwards sound. I really wanted to capture the idea of varied redundancy in this one, so every part of it repeats. The short melody repeats so many times that I don't know how many it is, the longer melody repeats 3 times, and the deep pad sound repeats twice. Every time you hear the notes repeated, the overall sound is never exactly the same as the last time you heard it, which brings variation into the song so that it doesn't get too boring too fast. The repetitive nature of the song might make the listener ask "is it over yet?", referring to the song, and maybe the album as a whole. Fun fact about this song: every time I would work on this piece, I would get an intense fear of dying later that night. I don't know why.
The very first part of this song that I made was the intro. That sounds pretty normal, but the part that makes it worthwhile here is that I was experimenting with making an ambient soundscape, which is something I haven't really done before. I then wrote the entirety of the rest of the song in like half a week. I hated the way it sounded because nothing felt congruent with each other and the song felt like it was fighting itself. The song sat stagnant for a few months until I erased pretty much everything besides the intro and outro, and started over. The old version of the song is still available to listen to on my YouTube channel and as a bonus track if you buy the album off my Bandcamp page. The song sat stagnant again for about another month until I suddenly had a deadline to finish the album and quick wrote the rest of it up in like 2 days. Yeah, it was a little rushed, but I think it still sounds pretty good. I wanted to capture the feeling of repetition in the everyday life while also conveying a sense of loneliness. Fun fact: nobody except me knows what this song is an aftermath of.
The project file name for this track is "Hyper Photo-realistic Fabrication", and the song was originally about paintings. I kind of swerved from that path and instead made the song about the album as a whole. I wanted the middle section to feel like you were remembering what the songs sounded like after you had heard them for the first time by playing the melodies from the other tracks on synthesizers from this track. The idea of the songs are there, but the sound isn't a perfect replica. The rest of the song, being the parts specific to Mess, were inspired by the messy and frustrated nature of my thought patterns while writing this album. I'm very proud of the use of noise in the ending, it's my favorite part of the entire song. The final melody that plays softly after the noise dies down was inspired by the song "Cemetery Window" by Red Vox, which does a similar thing. Although this track was one of the ones that was rushed due to a deadline, I think it worked out pretty good for what it is.