[001 - it's a scary world out there, but_]
"no more starship tunes!"
29 jul 2024
warning: weird artsy introspection.
This is a somewhat impromptu small writeup about starship tunes 3, a specific track, and a bit of waffling about music.
Starship Tunes as a whole (beyond whatever internal canon/narrative I had established) was meant to be an EP serving to be a musical equivalent of "where my head's at", and I feel like I always get it as accurate as I need to.
However, in recent I've been considering deeply how I feel about my own music and how I wish to make it further.
"it's a scary world out there, but_" is probably one of my favorite songs that I had worked on, but it was also mostly a collaborative effort. I had made the initial minute and a half of music, sent it over to oooz to which he added other instrumentation and other drums. I was left with this demo for a while, but I didn't know how to build off of it into finishing the song in a way that I thought would be cathartic or evocative of the emotional imagery that I was looking for, and I got pretty upset over it. What followed was a bit of art-block followed by a bout of self-doubt and pity, and I couldn't really work on the rest of the EP because of it (I was pained over certain ideas for how I wanted other tracks to sound, there was going to be another opening track that I had finished but I chose to scrap it entirely).
This cycle unfortunately continued while I tried idea after idea and just Didn't work on the EP for a while while I worked on other projects for people just to sort of give myself a bit of a musical pallete cleanse. They were good, and I really appreciated the experience and perspectives it provided to making VGM, I've wrote about it here.
Eventually, one morning while I was walking to class I was listening to swami sound's "Back in the Day" and I got to the drop in i said and I was struck with inspiration for how I wanted to finish "it's a scary world out there, but_".
I had remembered a drawing that I had made a long time ago, I think it's only on the barely active melo-dii instagram, but it was a short ink scribble that I had done my sketchbook with melo-dii looking out wistfully to the stars, and the drop happened to have resonated exactly with that feeling, which in further had corresponded to the feeling I wanted the ending song to evoke.
Eventually I made a drawing on my pocket notebook which became the basis for the cover of the song (on soundcloud), and in a call with my partner I had made the remaining 2 and a half minutes of the song before spending the next few weeks refining the end to make it more cohesive and climactic. It was very satisfying, and downright cathartic to be able to have a portion that I think currently most reflects a pillar of what I want to accomplish with dance music. Furthermore, this was something that was definitively my sound, brought from immaterial context into physical space in some manner. Obviously, all of my pre-existing music accomplishes this in some way, but this example was one that I felt most proud of.
This all has to do with how I want to go forward making music as "melo-dii". I find that most of my music, even though I (and others) enjoy it, lacks a certain fullness that I find in the mixes of other tracks and projects that I really enjoy. The mixes and instrumentation of most of my music is rather minimal, and while that itself can be interesting I tend not to take advantage of that aspect of my music (and even if I did, I feel it wouldn't really be fit for melo-dii anyhow).
There is an essence that I wish to draw from and portray in my music that I feel like I'll withold the details on for now. In the music that I most enjoy, there exists a type of awareness that goes beyond the physical and the musicians often understand the paraphysical aspects of their music that coesxist with it. I wish to draw from that perception, while keeping my usual "vigilance", "insight", and introspection that I tend to bring toward my own music under melo-dii. On top of that, I would like to also just get better at making jungle like the old cats did. It's great music, and the sort of visceral, raw and "scary" sound that they manage to draw from it is something that I relate to as a trans person.
Hopefully this will be something that I can manage to iterate on going forward, but I'll have to see through that matter myself.
[m-d]
If you have any thoughts or whatever, email me