Renzu blog

    Producers (and more generally artists of any kind) often keep quiet about how they arrived at a final product, maybe because it removes a certain mystique to their work, or maybe they feel that their unique sound will be threatened when their tools and methods are divulged.  I suppose exposing some of your production process does both of those things, but as a fan of knowing how things are created myself, I present a sort-of “commentary track” for Across the Threshold, my latest freebie music album that weaves Japanese sounds with electronic music.  During the course of producing this album, I went ahead and bought Ableton, Ozone, NI Komplete and a few other VSTs, along with gathering a collection of freeware, so I can actually talk about the majority of what I’m doing without incriminating myself on warez.

    First off, why Japan?  I’ve always been attracted to Japanese aesthetics, whether new (moé & iconic abstraction) or old (transience, deepness).  My music has always reached for an otherworldly (“deep” I guess) theme filled with soft, frail sounds (transience: wabi-sabi)– contrasted with “violent” drum programming and messy breakdowns (transience: mono no awaré) .  At the same time I always liked to personify my music with melancholic, singing synth-leads & melodies and my tendancy to name my tracks after things like characters.  I think of a lot of my tracks as theme songs for places and characters. This abstract characterization ties into aesthetics like moé, so as far as theme goes, Japanese aesthetics have always been in my music overtly or subconsciously.  And as far as sound goes, I’ve seen several taiko performances (from local groups) in the past.  Hijacking Japanese sounds for use in electronic music was something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.  Obviously I’m a big anime/game nut.  For this album I’ve been inspired by everything from Ookami to The Tale of Genji 1984 anime film.  Haruomi Hosono’s Genji soundtrack in particular is a very haunting mix of traditional Japanese music, synths and digital effects… the soundtrack is what eventually drove me to roll my own for this album.  Some songs have a particularly “BGM” feel to them.

    I’ve always been attracted to production art that depicts an otherworldly plane seeping into the mundane world, like Kamichu, Mushishi, Natsume Yuujinchou and so on.  That, as a vague idea, is a driving theme in Across the Threshold.  Every time you put your headphones on, your mundane world intersects the virtual world inside your music player.  The tracks in Across illustrate the hidden worlds of the small (Zashiki-warashi), the profound (Daifuku), the virtual (Miku Acid) and the spiritual (Across the Threshold) at the intersection of the past and future (Nakoruru).  The album begins with earthly, “live”-like sounds and generally moves towards abstract synth-heavy sounds as it progresses, “crossing the threshold” to an unearthly plane.

    A lot of what I do is driven by sound rather than melody.  Melody and harmony (music theory) has always been my weak point.  You’ll hear me wanking the same minor keys and chords over and over across all my albums, but at the same time I’m shuffling sounds and styles.  Most of my inspiration comes from playing with toys– Miku Acid and Zashiki-warashi are among the more obvious of  ”check out these cool new synth-toys!”, as opposed to more aesthetically deliberate songs like Omamori and Kuda-gitsune.  But even in my more “earthly” tracks I’m still driven by toys and sounds.  That kind of production style prevents me from having a certain sound or genre.  That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, it’s just how I work.
    What separates this album from Reiha and Kei is a greater emphasis on “real world” sounds as opposed to abstract, synth-heavy sounds.  The idea was to have tracks that provoke certain imagery, scenes and ideas rather than pure IDM-esque emotional/aesthetic abstraction.  Some songs like Kuda-gitsune have a downright soundtrack feel to them, so not only am I wanking “ethnic” sounds, I’ve been sampling CDs of traditional Japanese music, grabbing field recordings from The Freesound Project and elsewhere, sampling anime, as well as recording my own sounds with a collection of small instruments I’ve gathered.
    Similarly I’ve been trying to edge away from huge build-ups of analog synths and reverbs for a more focused, stripped-down, tactile sound.  Occasionally you’ll hear me constructing reverb & pad build-ups though.
    As I finished Reiha EP, I was nearing the end of my interest in the Confield-era Autechre style– Reiha has shorter, less tedious tracks than Kei and Kai, and Across continues that trend by changing course more rapidly and keeping some kind of progression going.  There are still some “last gen”-style tracks like Daifuku and Across the Threshold (i.e., build-up build-up build-up…), but those are in fact last-gen tracks made during or just after the completion of Reiha.
    I’ve been escalating my use of two-part song structures (heard previously in songs like Leviathan and Reiha) since that structure is an easy way to take a song in a different direction without having to think too hard about integration.  They’re not unlike a DJ session with only two songs and one crossfade.  Usually after one transition I have to clear the whole set of instruments to come up with something new.  I only made one chorus-verse-bridge song for the album (Nakoruru).  Most of the other tracks I can think of are either linear oldschool build-ups, linear part1+part2 etc. split tracks, or messy adventures (e.g. Pictures).
    I’ve also been trying to provide more audible cues in order to create anticipation for a song’s progression (i.e. the peak of a buildup or the bottom of a breakdown).  Where many of my previous albums had songs that were soupy and floating in space in terms of structure, I try to be more deliberate in dropping elements, killing certain frequency ranges (and other filtering gimmicks taken out of the DJ world) and so on, so hopefully Across is easier to follow than my previous albums progression-wise.

    Inn
    “Tada… where do you think we are?”
    There’s not much to say about this one.  It’s a mishmash of sounds and patches I had, thunder crashes, along with me banging on kitchen bowls, a CPU heat sink and a large ride cymbal.  In making this album, I scoured P2P networks for whatever traditional Japanese music I could find, so you’ll find some gagaku clips in this track.  Obviously I was going for a “haunted house” kind of soundscape here… though not so much haunted as otherworldly, saturated with gods and spirits.  I used a certain $500 highly realistic IR reverb effect for this one which I will probably never buy, so I try not to use it often.  It’s only useful anyway if you’re aiming to depict believable spaces… realistic reverbs tend not to have the same applications as abstract, “musical” algorithmic reverbs.

    Pictures of the Floating World
    Pictures was a very difficult track to finish.  It went through many drafts and revisions.  There used to be two versions of an additional bridge and second half that I ultimately tossed out.  I struggled with whether this track should remain on the album.  The song is a huge mess with many disparate parts that have nothing to do with eachother and a very loose, noisy sound.  At the same time, it’s an explosive intro to the faux-Japanese sound of the album so in terms of album progression, it serves a purpose.  I doubt anyone will be replaying the track 5 times in a row, but it makes sense in terms of the “journey”.
    My new and improved taiko drumset makes its debut here.  It’s a big sample set I meticulously constructed from taiko CDs over the years (an early version was previously used in Kuruma K).  I was especially happy to find some taiko group-rimshots and stick sounds since those are practically the taiko version of a clapsnare.  You’ll hear it in like every track I use the drumset.
    Nowhere in my library do I have a reasonable shamisen patch, so in tracks 2-4 you’ll hear me improvising with other asian-esque plucked string sounds.  This one in particular has a lead instrument assembled from four overdubbed instruments– a String Studio (Ableton Tension) patch, a Kong Audio GuZheng patch, a live picked violin, and a live clean electric guitar.
    Also on top is another “bouncing hammer” zithery sound from String Studio, and a buildup of electric guitars I created when a friend left his bass and electric at my place.  Not knowing how to play them didn’t stop me from exploiting them in this track, heh.  In fact (if this wasn’t obvious) I’m not great at any instrument, so I’ve had to stretch my ability and willingness to whip up faux live-sounding performances through meticulous sound editing, midi-editing and overdubbing.  Kuda-gitsune takes the cake though:

    Kuda-gitsune
    Kuda-gitsune is the last track made for the album, an xxxHolic-derived name (the short flick and the 2nd TV series are pretty alright btw).  I actually started the song as a variation of the ditty that closes xxxHolic Kei 13.  When I was developing the tracklist, I had a problem with how Omamori immediately followed Pictures– two loud Japsplosions back-to-back.  I needed a soft break in between, so Kuda-gitsune was created to fit the bill.  Aside from the analog synth buildup in the middle, the idea was to have a sparse-sounding track with some electronic bits thrown in.
    To aid in that sparseness, I used Guitar Rig (which is really Distortion, Cabinet Modelling and Analog Effects-rig since it’s applicable to things far beyond electric guitars) to reduce the fidelity of certain patches that sounded way too rich, like the wind instrument and the backup GuZheng zither that appears toward the end of the track.  In effect it’s sort-of lo-fi for the purpose of “realism”, otherwise things start sounding a little too digital and samply.  I also performed some simpler fidelity reduction with automated EQs for the lead asian banjo.
    The techno synthline that opens the track is actually an instrument that came with Reaktor.  When I found it I was like oh shit it’s Arctic Hospital in a patch!  When he said he used mostly Reaktor to make Citystream he wasn’t kidding.
    Thrown into the mix of my usual taiko drumset are some of the taiko drum samples included with NI Battery, so the sound of the percussion is a little different, a little more dry and meatier.

    Omamori
    Speaking of digital and samply, Omamori is another track created later as I noticed a deficit of faux-Japan tracks in the material I had so far.  It opens with a hand drum I bought at a garage sale.  It’s so simple, you have to tune it by wetting the surface or using a blow dryer.  It’s funny how with enough proximity effect, comperssion and reverb you can make it sound like a big drum (well, maybe not that big).  Omamori uses a bunch of strum samples so it sounds a little like a rehash of Pictures, but whatever.  It also uses a bunch of arpeggio/glissando samples so this track is corny to the max, which makes it kind of awesome.  It has a pretty nice bridge in the middle of the first segment, using a bunch of random recordings pulled from anime etc., and many more clips throughout the rest of the piece (At one point, Mushishi’s Renzu is handed a soda… Listen for it!).  Otherwise there’s not much special to say about the production– it’s mostly what-you-hear-is-what-it-is. I run a lot of ambient sounds (pads, voices, etc.) under a rhythmic ducking effect. Ableton Live makes it real easy with its compressor’s “sidechain” feature, where you can tell it to “listen” to any track in the project.
     I go a bit overboard with the second half but I couldn’t help myself really.  That long string-heavy melancholic bridge used to stretch on for the remainder of the song, so I opted to break up the doldrums with a relatively upbeat part with 808-esque drums and an arpeg Synth1.  That new part lacks finesse, but it was such a late addition I was like fuck it, Omamori is fixed and it’s time to get this album out the door already.

    Amasawa
    Amasawa is among the earlier tracks I’ve made for Across the Threshold, and marks the beginning of the more electronified majority of the album.  I made a neat idm/techno pattern on my Korg ESX. I thought I could develop it into a dance track, but after a while of struggling I was just like f-ck it.  I was watching Dennou Coil at the time (fun fact: I wrote 95% of that wiki article), so in the spirit of the series’ music, I filled the song with arpeggiated glocks, string pads, pizzicatos and an “ahh” voicepad, and hey… now it’s one of the more interesting tracks in the album.  There was a lot of fine-tuning in the mastering stage in terms of multiband compressors and well, everything else, since there’s a whole lot of high freq. energy in the track.  Tracks where the treble leads the mix tend to be very touchy in that dept. so I hope I struck the right balance of brightness here, though it’ll probably kill the ears of those listening on “bright” setups.  Mind that smiley curve on your EQ.  I also playtested it on a darker stereo setup, and the song sounded a bit muffled and dull.  I guess the unpredictability of high trebles is part of why that freq. range is avoided (in favor of ~5khz) in radio-friendly music.
    It’s also a difficult track since it’s deliberately overbearing.  It’s hard to tell where the fun ends and irritation begins… I’ve tried add a few momentary breaks from the brightness and intensity here and there, like the whole watery breakdown/bridge in the middle.
    I don’t know about you, but I certainly like the track.  I find it very vivid so it’s among my favorites in the album.  I also like the “walking through the forest” scene that marks the end of its hazy bridge segment. I guess I’ll break the illusion and say that breathing heavily into a mic and pitching it up creates the effect of breaths from a little girl.

    Zashiki-warashi
    Zashiki-warashi is a great example of a toy-oriented production for me.  The title is also another xxxHolic reference.  I was cruising freeware and I came across the (now highly recommended by me) Drumatic duo of 808-esque drum synths, and Xoxos Surface, which is a cute physically modelled percussion toy.  Beyond that there’s not much else to say about the track.  It’s so thin and simple you can pick it apart by listening to it.  I’m glad to have bought a drum pad controller since it sure came in handy here– I’m extra glad it was a Korg PadKontrol since it’s so absurdly touch sensitive, it might be the next best thing to a Zendrum.  You’ll hear me using a lot of Ableton Live’s “grain delay”, which I always like to use as an alternative reverb.  Sometimes I can use it as a reverb sans the “distant” and blurry quality that reverbs often have, but in this case I used it as a very echoey, chaotic delay.  This was also my first experiment with the Dominion plugin, which is a funky envelope-driven dynamics processor.  It basically allows you to adjust the “attack” (the snappiness) and the “sustain” of transient sounds without having to deal with thresholds, ratios, and dynamic range.  I used it in this track to reduce the natural snappiness of Drummatic, which allowed me to turn up the treble in the mastering stage for a clearer, more balanced sound.  I’ll probably find myself using it a lot in the future as a problem-solving tool.

    Daifuku
    Daifuku is a track I started working on immediately after Reiha, so it carries that old pad-heavy, beat-heavy sound and relentless build-up song structure.  Here I had a lot of fun using Guitar Rig’s distortion amps and effects for the drum parts.  It gives the otherwise samply percussion a dirty feel.
    The odd title is even more oddly named after Rozen Maiden (as Hina-ichigo’s favorite dessert… it’s just a nonsense working title that stuck), but the track itself is a big homage to anime composer Kenji Kawai, in particular his Patlabor: The Movie 2 soundtrack.  I found this chord patch that sounds just like the one he used in that flick, so I went further and added more of his trademark sounds like sustained pianos, taiko drums and a female ahhh voice (which was actually a recorded performance by a friend of mine, chopped up and reconstituted into layers of overdubs).
    Kenji Kawai’s older soundtracks have been an influence in this album, like his disembodying intersection of synths and faux-archaic sounds in Ghost in the Shell and the Japan-inspired synth-laden melancholic sound of Vampire Princess Miyu (TV) among several others, so I always wanted to do a tribute.
    Anyway, songs like these always require a lot of balancing.  There _are_ some lead instruments in this song, but I tried to make everything blend together like a big soup, as opposed to a more straightforward lead/backup configuration.  I put a lot of work into effects, dynamics, EQ and so on to make sure nothing pops out and ruins the hazy dream of the song.  At the same time, all the elements have to add up to a product worth listening to, so the sheer difficulty of this is part of why I’m trying to move away from this soupy aesthetic with my newer tracks.

    Nakoruru
    Don’t you love this track?  Here’s a song with a sparse, digital, samply sound.  There’s so much space in between the drums, you can just taste those long reverb tails.  I mixed in some electronic sounds and a lot of brush snare samples with my taiko set.  I have no idea how it added up to sound-texture magic but it did.
    The song is based off a track I heard when I was playing Samurai Shodown 6 (hence the track title), which mixed a jazz-hiphop sound with taiko drums and a Japanese choir.  I was immediately like fuck, I should’ve made this song.  So I started on a version, but with my attention span I knew I’d come up with something a bit different once I got the basic elements in there.
    I hand-made a typical e-piano chord pad for Nakoruru, but I tried to find a median between rigid digital samplyness and organic performance.  The patch contains several samples of the same chord being “strummed” with timing variations.  The sampler selects between the variations at random.  I still wanted to keep some of the cheap hiphop feel of digital resampling, so I turned off the ADSR release (i.e. the sound decays immediately).
    There’s a lot of contrast in Nakoruru.  You have the quantized, mechanical drumming, mixed with loose sounds like strings, a flabby analog bassline and a music box.  I like the breakdown since it feels like a literal breakdown of the machinery driving the song.  Then it snaps you awake with a “ding!” and proceeds with a very pretty build-up of strings and Ainu (maybe?) vocal clips.
    It also has a strong thematic contrast– the world of the old intersecting the new.  With all its old sounds and voice clips, it’s arranged in a pop verse/chorus/bridge structure and stylistically arranged like a hip hop track, with its quantized drum patterns, samply chord pad, heavy bass line and vocal clips that are, well, not unlike verses of rap music.  It has a bit of a ghostly edge in how it conjures the past into a modern structure.
    I would’ve liked to use a real violin in the track, but seeing that I can’t play violin worth shit I settled with samplers.

    Miku Acid
    I had to do it, this track.  I used a certain leekspinning voice synth that has achieved idol status over the past couple years.  By now she’s a passing fad, but I’d like to think that I made an interesting track rather than a disposable voicesynth rendition of [fill in the blank].
    This song revisits a robogirl theme I’ve used in previous tracks like Androsynth and Kuruma K’s second half.  Here, in what is very likely horrifically mangled Japanese, Miku talks about the emergence of her soul from her “metal body” and “electronic brian” and that she can “hear the sea of information” (original indeed).
    I go to great lengths to emphasize the artificiality of Miku’s singing by exploiting some of the weirder parameters of the synth, along with occasional Auto-tune effects (provided by Gsnap).  The glitch effects are provided by the tremendously awesome, freeware DBlue Glitch effects sequencer, used heavily in the second half.  The melody itself was created by pressing buttons in ChordSpace, so like Zashiki-warashi, this was another toy-driven track.
    I also tried to keep the song as minimalistic as I could.  Much of the song was Miku, a limited drum set, a few instances of Synth1 and effects.

    Stage
    Like Kuda-gitsune, Stage is another track created when I was solidifying the tracklist.  It’s just something to lead up to the next track, Across the Threshold…  Without it, the transition between Miku Acid and Across is jarring.  There’s not much going on here… some pads, some downloaded sound effects, some recorded stuff (shuffling paper, strumming on a totally detuned Chapman stick a friend left at my place).  Much of it is reconstituted parts from other song sketches that didn’t make it into Across.  There’s a lot of low bass and some deliberate clipping distortion.  The track is not that interesting but it serves the purpose of setting the stage for the next track.

    Across the Threshold
    For being the title track, it’s ironic that it’s a recycled song from the Reiha era.  It has that good old build-up structure and a synth-heavy aesthetic with reverb-heavy drums.  What prompted me to revive this song sketch from the dead was that, despite its Synth1-heavy dubby instrumentation, it (in my mind) conjures imagery of a serene snowy scene… at least in the beginning.  Eventually the build-up reaches a plateau of spookiness and breaks down, and goes for a spookier finale build-up.  The structure prompted me to name the track “Across the Threshold“, so there’s a bit of a storytelling element in this track and where it sits in the album.  The song (in my mind) portrays a fissure opening up in the fabric of mundane reality to another world.
    Like Daifuku, this is another soupy reverb-laden mix.  To make things a little more organic, I added some recorded china cymbal percussion.  You can tell I was never quite pleased with the song by the amount of frantic filtering and effect-automation that’s in it.

    Memories of Earth
    Memories of Earth (a reference to an early BLAME! chapter) was made in the middle of the album’s production, but was always meant to be an ending track.  It’s not that dissimilar in tone to the enders I’ve had for Kei and Kai and Synthi, this time with FM8 providing the obligatory long-decay synth sound.  There’s not much to it… lots of Freesound Project wankery and delay effects.  I actually don’t know what else to say about it, heh.  This track also fits in the storytelling of course, as the listener has “crossed the threshold” to some otherworldy plane and nostalgically remembers Earth, so I tried to aim for nostalgia as an emotional goal.

    Final thoughts and lessons learned…
    It seems like when people first discover compression, they go squash-crazy.  I’ve never had much of a tendancy to do this, but (in rare exceptions like Daifuku) I mostly laid off the heavy compression in Across the Threshold, particularly since I was mostly aiming for an open, organic sound.  Similarly, I used my mastering chain as more of a final problem-solving stage rather than a “make pretty” stage.  I’ve come to look at a lot of my practical tools (comp, eq, chorus/reverb) as problem-solvers rather than gimmicks to turn crap into gold.  It seems like an obvious thing to say, but I suppose it’s a lesson learned only through experience and struggle– it’s better to start with good core sounds rather than try to dress up crappy sounds with effects… also, it’s better to achieve a good sound in the mix rather than reserve “beautification” to the mastering stage.  With that evolved outlook, I’ve had much less trouble with Across’ mixing & mastering than with previous albums.  I had a better sense of what I needed to do, both in mixing and composition.
    Partially out of necessity (especially for this album), I’ve been moving away from my old outlook of meticulously hand-making all of my percussion sets and synth patches in a vain effort to “personalize” every aspect of the track.  In Kei and Kai for instance, I took some pride in the fact that all the synth patches were not presets but hand-made from scratch, if I recall correctly.  It also featured several drum sets made out of original recordings of me tapping and hitting things around the house.  While Across has a lot of that on the percussion side, much of it was to build a certain sound that I couldn’t grab offhand in some library.  Obviously many of the pitched instruments are sampler patches from ethnic libraries and whatnot, but even some of the synth sounds were pulled out of presets too.  In comparison to my more abstract electronic albums, Across presented me with a vivid goal to reach for (of a faux-Japan mythological fantasy world).  I didn’t want to be mucking around in synth patching so much when it had little to do with the big picture.  Instead I reached for many toys and sounds and tweaked them to what I needed to convey the scene and the journey.
    For mixing and mastering, I snapped and dropped 1.5 Gs on a new monitoring setup (Event ASP8 + Martin Logan Dynamo), and rearranged my entire room to get the best possible sound.  I wrote a blog article about it nearly a year ago called Improve Your Monitoring Setup for Free.  I wanted Across to sound substantially better than anything I’ve made in the past.
    In terms of a mastering “target”, Across the Threshold continues my trend in assuming the best from people’s stereos, though I imagine most people will hear it on desktop speakers and ipod earbuds.  The joke’s on me when I’m mastering it on my full-range monitoring solution and playtesting it on my high-end Grado headphones and Martin Logan electrostat home theater setup.  That’s fine though… ultimately the “target audience” for my music is primarily myself, so I don’t like to squash the sh-t out of my sound, give my music an excessively warm curve, duplicate the low basses to the upper bass and over-simplify the mix.  What’s the point of compromise if I’m not making a radio-friendly pop album?  I designed Across for people who love sound, because I love sound too.
    A mixing trend I’ve been moving away from is the overuse of reverb, because of its tendancy to make a mix sound distant.  In its place I’ve been using lots of delay lines if I need to fill space.  Ableton also has a really nice reverb alternative in the form of its “Grain Delay” plugin… give it a really large grain size (~1 sec) and a large “spread” parameter and it gives you a really chaotic delay, a reverb without the distance and a lot more texture.  The “random pitch” function gives it more of a chorus character.  I practically abuse Grain Delay every day now.
     I’ve found a few nice pieces of freeware… drumatic, dblue glitch and dominion have already been mentioned, but blockfish has proven to be an interesting compressor, MDA Stereo invaluable in channels (it’s a versatile “make awesome” effect), Ambience and Synth1 have always been in my arsenal, HighLife is kinda cool for freeware, and Destroy FX Geometer & Buffer Override are nice effects.  Lazysnake makes a nice electric piano too.
    On the commercial side of things, I’ve previously used FM8, Massive, Guitar Rig and Akoustik Piano (all very useful), but having just bought Komplete I’ve only just begun to explore some of the other NI plugins.
    I’ve bought a couple of rather expensive Kong Audio plugins– a GuZheng zither (similar to a Japanese Koto) and a Nanxiao (bamboo flute) and I can’t exactly recommend either.  Some of their samples have odd recording issues (background noise, inconsistant start times etc.) and the synthedit-based sampling engine & patches are a bit questionable.  The patches aren’t multisampled across the velocity range… how lame is that?  I instead ripped a bunch of GuZheng patches with HighLife and made my own multi velocity zone patch with it.  I ultimately did find both the Kong Audio plugins useful, but they suffer from some rather poor design choices.  They should give you like 2 awesome, highly versatile patches rather than a package of several simplistic ones for each instrument.
    String Studio (which I later bought as Ableton Tension) is a neat plugin, but for physical modelling it’s a bit limited– not so much in its synthesis, but in its “control”.  The excitation models are all a bit robotic and there’s not much you can do to make them more characteristic and human.  The developers need to discover real instruments and map the many real-life dimensions of expression in “triggering” strings.  Everything that comes out of String Studio in its current state sounds like a weird music box or some kind of abstract “ethnic” player piano, even after mapping the mod wheel etc. to some of its parameters.  It’s like the physical “motion” of the excitation engine is too rigid.

    Graphics
    I’m less able to talk about specifically what software I used here (haha) but on the real-world side of things, that’s a friend of mine dressed up in one of my mom’s for-real family-made kimonos.  It took us a couple hours of reviewing obi-tying tutorials and youtube vids to figure out how it goes on, and even then the back part is kinda half-assed cuz we were in a rush.  After that we did a photoshoot with her shiny new DSLR.  Also, those walkways of infinity shrine gates actually exist IRL.  The creature she meets in there is a mythological nine-tailed fox (although in the 3D model I probably made only 5 or 6, heh).
    Graphics wise, lighting & rendering are always a big focus for me and I always like to pay attention to those elements.  Frankly I’m not very good with textures and modelling but I’ve always found lighting & rendering to be much more of a playground.  In terms of composition, the graphics reflect my music in that they’re very soupy and scenic rather than having big focal points.  The images with definite subjects are always subdued into the scene, since I’m much more interesting in conveying the scene and atmosphere rather than propping up a polished “lead” element.  Did I mention I’m an INTP?
    I gradually became aware of my monitor’s fucked up gamma and ended up buying a color calibrator (a Spyder 3).  My suspicion of producing overly dark images was true, as the calibrator toned down (or “up” in terms of value) the gamma on my monitor, so now I can now trust my computer monitor like I can my monitor speakers.  Yay.
    The torii/kyuubi image marked my first (and hopefully last) foray into photomorphing.  I amassed a collection of fox heads, paws and torsos via google image, and I went to great pains to integrate it with the rendered body and the scene lighting.  With every new layer of touch ups, I felt like I was meticulously reverse-engineering what I take for granted in a 3D renderer– every aspect of lighting, shading, specular reflection with fresnel curves, direct & global illumination and so on.  Each graphic went through several drafts but Torii takes the cake.
    As I completed the images, a lingering dissatisfaction grew over the overall “immersiveness” of the images.  Something was missing, and no amount of fiddling with individual elements, effects, saturation levels and so on could do it.  One day I was looking at the tourou nagashi graphic I was working on and said to myself this area needs to be more green… fuck it.  I created a new layer on top of my entire supermassive composite and started airbrushing some green.  And then I airbrushed some more colors and magic happened.  The problem was I was looking at my composites like they were music mixes.  It never occured to me to just start painting some colors on top of the whole damn thing.  Unlike audio mixes, graphics can be easily adjusted with broad strokes, because audio is _only_ additive, where graphics can blend and occlude.  I can’t easily make a portion of my music “green” by adding a new green track to the mix– instead I have to deconstruct the mix and meticulously adjust every part in order to build a new “green” sound.
    I love that tacky photo mashup that makes the album’s back cover.  I laughed the whole time making it, but partially because its tackiness reflects some of the album’s overblown faux-Japan tracks like Pictures and Omamori.  It’s also nice to do a photo/graphics mashup that isn’t meticulously realistic like the other images.  The more discernable elements are scanned/photographed items from around the house– dolls, omamoris, and that kimono of course.
    At the last minute, I decided to whack together a flyby animation using recycled assets from the album cover and some older projects.  The fact that it took, between my two modern desktop computers (6 cores total), like 48 hours to render at 720×400 with 1 ray bounce&refraction, low AA and every scene/rendering/lighting/shader optimization I could think of, drives home the fact of life that all information technology begins to feel inadequite just a couple years later.  Many of the more complicated songs in Across were rendered at 44 KHz instead of 88.  I thought I could standardize 88K this time around, but maybe next PC.  Some plugins like Drumatic sound different (better) running at higher sampling rates.  Anyway you’ll notice lots of rendering artifacts and sloppiness in the video if you know what to look for, as it was whipped up in a mad frenzy and published a couple days after the release of the album. I mean damn, it even says “2008″ at the end. Whoops.

    Getting it Published
   This was a bit of an ordeal but in some ways it was self-inflicted.  The first label I sent it to (an electronic label) rejected it because it was too chinky too far outside of their sound.  That’s fine though… labels have to control their output because that’s the whole point, to cull and contextualize the vast (and mostly garbage) output of all the producers in the world.  Sometimes I wish netlabels were even more discerning quality-wise.  Anyway, to some degree Bump Foot probably made a bit of an exception for this one.  I’d like to say that oh, my album is too unique for genres or whatever, but in reality I made an album with a heavily ethnic sound, yet I still wanted to put it out on an electronic label and not a label that specializes in acoustic or “world” stuff.  For one thing, I don’t know about, don’t listen to and don’t care about hybrid “world” music, and for another thing I don’t consider Across to be vastly different from my previous all-electronic affairs.  I produced this one just like I did the others, except with lots of ethnic samples instead of electronic beats and analog synths.  What exacerbates the problem is only the first 12 minutes is heavily ethnic, and then you don’t hear much of it until track 8, Nakoruru.  It’s not a perfect blend of electronic sounds and ethnic samples. The two worlds of the electronic and the ethnic are very distinct, so the album has two sounds. I wonder if I sent it to a “world”-type label, they’d reject it for having too many heavily electronic tracks. Regardless, I wanted Across to be an album for the electronic world, because that’s where I come from when approaching the pseudo-asian sound.

   In my next thing for “Renzu”, I’d like to come up with something more integrated, where the ethnic and electronic cannot be easily separated and categorized.  I also want to continue my trends in vivid imagery and easier-to-follow progression. I often say the next thing I’m going to make is a dance album, but well, who knows, cuz I don’t.

(transplanted from facebook)

1. I am so hip and popular, I’ve only read about this "25 things" fad from opinion pieces in newspapers way after the fact.

2. I have a love/hate relationship with totally frivolous ego-stroking tools like this one. I love writing them, but I hate having written them. I guess it’s similar to how some people feel about (say) diary entries.

3. My handful of real-life friends are more or less aimless, deadbeat artists like me.

4. When prompted to write, I tend to write a lot:

5. I can’t maintain interest in a project or a narrowly-defined activity for more than a few weeks. This has prevented me from going for a straightforward, highly repetitive production job like "animator" or "audio mastering engineer". It also prevents me from becoming legendarily skilled at any one thing.

6. The projects that I have finished tend to be those that present numerous mini-challenges and opportunities to play with new toys & tools (e.g. music production). I’ve learned to design my projects to include as much of this as possible while minimizing tedium. It took me a long time to realize this about myself and come to terms with the fact that I can’t be one of those (say) highly dedicated, motivated 2D animators who can spend years of their life slogging away at one incredible solo short. My projects need to be more weird and decentralized if I ever want to see them finished. I’m best at work that requires connecting a bunch of disparate tools and skills into some vaguely cohesive product, so I maintain interest in music production & audio "as a whole" as well as 3D graphics (again as a whole).

7. I try to live below my means. A lot of the the baby boomer generation, whether you’re talking about fads like McMansions & SUVs, their associated problems like the crash of the housing & car industries + waves of foreclosures, the erosion of free time and sleep in careers, the paradox of women’s liberation vs the increasing unhappiness of working women in surveys, can be attributed to the baby boomers’ overzealous pursuit of the American Dream as a reaction to their parents and their Great Depression pessimism. I suppose my outlook is a reaction to that. I’d rather have disposable income, few working hours and lots of freedom than be chained to a career that barely supports an expensive lifestyle, leaving no room for anything else & unable to weather (say) an economic downturn.

8. I try to appreciate the chaos and complexity of the world. Everyone wants to reduce the world into (often false) dichotomies like "free-market capitalism vs. big government" and ideologies that rely on absurdly simplified, uniform behavioral models in order to function, like communism & libertarianism… however, those rarely line up with the chaos and non-uniformity of the real world. Many of the best solutions require a dynamic balance of such ideas as well as a mix of unconventional thinking rooted in facts & history rather than overly abstract philosophy. If this sounds a bit like Barack Obama, well, that’s why I voted for him. Ideologies and false dichotomies are often hawked by massmedia conglomerates and political parties because they’re easier to sell than complex, nuanced ideas. Beware of them, identify them, and understand them enough to know that they don’t work.

9. People love to slice & dice the arts into genres and engage in the pretentious exercise of separating "high art" or "true art" etc. from everything else. This is all futile because it’s like placing a dividing line on a gradient. It’s like trying to define when exactly a fetus/stemcell/sperm/egg/whatever becomes a human being. You can’t, because such definitions (on top of being arbitrary) require quantitative measurement, and last I checked you can’t quantify the inherent properties of a work of art, especially since its effects vary from person to person– "it’s subjective". It’s only your taste.

10. I become full of myself very quickly when there’s an opportunity to flaunt some technical knowhow. It’s all vain but I can’t help myself.

11. Similarly, I love to identify my flaws but I find it bothersome to fix them, so I tend to work around them. That may also be a flaw in itself.

12. I find it interesting that our civilization is unsustainable the way it is at this very moment, and therefore our fate is directly tied to the development of future technology like next-gen solar panels, batteries, advances in agriculture & farming (e.g. invitro-meat, genetically engineered crops) and medicine. Of course this only exacerbates the need for even greater technology in the future. If you thought our exponential population growth was a problem now, just wait until we’re living forever via nanomachines in our bodies. There are futurists (most notably Kurzweil) who think that our exponential advance in technology will get us over that hump by the time we reduce ourselves to software and nanomachines, thus doing away with human bodies, but at the same time it might be our destiny to destroy ourselves prior to all that with technological terrors like the "grey goo scenario". Have you ever read the wiki article on fermi’s paradox? One possibility suggests it’s the destiny of intelligent races to destroy themselves with their own technology, otherwise the galaxy should be utterly saturated with intelligent life right now, if we’re not just the very first intelligent race.

13. I appreciate that art is often a subconscious process. In film class for instance, we often meticulously broke down scenes into their tiniest little elements under the assumption that EVERY artistic decision is all part of some grand scheme on behalf of the director. However some directors are spontaneous (David Cronenberg) or throw in tons of ambiguous elements (Mamoru Oshii) meant to be interpreted by the audience. It’d be a disservice to analyze their films in that way. When I make stuff, I often do so on impulse, guided by determining "what feels right" and "what seems kinda awesome". Only after the fact can I sometimes come up with tangible reasons behind my decisions and sometimes a common thread running through a series of projects. I try to understand works of art from this perspective, and the decision-making that went into them.

14. I love Japanese aesthetics, particularly when they appear in modern works. If you know what they are, you’ll recognize them everywhere:

I. Wabi-sabi: rustic beauty, or “the beauty of imperfection”. If you’ve ever been to the New Orleans French Quarter, that place embodies it. Unique, old and pretty buildings that are somewhat unkempt and crumbling– however all that is part of its charm and character. This aesthetic is derived from Buddhism and its main idea that everything is fleeting and impermanent. It’s also found in characters who are charming due to their flaws, or have appeal due to their tragic nature.

II. Mono no Awaré: Similar to wabi-sabi, it is the "sadness of transience", the passing of the seasons, the leaves falling from the tree, the flower that blooms and dies, the passing of ideals and generations. The lonely samurai, the cowboy, or the Solid Snake whose generation and ideals have lost relevance in a changed world. Very common in fiction, easy to identify.

III. Yuugen: "mysterious beauty" and "deepness". Like looking up at the moon, something beautiful and mysterious that suggests a certain deepness in the world. It’s hard to define, but easy to identify. A film that embodies it is Ghost in the Shell (1995), with all of its imagery and symbolism that suggest a hidden deepness.

IV. Iconic abstraction, personification & symbolism… I imagine derived from the semi-pictorial written language they’ve adopted from the Chinese and maybe the Shintoist belief that everything has a spirit/god, even inanimate things and ideas. This leads directly into how naturally Japan’s culture is saturated in iconic, comic imagery and hosts the largest comic and animation industries in the whole damn world. Much of this has been slowly creeping into our films, games, and even comics… but the outlook itself seems unique to Japanese culture.

If you want to see something that embodies all of these aesthetics simultaneously, watch the anime series "Mushishi"

Much of what I’ve been making my whole life has embodied these aesthetics, but I’ve only really learned about them recently. Since I’m literally half-Japanese, I was born with a Wapanese license in my hand.

My first ever kit, and really my first ever serious foray into real-world painting. Water-based acrylics. It’s an original (not recast) of an Akio Watanabe aka Poyoyon Rock character, Hina-chan.  I believe she appears in some of his doujinshi… not sure where else.  Dunno too much about it, it was on sale somewhere and I like Poyoyon’s designs.

That yellow & blue lighting is actually painted on.  I wanted to see if I could simulate colored lighting in a garage kit (similar to some light baking work I was previously doing in Second Life).  My plan for this kit was to try everything I could think of, airbrushing, drybrushing, masking, experimenting with special effects paints and generally going off the intended color scheme in order to make mistakes and learn.  Many mistakes were made, some pieces were lost (e.g. the accessories) but at least it turned out ok. Click on the image for the full photo set.