re:member//re:live//re:hometown


anyone who knows me on a personal level can tell you this has been a long time coming :) i'm generally someone who loves to peruse the past and pick at old scars. this album originally came from a long-gone time in my life, but one i miss dearly. (i would never choose to return there, but i'm glad i get to keep it in my heart and head)
but naturally, my taste and skills have changed over time - and i always felt the album was *close* to hitting the target but just slightly missed.
personally i like the amateurish feel to the original :) but i also felt if i didn't try to clean it up it would stay in the back of my head forever.
so for about a year i went back to my old files and tried, once more, to put that teenage dream into reality. . .

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the process was a little hard ! the computer i made it on originally is long gone, and a lot of the files were all corrupted - or burned in.
regardless i had fun finding ways to make it all feel new and fresh, even to me !! the vocalist, my long-time friend phoebe, has been in a spiral lately...
and i hadn't heard from her in over a year (until recently). so it was a little weird to be spending so much time editing the vocals of a 15 year old girl who i was so close to then but now hadn't heard much from...

luckily... i was able to actually return to my hometown this summer, with my new name, new family, and new heart. i was able to meet her again and we talked about everything. it was really nice. and i probably couldn't have re:made this album without that feeling. these days i'm singing on my own music (coming soon...) but i think phoebe has a really special voice - it feels truly like a dubbed cartoon opening :D

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let's talk about the album itself!!!

i was lonely for most of my life for manymanymany reasons . in 2017 or so i ended up doing something drastic and it ended up with me finding friends - real friends. some i still have to this day. all of them will live in my heart forever, even if i cant talk to them anymore.
im from the smallest of towns - to be precise i grew up in a forest (most wolves do :3) . the north of england is a cold/close minded/depressing place. but these people, in a very real way, saved me, and made me.
the emotion of being liked, wanted, sometimes needed, was so intense and new to me that i was often overwhelmed. this album is coming from that feeling - a world-rewriting sense of gratitude, love, and safety.
i think the lyrics go into that direction sometimes - and it can definitely feel saccharine and overly-sentimental. but i promise you every emotion was at least as intense as this music feels. im not someone who likes to hide behind a veneer, or play aloof and non-chalant. i want to feel innocence and clarity in my emotions and i want to express them the way they feel. i think thats why at the time i gravitated to mediums like games, cartoons, and anime - they tend not to hide anything.
actually, they're kind of hyper-emotional in a way that people tend to laugh at - but i think they depict how those emotions actually feel to the person living through them. that's why grown men laugh at elfen lied but teenage girls feel seen.
anyway . i'm a sensitive fragile person really - but i'm also very strong. this album is my scream to the universe: thank you for letting me live, thank you for letting me love and be loved

i must have started writing it around 2018 onwards . . it took a loooooong time to put together, being that it was a much more large-scale effort than my previous chiptune album.
i didn't know how to play guitar or sing or ... anything really! but for some reason i had it in my heart that there were some words and sounds that needed to flow out of me. so i began about it!!
it's obvious to many that game music was an inspiration - the original album had a cover/mashup of songs from higurashi+umineko+ciconia even. if you're a fan of my art i think we probably have similar tastes, so i probably don't need to put it to words. but of course, i like midi-based music, and early streamed audio from 5th+6th gen game hardware.
the other big (and in my opinion main) inspiration is actually cartoon openings ! especially english dubs of anime... they often made bespoke openings in english to accompany the dubs of the shows in the 90s/2000s, as part of their localisation effort. some shows, like ouran highschool host club, simply covered the japanese with english lyrics. others, such as toyko mew mew, write entirely new songs. generally they were (pretty) generic pop-punk/emo, as standard for the time.
but they all felt rather amateur, and had pretty weird melodies/lyrics in order to establish the shows' title or premise. this applied to cartoons originally made for english audiences too - simple plan did the what's new scooby doo opening...
and of course shows like 6teen or total drama island have insanely catchy openings. w.i.t.c.h. has this crazy evanescence-esque numetal track i keep coming back to. i'll link a playlist here for some other recommendations:

.......................................... these songs aren't made to compete in the radio/cd market - they only exist to market a product, but i think the artists making them were able to have fun making them:)
i would say... skater song, another reality, and school rooftop are the main examples of this atmosphere. to be 100% with you i almost entirely copied akfg's re:write for school rooftop like. i recreated that in my daw and then changed every individual part until it was a different song ... like i said i was a beginner at music and i figured everything out on the way.

as for game music, there's a few very direct samples and inspirations ! the intro track, start, is based on tamatown's main theme. this is a long-dead tamagotchi browser mmo similar to neopets.
anyone who played it is aware it has some insanely good music. im pretty sure its only available as a heavily compressed mp3 ripped from the flash file, but im sure you can appreciate the fuzzy warm beauty of compression. the final track, so long . . ., is using a choir sound from mother3 that i just bawl over... and samples from a famous 90s movie that were also used in nights into dreams' gate of your world. iykyk... keep it a secret please.
folklore, laura's star and hometown are going more into a shoegaze/noise atmosphere that i was really liking at the time. in general i tend to gravitate towards things that feel "orange" to me, which is fuzzy guitars, noise, humming, and distortion. i've been told that this album feels purple to many! maybe because of it flickers and folklore.

it flickers is a cover of a song from STOMACH BOOK's previous alias. we have been internet friends for a while now, and the original it flickers made me cry in a way i hadn't in a long long long time. a lot has happened to me that shouldn't and i think the emotions i feel about all that are in the background radiation of the album, though not directly addressed. i don't think i was ready. it flickers is my favourite on this album, and many people told me they agree.
it makes me really happy to think i did that song justice. i get a lot of questions about the sample in the middle... its not a sample! i wrote fake game dialogue, and phoebe and i recorded it:) i also added some ps3 disc loading sounds and general game compression so it probably felt like a real cutscene haha . . well im glad i got to add a little audio-based narrative.. im interested in exploring things like that through music. someone once told me theres too much talking in this album.... oops

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i like re:hometown a lot . it has the brightness, clarity and volume the original needed to fully express itself the way i wanted it to.

im glad the project feels cohesive, and im glad it still makes me really emotional.

its a time capsule for me now.

i hope i never lose this tenderness and reverence thank you to everyone who listened, everyone who resonated, and especially to everyone i met because of this album.

i love you