CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 1: INTRO AND “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP”

INTRO

I usually don’t feel like I’m making full albums. A lot of my releases are like checkpoints meant to capture what’s “me” at a certain time or continue a style exploration as part of a larger series. I put out a lot of “part 2s” that make more sense with their “part 1s”, or a lot of smaller experimental chunks in a mini-album or EP format. I think that’s because the last few years have been my most curious in music, trying to figure out what I really want to be and accomplish while I’m here. Not wanting to stick too long with any one thing or get hung up on a particular sound, I keep iterating or changing lanes entirely with every release. It seems as if it’s very enjoyable to watch and follow along with, but to me it can feel a bit shallow, like I’m dipping my toes into a dozen different nourishing and relaxing hot springs without taking a deep soak in any of them.

Before 2021, I feel that I had only had two real full albums: 2018’s Memories Of Tokyo-To and Return Of The Soul. The deep musical soaks. One of these, Memories, changed my life with its success, internally and externally. When it was released, it made a bigger commercial splash than anything I’d ever done, giving me the financial security to finally pursue music full-time and get out of an abusive work environment. Before this, music had been relegated to a side gig. After this released, it had people looking at me as someone with style, the rarest and most elusive spice in creative work. You’re lucky if you can half-convince one person that you have any style. After over a decade of pursuing music with the gas pedal half down, I jetted toward a sound that loomed large in my heart and finally showed people what I wanted. Internally, I had the satisfaction that I had done exactly what I set out to do and put out good songs with my voice in them. I had been perceived as exactly what I am and not rejected.

Because of this life-changing success, I knew that if I were to ever try to make a follow-up to Memories, it would have to be an even more honest, time-consuming and grandiose album. A real album on the same level as Memories and Return, and probably the most difficult thing I’d ever made. At first, I thought there would never be any need to follow up--I was ready to move on! It would be folly to try to repeat such a rare moment in a career, right? But the more I listened to Memories, the more I saw people saying what my Best Songs were, the more I realized the album was my new musical identity, the older it felt to me… and the more I wanted to step back on stage. Ah, shit. I’m not done, am I?

I don’t believe you should ever follow up a work for any other reason than that one. I’m not done. I have more to say. No trying to capitalize on success. No trying to rewrite a narrative your audience already has, or force an image that doesn’t fit you. Even if you are doing a follow-up, you should be continuing your overall story as an artist as well as the story that the works have together. No cynicism, no retreading. It’s a classic pitfall in artists’ careers, the bewildering experience of having a “hit” on your hands causing you to botch execution and create a failed follow-up. Only do this if you actually have more to say, I told myself. Don’t you dare create that space if you can’t fill it.

It took about three years, but I filled it. Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future is the filled space. It’s different than I imagined it being. I can tell it’s a different thing than you, the listener, imagined it would be. I knew it was heading in that direction by a certain point in the production, and that made it even more nerve-wracking to stick the landing. It’s more distant from my past inspirations and from the sound of Memories. It was grueling to make, taking a toll on my mental health that I have yet to recover from (more on that later, I’m sure).

There were a lot of stressful but necessary self-imposed rules to the album that might make it easier to understand why it was difficult and why it sounds the way it does:

Make something BIG, but not big for big’s sake.
Make something packed with dynamic changes without being annoying, exhausting and unlistenable.
Make new experiences without leaning on something people liked or repeating something just to play on nostalgia.
Don’t make your inspirations from 20 years ago, make something that feels like your inspirations from 20 years ago but is from 2021 and is from you.
Be confident but not boastful or alienating.
Be positive, fun and encouraging.
Plus, you can’t go outside or see anyone or take a trip to get away and refresh while doing all this, because there’s a pandemic. And if you write about or make even the smallest reference to this worldwide situation, you will instantly find yourself with an overwrought, corny and dated project.

Yeah, I’m really proud about dodging that last one, especially.

I’m very excited to write about each song on Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future and share whatever details I can on the inspirations and production stories behind each. I have a lot of things I’m excited to spill details about and a lot of things I need to vent about, too. I hope that these blogs enrich the listening experience of the album and provide insight that could inspire people as they take on their own unwieldy, terrifying and foolish goals. Thanks so much for reading this, for taking a chance on me as one of thousands of artists vying for your time and attention, and for humoring my attempt to one-up myself and connect strongly with you again.

“BREAK DOWN BREAK UP”

Audio Track Count: 132 (the most individual audio tracks on the album)

Favorite Sound: Anton’s sax solo, of course

Cutting-Room Floor: Two different kinds of rap segments, one with a whole unused beat-switch

Inspirations: FLCL/the pillows, “I Love Love You (Love Love Super Dimension Mix)”, positive big beat, alternative rock, summertime, the big convention/event feeling of communal excitement

I attended the event MAGFest in January 2020 with the goal to be as social as my natural limits would allow, to really be AT a convention instead of being a wallflower like usual. I actually had a notebook with a list of people to see and things to do like I was Ryo Hazuki in Shenmue. Doing this ended up being a really positive thing for me, but the other goal I had was to save some time to step back and observe the general energy of the convention while resting.

My intent was to make Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future an upbeat and social album, an album you would bring along on road trips or play at hotel parties, something you would want to share with others to get excited and form memories. I wanted to people-watch in order to take MAGFest in as a whole, seal away that energy in a mental jar and return to it while I was making songs that needed it. Little did I know, this would be the last time I saw a space this crowded for–well, I still have yet to go back to an event this busy as I’m writing this! I cherished the memory of MAGFest 2020 more and more as I chipped away at this huge project.

“BREAK DOWN BREAK UP” was one of the first songs from the album I started working on. In early 2019, I found the guitar samples and weaved the vocals together to create an oddly memorable phrase with a satisfying rhythm. It felt more rock-oriented than my usual music and I was really intrigued by it. My music creation program Ableton Live had also just added this “Echo” plugin that emulated vintage delays, and I was having fun with the more raw and dirty feel of those. The week of MAGFest, I had a 40-second draft of the song in my phone that I’d loop over and over as I took in the vibe of bustling convention areas and imagined how music like this might fit into someone’s daily life. A lot of stuff that I made during these early months of knowing I had an album underway didn’t get used–this one was instantly earmarked as a guaranteed track.

This song was the most similar song I had to the previous album opener “Pump Up The Love”, so I thought it’d be a good idea to put it up front and start people off with something that felt a little familiar before the more out-there tracks like RAVE SHIT and Noize The Invasion hit. I also thought it had so much momentum–basically every new section of the song is completely different from the last, until the ending. Electronic artists from the 1990s and 2000s would often have their songs licensed for car commercials. I don’t think that’s gonna happen to me, but I still think of “Pump Up The Love” and “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP” as my “car commercial songs”.

As you can see from the track count, BREAK DOWN BREAK UP is the biggest song on the album as far as literal complexity goes. It also might be the most “standard” Jet Set Radio-influenced song on the album—as if such a rare and also varied style could have a “standard” sound. When I think of some of what’s “standard” for Jet Set Radio-styled music, I’m talking about the energy, the focus on dynamic changes and keeping even the little things fresh (drumrolls and unique vocal samples peppered throughout) and having one signature vocal sample or voiced concept that everything centers around (“break”). That last part was really fun–I ended up searching my vocal sample folders for the word “break” and finding over 30 options to use!

By the way, just to get this out of the way,. I don’t know what “Break Down Break Up” means, so don’t ask me. Is it a break-up of a relationship? Is it a dance move? Is it a dance move you invent after you break up with someone? Then, does it look mournful or happy? You decide. Actually, if I had to comment… I think this song is telling us to try to make changes and get unstuck from unfavorable situations we might be in, even if that requires us to break something. I needed a feeling like this to start off the album and to break myself out of the endless cycle of refining and redeveloping an idea that I needed to just finish.

As for the instruments of the song, I’m not really familiar with using electric guitars in the way I did here, so I knew I was taking a risk making them the centerpiece. I want to say that three or four entire work days were spent trying different layering configurations to make them big, full and present at the same time. I’d get them loud but thin, then full but muted, a real Goldilocks-and-the-porridge situation–until I finally landed on an option I didn’t hate involving four layers at different octaves with different amplifiers. I think I just independently recreated the way guitar stacks are traditionally designed, but I did it out of ignorance and not bothering to ask anyone.

(Above: my standard method of layering many drums over breakbeats to increase their volume, punch, width and brightness. You will find this in most of
my tracks that incorporate breakbeat samples.)

The drums were much more comfortable territory for me, with the main beat actually being two breaks on top of each other glued together by stronger individual drum “hits”. I lended my own vocals to provide a subtle phased-out layer (“Do you like, do, do you like” at 0:01) and a more obvious fake choir effect with multiple stacked recordings of me singing out the title at 1:07. I was really happy with those layers–I felt like I built on top of the limited, inflexible main vocal sample and successfully made it my own bigger chorus for that one special section. The vocals starting at 1:49 are also me.

I can’t talk about this song without heaping praise on Anton Corazza’s sax contribution to the track. He made one of the best parts of Memories Of Tokyo-To possible, and it was absolutely non-negotiable to me to have him back in some fashion for the sequel. I really hope everyone listening was glad for his return as well. I love the way his sax solos explore the key of a song I’ve been working on for hours in a way that I personally cannot, and it reinvigorates my efforts to finish songs. I spent a lot of time thinking about where I could best incorporate his skill on this album, and I settled on the segment of “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP” that album cover artist Ethan Redd calls my “shoegaze moment”.

The shoegaze moment is at 1:48. I had just dropped into a long breakdown (perhaps both in the song structure and in real life) after a pretty nonstop first minute or so of beats, and I didn’t want to just go back to that. I needed a surprise. I messed around with a few options that kept the same energy with different sounds (like the rap parts left on the cutting-room floor that I mentioned above). I knew it wasn’t working at all, so I took a step back and started dropping in some new samples I’d just gotten to shake things up. Suddenly I was working with a really deep, moody and more chilled-out sound that was intriguing. This type of transition would become a thing I’d return to for other songs on the album, but at this point I had to sell myself on it.

I put the breakbeat and some ad-lib vocals over this new jazz sample arrangement and loved the way it sounded, but I almost filed it away as a separate song before hearing how it felt for the “break down break up” vocal with the clap sample from the previous section to melt into it. It was kind of a “gotcha” moment for people expecting me to launch into the main beat again. I decided: “people have been waiting for this album to sound exactly how it just sounded for the last 2 minutes. That’s not all you want. Don’t be afraid of moving away from that. You should be excited for the chance to do it in the very first track.” Something like that, that was my thought process on it. Once I settled on keeping it in, the only thing I needed was a lead sound driving it forward, and it was the most obvious choice ever to bring Anton in to take it from intriguing to incredible.

A word from Anton Corazza on the song: To be completely honest with you, I’m mostly on my composer/rapper shit these days and don’t really play sax like that anymore. Actually, Midnight In Tokyo-To was one of the last joints I did before I mostly stepped away from horns, and that was recorded in late 2017. Usually if someone asks me for sax I’ma say something like “sorry fam, can’t do it”. It’s not my hustle anymore, and depending on how I felt when Mello hit me up about this one, I mighta told him the same thing no matter how much I love his music or him as a person (both extremely high quality). But I set aside my reluctance and told him to send the rough draft. If you read this far, you know the song already so you can imagine that my reaction to it might have been similar to yours. Long story short, I let him know that it might take a while but I wanted to hop on it, and that’s pretty much how it played out. I was given just over 30 seconds of the track to say something… What’s it all mean? I dunno, I just wanted it to sound kinda cool, kinda hot, with a bit of “watch out cause Mello is about to fuck the game up again and I’m right here too with a stank face like ‘yeah’”.

This has been the story of “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP”, an opening track of such intimidating complexity compared to my usual that the laptop I made the album on wasn’t actually able to smoothly play it anymore in the last stages of production.

That’s all for now—I’ll be discussing track 2, “Life On The Line” here next Tuesday, January 11!

Above: Full view of the “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP” mixdown in Ableton Live. Most DAW programs arrange music from left to right on the timeline, so the
left end is my intro and the right end is my ending, with every sound placed in a linear fashion. Hope that makes sense. The rows are audio tracks or
grouped tracks—I called them “layers” in my description to match how listeners probably more commonly think of them.

2 MelloJanuary 4, 2022