CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 2: "LIFE ON THE LINE"
Album art by Ethan Redd
“LIFE ON THE LINE”
Audio Track Count: 90
Favorite Sound: One of the latest additions, the “I can” vocal sample coming back from the bridge section and appearing as a chop in the background at 1:20. That last touch to a song you’re mostly familiar with can excited you as you’re wrapping up production
Cutting-Room Floor: The section at 2:21 was gonna be twice as long and have even more of a build-up with some different melodies. I ended up thinking it’d be best to not overburden it and just get back into the hook
Inspirations: Jungle, big beat, “Leave You Far Behind” by Lunatic Calm, The Prodigy, the title screen energy of “The Concept Of Love”, “Affection for Beauty” from the MOON: Remix RPG Adventure soundtrack
I’ve vaguely talked about this album as a “risk” online a few times, but have never really gone into what I meant too much because I thought it would be really over-indulgent. But look where we are now. On a deep-dive blog post specifically designed for indulgence, that you wouldn’t be reading if you didn’t want these kinds of details. Let’s get into it.
Being a full-time musician with modest sales on each project means releasing a large quantity of music to get by. Instead of a big, expensive and well-marketed album that carries me for two to five years, I have several small, scrappy albums that sustain me for two to five months each. The upside of this is that I get to work through a lot of ideas I have, and people who find me from one release will have a lot of other stuff to explore, and maybe they’ll stream or buy some of it. The downside is that I never really got to let something simmer for a long time, the process that results in bigger, more creative and polished works. In 2020, I decided this was my year to do that. I made the decision to push as many things as I could to the side and focus on Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future. What a fantastic year that would turn out to be to pass up extra money.
I kept commissions and other side work to the absolute minimum I could, and made much smaller personal releases (Summer In Silent Places and Atmo Horror Vol. 2 were like little pipes venting off the massive stress from Sounds). I took a nearly year-long break from Patreon (should have just closed it like I’ve done now). As much as it’s become a tiring, obligatory and desperate promo tradition now, Bandcamp Fridays helped a lot with monthly income during 2020 in this period where I was waking up and pouring time and money into this album every day.
I generally tortured myself during this time with the fact that I wasn’t making much material progress. I went from literally hundreds of ideas to six real songs and 20 wishy-washy drafts, and the album didn’t have any real shape until late 2020. I missed two hopeful release dates, summer and fall of that year. It was around this time I began to have consistent breakdowns as I realized I was heading into a second year of sacrificing everything for this project and I barely had anything finished yet. I cleared my schedule even more drastically, making 2021 the first year in a long time with only one release from me. Though I say it was being made for about three years in these posts and a lot of interviews, the truth is that most of that time was developing ideas and the album only actually started to become an album from March to August 2021. It was a case of having to let something simmer for a long time and only pay off in the final stretch, and I had not been as ready for that as I thought I was. The simmering period is what allows you to finish at all, but you can’t help but kick yourself for “wasting” two years to get to that six months. At least, my brain can’t.
Music is and has always been my life, the thing that I feel dead without. If I didn’t get to work on it like this, it would be like losing a really special iteration of what my life on Earth could be and shifting to a much less fulfilling parallel timeline. If this album hadn’t done well, it would have probably crushed me and left me in a tailspin not knowing where to go next, as well as hurt a lot financially. I was incredibly fortunate that people embraced my attempt to put way more time than usual into something unique. And if “BREAK DOWN BREAK UP” is the song of me telling myself to just finish shit already, “Life On The Line” is the song of me telling myself to do and say what I actually want, because this is the shot that counts.
From the beginning of this track, you can hear that I’m again deciding to mess around with heavily distorted guitars. Pretty big guitar album for a guy who is intimidated by producing guitar music. They’re still a sound source I am not confident and experienced with at all, but in this song I treat them more as malleable samples with creative filters and layering that have them not exactly sounding “rock”-like. More like my usual sample fodder. I’m using blues vocal samples that match the song in energy if not necessarily genre, and fill out the space above the instrumental really nicely. Like in “BREAK”, I’m piling different breakbeat loops on top of each other and scoring them with punchier EDM-like drum hits to cut through. Except, I think this song juggles between an unspeakable SIX breakbeats. If you listen to the first section with drums at 0:22, you’ll probably notice me switching groups of them out every two measures—it’s an old drum’n’bass habit to show off how many breaks you can make work together, I guess.
“Life On The Line” is big, but lean too–stuffed with bright, competitive elements but not enough that it can’t move from legible section to section. Remember my rule for the album as a whole about making things big but not exhausting or incomprehensible. I still wanted “anime intro” energy, a song covering as much ground as it could in 90 seconds. About halfway through making it, I realized it was an exhausting clump of loud noise, so I started inserting these little breaks to refresh the ears. The drum stutters at 0:31 and 0:35, the “future” vocal drop at 0:45, the effects at 1:08 before the first hook. Dropping out the beat behind “fuckin’ with me” at 1:11 and leaving my voice exposed was a particularly worrisome one, because I worry about my voice in ways that aren’t worth going into here and letting them see daylight. I had to give people a break every 10-20 seconds. It also helped to have consistent new FX and vocals that kept everything fresh and bright, with some favorites of mine being the “Ha!” at 0:37 and the bird calls (?) at 1:09.
(Above: how I arrange beat switches in a song so that I don’t get lost in my own project)
The big beat switch for the middle section of the song (1:36 - 2:22) suits this purpose of giving ears a breather as well. I indulge in some of the random sample-tossing that we’re definitely gonna talk more about with “Sound Effects Record No. 27” and “Don’t Stop Now! (Interlude)” with the automated phone message and some vocal snippets. The beat-switches of the album themselves probably feel dense, because what you’re really hearing is me trying to go through a whole song’s worth of ideas in less than a minute. When I first made this part, I thought it was cool but didn’t really fit for the rest of “Life On The Line”. I had actually planned to make it its own separate song! But here I am, running through all the things that would have been slowly introduced in that song, for maximum excitement.
I wanted the first time my own vocals appeared front-and-center on the album to be a “moment.” With the hook of this song being so direct and all-out, I definitely feel like I got that down. I also wanted the first rap verse to feel significant. I couldn’t just start rapping, the production had to respond to my presence. I found myself uninspired to write a verse until I had the breakbeats drop out and come back with the new more staccato half-time rhythm they have at 1:58. Something about that rhythm just makes me want to stomp around like a dinosaur in my room, which is some pretty good energy for lyrics-writing.
(Above: me stomping around like a dinosaur at Virtuoso Neomedia’s Intervision)
I want to talk a bit about my lyrics in this song, few as they are. In the industries I work in (music and games primarily) there are people who want to take stuff from you if you’re creating. To take your time and get work from you for cheap, to take your name and social media presence and boost themselves with it, to simply take advantage of your passion and excitement for what you do in any way they can. I’ve met people who gassed me up more than anyone else I’d met, telling me that they knew I could shine and be great and all this stuff. What I didn’t realize until it was too late is that they wanted me to do that stuff for them while they controlled me and benefited from it, not for me to enjoy it myself. It took me a long time to feel proud about my progress and goals again after that, to see it as my life and not someone else’s 2 Mello development roadmap. The chorus of “Life On The Line” has me finally breathing in my own air and telling people like this to fuck off because I did get my own thing and it is working. I felt really out of practice recording the lyrics on this album–lowered breath capacity and heightened perfectionism is a really lousy combination–but I think the very genuine feeling behind these lines carried me through.
If you are just going on your merry way with your dreams and happen to get involved with someone who’s built a minor cult of personality in the game or music industry–or even just on social media!!--things get dangerous and exploitative fast. It’s become regular to encounter people who have chosen this path out of ego and to cement their survival, with an existing position of power or facade of vague impressiveness. I don’t consider myself an angry person; my frustration with the world manifests in other ways. However, people who cultivate and subsist on devotion and stay safe in their social circles while also causing harm do manage to make me very angry, so they got a line on the album.
“The beats are so right cuz I got anxiety, I take my time, make em shine cuz you’re eyein me”. You know, sometimes you just have to get on a track and tell on yourself right away. How do you make everything feel so polished, with so many layers? Anxiety. How does your music have so much energy and movement? Anxiety. Why do all of your releases have pretty consistent quality? You get where I’m going with this. Music came first in my life, but the problems I have developed over the years as those years get harder and harder do contribute to my work just as much as my ability to find good samples or whatever. I can’t wait to get to a place in my life where it’s not as much of a factor, but while it is, it feels better to be honest about it.
I think my verse is pretty self-explanatory, but since this is a deep dive....
Creative industries have decided the way forward is to joyously recycle and re-consume old ideas, and us artists are all desperately trying to make you notice and remember us by hooking ourselves to the buoys of those existing ideas and franchises instead of going out into the vast sea of what’s possible and likely drowning. Even this album has a generous amount of connection to a franchise. “Now in history, everybody flippin what they find, hope you remember me”. Just my little plea to you to support cool original, unfamiliar ideas whenever possible.
“Brands with the fans”, two words I have come to hate. See if you can tell I’m saying them with disdain here. Brands want you to do free work out of passion and the chance to be part of something you love, but they firmly want to keep you as a fan and not a contributor. They advance you to the creation stage, but make sure to give you no actual power, just elation over being a part of Something Really Special. You feel like part of a team, but you’re part of a creation mill. Either that or they’ll rile you up to go online and fight their battles for them, like Disney and Sony make y’all squabble over Spider-Man now and then. I’ve never even liked saying “my fans” because of the stink industries put on the development of “fanbases” or moves made to appease the most toxic of fans. Also, it’s not descriptive or respectful of you. Prefer saying listeners or supporters, using a verb of what you actually do rather than calling you fanatics. OK, ranting part of the blog over!
Back to production: one element of the last part of the song that barely made it in was the horn section under the last hook. I knew I needed a new production element for the hook so that it wasn’t just a repeat, but it felt like overkill to stuff a whole horn section in as that one element. Unfortunately, it was too cool and needed to happen, so I put in the work mixing it until I didn’t think it was too much. Then, the track is capped off by repeating some instrumental stuff from the first half, with some subtle new breakbeats in there if you can hear them. Being that this album is so active and ever-changing, It was a real relief to be able to repeat something whenever I felt I could get away with it.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this breakdown of Life On The Line, the second punch to the one-two punch opener of the album before it gets… different.
That’s all for now—I’ll be discussing track 3, “RAVE SHIT” here next Tuesday, January 18!
Above: Full view of the “Life On The Line” 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. 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.