CREATING SOUNDS OF TOKYO-TO FUTURE PART 6: "MOLOTOV MUSIC"
Album art by Ethan Redd
“MOLOTOV MUSIC (INTERLUDE)”
Audio Track Count: 35
Favorite Sound: The massive horn hit!
Cutting-Room Floor: Re-recording of the rap verse, and an idea that the phone touch-tone record scratch could lead into a radio station call-in segment skit that I didn’t end up having any idea how I wanted to do
Inspirations: “Thugged Out Bitch”, both the Dillinja original and Fresh/Adam F remix, and the remix of Capone n’ Noreaga’s “Listen Here” by Dillinja, all extremely heavy DnB tracks
“Molotov Music”, previously known as the Jet Set Sona theme or the “Jet Set Sona Challenge” song on streaming services, was the first full song released for Sounds Of Tokyo-To Future, even though I don’t think I ever said it would be on the album for sure. (Edit: I just checked the YouTube description for the song and I absolutely did say it would be on the album, never mind!) The version uploaded as the “Jet Set Sona Challenge” is a little shorter, but structurally almost the same. I always planned for it to be an interlude and stay around the length it was in that early form, but when I started working on the album, I wanted to be sure that the new version definitively replaced the older one. I don’t like the idea of people having to fuss over which version was preferable, so I wanted to enhance this song subtly and make a version good enough to render the other one irrelevant.
“JetSetSona” was a community art challenge project organized by incredible artist Kainonaut in an effort to cause a boom in Jet Set Radio fan art and inspire people to take the continued life of the series into their own hands, specifically by having people draw their original characters to fit within the series world. A short live action/animatic hybrid film was created with “Molotov Music” as the score to announce the art challenge. At the time, it was still one of a few random drafts I had laying around and I was thinking more that I would make something new and original for Kai and it would be separate from the album. However, I sent over “Molotov Music” in draft form after I recorded the verse just to see, and he thought it was perfect for the animation! The finished version is one of the coolest things I’ve ever been a part of, and the #JetSetSona hashtag is still full of amazing art.
When I first stacked those horn samples up and laid the driving drum n’ bass beat underneath, my first thought was “this is way too abrasive to be a sustained song, right?” The horns were so big and intense, the drums were fat and the bassline was growly. I left it in that form as a draft for a while, but eventually returned to it and had the idea to make it transition into a half-time section at 0:30, with all the same elements remaining but more space between the heavy drum hits. Doing something in half-time is basically slowing down the feel of a song without changing its tempo, giving everything exactly twice as much time to happen and giving the effect that the tempo has been cut in half. Everything clicked when I added a new live breakbeat element over the existing drum hits in the half-time section–the song perceptually slowed down, but actually got bigger and more satisfying instead of losing energy.
I mention the huge hybrid horn hit as being my favorite sound in this song, but it’s actually hard to pick any sounds I don’t love here. I have to shout out the pitched percussion hit in the left ear and detuned piano in the right that both play off the really simple central melody and make the song more interesting. I’m also really glad I was able to make such a big growling bass sound to match the rest of the energy. I came into the production of Sounds with a lot of worries and low confidence about the idea of it being a follow-up, but I was already showing myself that I had learned and grown a lot since the first album with everything I was doing here.
The rap verse of “Molotov Music” was actually a first draft in both the writing and recording sense, and maybe you can tell! However, I couldn’t convince myself that any of my re-recordings or rewrites actually sounded better, so it survived all the cuts. I grew to love the lo-fi quality of it and got accustomed to the words and cadence as they were. With some other vocal tracks on the album we’ll talk about later on, I have a very clear idea of what character or perspective I’m speaking from. Here? No real depth to this one, just words that sound cool together. Sometimes that’s how rapping is, especially when I’m using my voice more as an instrument to fill in a certain part of a song.
As I mentioned at the top, for a while I was playing around with the second half of this song’s touch-tone phone scratch leading into some kind of radio call-in skit with some pals (“This is ___ and you’re listening to Jet Set Radio” or something like that), but I made zero headway on this. I don’t think I ever even wrote it down; it is an idea that has not existed outside of idle musing in my mind until now. This was also a casualty of wanting to pull away from on-the-nose Jet Set Radio references during the album’s production as much as possible and go more for the general spirit, as the music itself became more of its own thing.
This entry on “Molotov Music (Interlude)” has been comparatively short, but it really is a pretty simple and brief song that gets in and out without overstaying its welcome, by design. I hope you enjoyed knowing a little more about it!
That’s all for now—I’ll see you back here with a breakdown of “LUV 2 LUV” on February 22!
Above: Full view of the “Molotov Music (Interlude)” 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 of color are audio tracks, and the tighter multicolored bands of audio tracks are collapsed Groups, as you can see on the right.