OYO is one year older.

….Literally, because it came out last year.



But yeah. One year ago, about this time, the last major musical project I’ve ever made came to be. It’s gotten a good bit of positive feedback, as far as I know, and it’s still something that….well, I’d be lieing if I said I felt awesomely about it but at least there’s good bits in there! (spoilers: jit never feels awesomely about his music)



So, yeah. I can’t think of much retrospective to do on it. It took more than 2 years to get done and then updated for better production. How many albums came out during that time? A lot. Why else did things need to get updated with better production? I’m not saying there’s great production on there, but it’s at least better than it was. I think.



At any rate, I think it accomplished everything that I’d set out to do with it. Namely, create a solo album that could stand on its own and also explore a lot of events in the comic. And come to think of it, for something that was basically following the comic events in order, thankfully there wasn’t a lot of “and now 5 slow pieces in a row”. Like, musically, there was a nice bit of ebb to the energy. At the very least, I’d sorta wanted the pieces to flow like that, but thankfully it worked with the comic events too.



Most of all, I still love all the album artwork, and am still hugely thankful to every single album artist that made art for this album / put up with me just popping up and saying “hey yo you make cool stuff do you think maybe you’d like to get in on this”. Really I probably was a lot more awkward than the previous quotation would lead you to believe, do not be fooled. And Another Chance is still my favorite track off of the whole thing (eston you amazing person).



So yeah! Now I’m gonna drop a bunch of trivia/random facts behind a read more.





Sunrise is the only track I’ve ever used theremin in, also the only cover of Light I’ve done (far as I remember?). Is there a connection there? (not really)

October was pretty much started out as me just wanting to try and do something with a smaller ensemble, focusing on the individual parts instead of, say, throwing in trumpets or horns just to embellish one section (which has happened in a few spots for me).

October also got its name from me having the smaller ensemble, going “hmm” cause I didn’t have a name, then seeing the October artwork from the 2011 calendar and going “wow yeah that’s exactly what’s going on in here”. I mean, it already had bass, piano, and beats…unfortunately, no violin. And trying to replace the oscillator with violin sounds just didn’t work. I don’t have good enough sounds for that, would have to have a real violinist. So I just imagine it as Rose on an electric violin that sends MIDI output.

Firefly Cloud is the only legitimate Doctor cover I did. (once upon a time I did a small battle-ish cover in famitracker but that doesn’t count, plus at the time there were so many doctor covers that there was no need to do anything with it (it was called doctur))

FantasyP is actually the second iteration of itself, cause the first one was kind of….enh, loud all the time, not much dynamicism, so it got switched up.

I’m not sure at all where the name Underfoot came from, but it sounded alright.

And I swear I didn’t know who Dave Brubeck was before making Flying Car. The central riff itself came from messing around until it worked, in 2009, and I didn’t know about hardly any music back then.

Cancerous Core is the track on the album that had the most to do with my life at the time, aka, was the most personal track on there.

Game Over is my least favorite track on the whole album, which just makes it really ironic to me that a lot of people like it.

Unlabeled is a complete ripoff of Satie’s earlier works that no one has a copy of but me, and I should be praised for bringing it back into the light.

Skaian Shrapnel is loaded with 4-1-3 and 6-1-2 references. The middle section’s chord scheme is basically 6-1-b2 | 6-1-b2 | 6-1-b2 | 4-1-3, twice, and the end section has a bunch of percussion hits on the 6-1-2/4-1-3 patterns, or patterns of hits were structed in 6-1-2/4-1-3 groupings. And it’s 4:13 long as well!

The Scratch was started because my piano studio in college was doing a “piano plus backing track made with electronics” composition project, and a lot of the work on it (plus the reason that the piano part is “mess around with this riff” improvisation) was done from last-minute panic upon finding out that our studio was supposed to present progress every so often.

Also you’re not hearing things, there’s rapidly-entered morse code hidden in there.

Respit was me going “that radiation, he thinks he’s so great, well he’s not, I bet I could make a piece just like he makes them” and then it turned out to be one of my favorites on the album. Conswaggle that Radiation and his tunage.

Also it was gonna be a lot shorter, then I figured it could stand to be more than a minute.

Negastrife is the first piece I ever made that had to be rendered out and assembled in parts because it was too much for my computer to handle at one time. Also there’s a reference to 1900 (the movie) in there, which is one of my favorite movies.

Mother is called Mother because when I first had the piano-only version of it, I couldn’t think of a name, so I just took the second half of my then-boyfriend’s last name because I couldn’t think of anything. And after a while, you don’t want to be reminded of that when you’re trying to make something for Homestuck. So I replaced “young naive relationship” guilt with “why haven’t I talked to my mother” guilt.

Another Chance is still the best track you can’t even juke that.

And Under the Hat started off as Dad strife music. I didn’t even realize that that fact meant it tied into the album as well, when deciding to put it on.



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Other misc. facts:



The very first thoughts about the album are in the back of my sketchbook. Looking back, apparently the album might have been called “breeze” or “softbreeze”. I like OYO better.

Besides the initial notes, I kept track of things and wrote many notes on a giant piece of graph paper I got out of nowhere and hung up on my wall. Sooo much random information in there.

Also on those initial notes, there’s alternate names for pieces that didn’t have names yet, here’s some: Flying Car is “13/4 piece”, Game Over is “pianoandceleste”, and October is “Bb piece”. Plus “eridanthing_2” which eventually became Awakening from Volume 8.

Length-wise, the album comes in at about 5 minutes under the max capacity of a CD, and I don’t think that was intentional either.

There were three conceptual tracks that got off the ground that I can remember, two of which I have no recollection of aside from the initial album notes. There was “ragtime piece” with “bass, clarinet, banjo?, repeated melody fragments” but I have no idea what that is; “something about the breeze” which has no other notes at all, probably just an idea; and then Em Pithos which was going to be something along the lines of Mephisto Waltz by Lizst, for John/Rose’s grimdark stuff, and it’d have violin and tons of composition and it just didn’t happen cause I was like “no way will I have violin sounds for this”.

Oldest piece on the album? Game Over. I think that piece almost took 3 years from beginning to release.

Did you know that there are 14 tracks and 3 bonus tracks? What could that mean!

I don’t have any other tidbits of knowledge at the moment, but if you want to ask anything else about the album, my askbox is totes open for that.