Making Music Is Like Writing On Tumblr

Early this year, one of my best friends (we’ll call him George for the purpose of this post) joined and introduced me to a band called The Friday’ers. It consisted of George on bass, a guy we’ll call Arn (lol that’s his name) who was the leader and played lead guitar, a guy we’ll call Kanon on second guitar, and a guy named Herbert on drums. At first, they wanted me to be their vocalist, but they didn’t have any songs or ideas together, and Arn, who’s incredibly irresponsible, never managed to contact me about practice or shows that they did in their hasty, disorganized fashion. However, I still jammed with them from time to time, and importantly, Arn and Kanon are both really excellent guitarists. George wasn’t a great basist at first, but he got much better over the course of the year. Even moreso, however, he got better at guitar, and for a long time he brought his acoustic guitar every time he came over, and we’d make up songs together.

My interest in making music soared at the time, but I became increasingly frustrated as Arn, still claiming he wanted me on vocals, would never contact me for shit. Since I didn’t care much for the style of music he wanted the band to perform anyway (something between punk and classic rock which was sometimes okay), I invited my brother, who we’ll call Battler, and George to form a side band with me called Trial of the Golden Witch. (And now the Umineko theme comes together). Battler had been learning guitar and was obsessed with playing dark-metal riffs, and I tried to get George to follow on acoustic guitar while I sang. In the end, though, we only recorded one or two songs that were anything like dark-metal, instead following our more eclectic interests to the pursuit of acapella songs. We’d sit around my shitty voice recorder and make shit up on the spot, usually utilizing quotes from video games and MSI songs. This was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t really going anywhere. 

Things picked up again in September when I became re-acquainted with The Friday’ers, who finally wanted me to sing with them during a live show, which they’d be dedicating to my mom, who’d just been hospitalized with cancer. During this time, I became better friends with Kanon—something I should’ve done a long time ago since he’s the only person I’ve ever met with a broader musical taste than myself. I started trying to get him to record some stuff for me to use, since he was mostly interested in shoegaze and experimental stuff over the kind of music Arn wanted the Friday’ers to play. 

We finally did play live, which didn’t go nearly as well as we’d hoped thanks to technical issues, and around the same time, I managed to trap Arn, Battler, and George in my room with Arn’s Blue mic in order to record a full album’s worth of songs. Arn played acoustic guitar, while the other three of us improvised acappella melodies. The result was a full-length album called Phantasmagoria of Improv Bullshit. I love this album.

I was so excited about having made this album that a week later, I trapped Kanon, Battler, and George in my room again, this time with Geroge on acoustic and Kanon on electric, to record the Improv 2: The Beckoning EP. I didn’t like it as much as the full length, but it was still fun and I felt like we were getting somewhere—like if I could keep trapping these guys together, we’d refine these improv jams into something awesome. 

The next week, I was lucky because my friend Mike came over. Mike is a guy who does nothing but play guitar all day, and as a result can play with extremely technical proficiency. The problem is that Mike doesn’t write songs, and neither do I, plus he’s mostly interested in playing technical death metal and playing fast, rather than my more experimental style. This is why we never got any music recorded on our own (except Tidal Wave of Black Suffering lol). But that weekend, I had him, Kanon, and George, all three of them with electric guitars and amps, in my living room, along with myself and Battler using anything from a shitty acoustic guitar to a tambourine and bamboo sticks to add to the sound. The result was a fairly chaotic but definitely interesting EP called Sandalgaze (a play on shoegaze). 

In the time since then, however, it’s been increasingly difficult to organize any kind of session. My bandmates are bogged down with work and school, and don’t necessarily want to record music every time we get together. Additionally, George and Battler aren’t really interested in recording to begin with, favoring the experience of playing random shit over having to hear it back. George actually posts random guitar playing on his youtube account en masse for no reason and doesn’t even watch any of it back. It’s only Kanon who shares my enthusiasm for actually releasing some halfway-decent music at some point. I still got some releases out where I could work alone, such as Inverted Sandalgaze, which is the songs from Sandalgaze edited and played backwards. 

In early November, I managed to capture Kanon and George again, and we recorded the very short Friendship EP, which instantly became my favorite thing we’d done. In spite of still being improv, it felt much more held-together than our other work, almost as if we’d made the songs sound the way they did on purpose. Also at this time, Kanon became the official fourth band member, what with the Friday’ers basically being dead now anyways. I got really excited by this, but unfortunately, it’s the last full recording we’ve done as a band together.

In the meantime, I’ve been recording copious amounts of dark ambient music, which seems to be a thing I do in the wintertime lol. I’ve been building up to an EP called Night Winter Noise, which is what happens when I’m alone in my room all night listening to my open window and the sound of my refrigerator (I now have a mini-fridge in my room). I enjoy doing this, and I think I’ve gotten enormously better at it than I was a year ago. In addition to the dark ambient, I’ve done a track or two of chaotic noise, which I also like, but Battler hates all of it. He considers dark ambient a bullshit genre he wants no part in. Thankfully, Kanon disagrees entirely.

The other day, Kanon sent me a melody he’d put together, and I laid down atmospheric tracks over it to turn it into a soothing ambient song that I find good enough to genuinely believe we could sell. It’s only a matter of time before he and I put together some more tracks and I’ll finally set up a bandcamp account or something.

It’s weird making all this music, because I like all of it. I actually listen to all of my songs regularly, and even know the lyrics to a lot of the improv songs. I’ve burned several CDs of our music for my car. But it’s weird, because it’s like posting on tumblr: I put out something that I care about in a forum where no one’s really going to see it. The only people who listen to my music are my friends, all of whom are already in the band itself. After a rather negative reaction to the first two albums, I gave up on posting my songs on google+, and I don’t know what kind of place would be fit to interest anyone in the songs. I mean, who would even want to listen to this stuff? Most of it is unpolished and underwhelming. Would even people who love weird indie and atmospheric shit be interested? I can’t figure out how to figure it out. 

I do know this: I may be proud of my music, but I’m at the same time a little too ashamed of it to present it. As soon as I’ve made music that I’m really, truly proud of and find presentable, I’m definitely going to make sure it finds an audience. then I’ll just hope that the people I find might take interest in the rest of the Trial discography.

And now, if anyone actually read all of this and is interested in hearing some of our music, here’s my personal Best-Of:

Souls in Tandem (acoustic folk-rock improv)

I’m Your Favorite Number, You’re My Favorite Letter (ambient mathy thing)

Shaughmboughaleigh (weird-ass, badly recorded acoustic improv epic)

That Ass Is So Clean You Could Eat Off Of It (weird-ass acoustic improv comedy)

Abduction (dark ambient)