The day’s August 31st, 2021, and as I was browsing the internet as usual, I came upon an article from earlier that month while I was researching arctic climates:

Rain and Warmth Trigger Intense Melting in Greenland

“Large melt events including those of the 2021 season are generally short-lived and contribute a relatively small amount to the total melting that occurs across a season. But they can have a lasting effect on the ice sheet.”

Kathryn Hansen, SciTechDaily

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Now this particular news, to be honest with you, wasn’t the worst of global warming that year—like I’d list the worst for you, but welp- for a start, news like this wouldn’t come out until a few months later （ ｉ _ ｉ ）

Reading this at the time gave me the image of Greenland as this massive, chunk of ice that was just slowly melting away—and yeah I think we both know that’s not true, but that scenery stuck with me for that day…

Morning goes by, then so does the half the afternoon, and I mostly just laze around, since the night before, I’d just finished recording my first three proper songs-!

Thanks to Another Breeze, I had this theme of nature just rolling like a film reel in my head, so I thought: what if I turned that lonely glacier into its own song!?

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Floe

My vision idea for Floe evolved straight from that article I read: first I thought of a lonely glacier, then I thought about trying to depict the thing from its formation, right up to when it slowly melts away into the ocean…

Musically… Okay I’ll admit I was a complete noob with this software: everything in this first album is literally just in C Major, most with a tempo of 110 BPM, so this wasn’t really an exception (-.-)y-., o O

Because Another Breeze turned out so well, I wanted to try and compose another song that was mostly synth-based, so I began experimenting what keyboards I thought sounded nice, then slapped together whatever I felt worked~

Around the 1 or so minute mark? You can head this crystalline, repeating melody for a while—I got the inspiration to do these kinds of melodies from Kraftwerk, and if you’re a fan of them too, you can probably hum quite a few of their memorable lines over the years!

And I guess this one melody wasn’t that bad… but for me anyways, its ear-piercing shrillness really highlights one of my biggest mistakes with this song: volume.

My mixing is basically non-existent—I didn’t know much of that at the time, so, especially compared to the rest of this first album, Floe is just this octave leap that really wants to hate crime our ears (＞人＜;)

Other than that, I also, somehow, messed up a lot of the timings around the middle—you can hear it too I think: a repeating melody that abruptly loops slightly behind the beat, and just does it poorly in a way that’s always bugged me during re-listens…

When I ranked Searing Debut dead last, I was dealing with noise that I felt just didn’t have direction—this time, there’s a direction and an image, but not much care or experience…

And I honestly really regretted that. (T . T)

Because if you ask me, I actually like the last few minutes of Floe—!

What I did there was basically loop the same melody again and again, as was my early style, but with each bar, one layer of the melody would go up a semitone, creating this dramatic crescendo of sorts that I felt really captured that desperate scenario I pictured the glacier to be in!

If my memory’s right, I think there are around 3 different synths playing the same melody during that sequence, and each one would rise a semitone independently of the others, only really syncing up at the tail end of the track!

But the volume and that middle section just made this song the black sheep of the album for me—and given how messy the rest of it is, I feel like that says something about how I perceive it… (● ˃̶͈̀ロ˂̶͈́)੭ꠥ⁾⁾

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継続は力なり

For us creative folk, regret about past works can be a bit powerful of a feeling, isn’t it?

Every now and then I think back to some of my oldest books and works, left out there on web forums as decomposed things not even flies touch anymore…

No one knows those were from me, yeah, but I can’t help but feel some shame for thinking these were good enough…

But that’s part of learning, right?

Floe’s a very similar kind of misstep for me—but it’s still up on my channel, and here I am still talking about it…

As a learning experience, the mistakes I made on Food, my fourth-ever released song, were some of the ones that really stuck—Just remember that middle section makes me obsessively-check the mixing on my newer tracks, and I’m still not getting any of it perfect of course, but it’s quite a far cry of an improvement, no?

The title of this segment is a pretty-famous Japanese proverb that, translated literally, basically says “Continuation is power”.

Maybe it’s just me, but I feel those three words—in English anyways—summarise the point of this last bit well!

This won’t be the last I’ll talk about Floe, because in the end, my regrets over this song led me to look back on this track, take it, and do something that, at the time, I hadn’t ever done before… ((o(^∇^)o))

So stay tuned, friend!

Much-higher up on this list, we can talk about Floe once more, and I promise you by then—we’ll be looking at something that, with any luck, won’t be blasted at Somali pirates anytime soon~

Look after yourself, and all the love to you~!