shadowsdog
by tirestires
And he remembers the lie he told himself, when he first learned how to twist his world's dynamics. That he could bend synapse with noises through his mouth from his lobes, and later through his fingers. Stitching up what they or anyone could fear. Orange as a candle with all night surrounding it, and dead fish and dogs. Feeling real snuffed so quiet, so clear. Too clear to be any kind of memory.
~ B.R. Yeager, Amygdalatropolis
shadowdog_album_explaination [Aug 25 2020]
Writing:
I wrote all the songs over about a year and a half, on mostly guitar, but sometimes piano from May 2012- Fall 2013ish. I am pretty bad at playing instruments myself, but I tried my best. I played most of the guitar, about half the bass, some of the keyboard, and one of the drum tracks myself. Everything started as lo-fi indie rock songs I was planning to record with my band at the time. Olivia Tremor Control, Liz Phair, Built to Spill, Guided by Voices, or Pavement were the main influences back then. But then I got bored of guitar music. All the lyrics were originally totally different, but then I decided it should be a concept breakup album, so I rewrote all the lyrics as prose with rhyme schemes over the course of about a summer, I think 2014.
Live Recording:
I sort of broke up the band and got all the friends I could find to record a ton of different parts for every song. A lot of the instruments were recorded at different keys from the original songs, in order to have them pitchshifted to the correct scales, in order to sound more warped. A lot of the guitars feature unusual tuning I don't remember any of them now. My brother played all the live kit drums for the album at age 13 or 14, and we recorded him everyday for like a week, banging out everything pretty quickly, writing drum parts and then immediately recording them after. Basically, all the songs featured full rock band arrangements, often with several guitars. Then I recorded a bunch of keyboard stuff through midi. I recruited all my friends who played any orchestral instruments to come by my house and record improved stuff on the spot. There was live sax, standup bass, violin, and marimba, as well as a ton of hand percussion. Shoutouts to my friends Tyse and Daniel who each played a TON of the random tracks on all sorts of instruments. These recording sessions lasted the two middle years of the project. Almost everything recorded was pretty improvised, so I usually chopped up and retuned the instruments after the recordings. I wanted it to sound like a Glitch-y Baroque Pop. On top of all the live recordings, each song features about three other random things I found on youtube, which I chopped up, sampled, and often manually tuned to fit new melodies. Lots of orchestral music samples, but a ton of random stuff from many genres are sampled. I recorded vocals during summer 2015. I don't mean to make it sound like I was working on it everyday. It was more like 5 to 12 hours a week were spent on something related to this album for the 4 years, approximately. Sometimes way more for a month, and then some months I hardly worked on it
Production: (I don't know if this section is overkill, but I think it is where things got interesting).
So I heard Vectroid and Jai Paul leaks in summer 2013 and my mind got blown and that's why I couldn't make indie rock anymore. I sort of understood the process of making vaporwave cause it's pretty simple, but I had no idea how Jai Paul sounded like he did. I really wanted the intense side chaining / ducking effect he had on that record, but I didn't really understand electronic music production, because I had learned all my recording skills from lo-fi rock band albums. So the production style of Shadowdog was basically developed by very poorly trying to understand and then replicate Jai Paul.
I did everything in Logic 9. Most of the midi synths I used were either Native Instruments Orchestral Presets, or from this wonky crack of a fake Juno Synth 106, where I couldn't save presets. I used mostly base logic plugins. The only other plugins that don't come with logic, that were extremely relevant, were all Fab Filter cracks. I specifically found strange ways to abuse FabFilter Pro-Q (EQ), Fab Filter Pro-L (Limiter), Fab Filter Pro C (Compressor), and Fab Filter Saturn, in order to develop what I think is at the heart of the Shadowdog sound. That sound was also deeply effected by the limitations of the Stereo Spreader plugin in Logic.
This next part of the process is the most convoluted part. I would probably need a live stream to properly convey this part lol. But basically the heart of how things sound on the record involved me creating many drastically different mixes of the same songs, using totally different instrumentations, samples, and aggressive EQing. All these different versions were then compressed intensely, which pushed really unusual frequencies to the top of each mix. Serious compression of the whole mix was the only way I could figure out to remotely replicate Jai Paul's heavy ducking / side chaining effects, because the instruments would be so compressed, that at a loud moment, one instrument would totally overwhelm the mix.
I then took all these different mixes of each song, into a new project file, where I would rhythmically slice from one mix to another, in order to create new rhythms and flow. There was sort of more to this part, which heavily used a pretty specific stereo spreader effect and some hard cut EQing, but I literally cannot think of how to explain this without showing the project files.
But to use an analogy from the world of 3d animation, I can sort of convey the technique. It's sort of like I am cutting between different skins and textures of the same 3d scenes, in order to give the audience a feeling of a new texture. It's like the same camera and character movement, but the skins are constantly changing (Ex: it's like between 2:18-2:22 in this video by Jerry Paper. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeNF12NbWXM. The walls changing colours with the remote hits are like the different mixes of the same song, and the camera movement and objects are like the structure of my songs).
The last major piece of the production process came when I heard "asdfasdf" by katie dey, and realized you could write indie rock songs, and aggressively tune the vocals, and it would work. So I took all my vocal recordings, and tuned them heavily, then I used these manually tuned vocal tracks to create several layers of harmonies above and below the main vocal lines. That’s what creates the vocoder effect. And finished those during summer 2015.
Finally, I slowed everything down cause vaporwave is cool lol, and finished everything during fall 2015.
Unfortunately, because I was so disorganized, and destructive about how I figured out the production style, there really wasn't a good way to make the album more dynamic. This is my biggest regret about the project, because many people find it unlistenable, because it's so compressed for 40 minutes straight. This is a very fair criticism.
- tirestires
listen (mp3):
after sex under parents
lyrics:
minutes in and chill meme // mature butthole prolapses inside-out // my basement scene #1
lyrics:
breaking apart baby monitor/potential recording device // my basement scene #2
lyrics:
unclogging roof drain on her // bare rests
lyrics:
valerian tea // underage on message board // mom tags herself viewing me in ultrasound // a vacation, apart
lyrics:
hiding seek at family reunion // drowning after sand burial // a vacation
lyrics:
breast feeding home movie // head indents ceiling, again // 50th mom birthday
lyrics:
wedding dress rehearsal after bachelor party/baby shower // morning nausea
lyrics:
carrying topical cream back home // elder crossing guard with fas
lyrics:
kissing after late party // awaiting torrent finish // sharing old haircut incites new haircut
lyrics:
(mirror) upload of ancient condom opening vlog // looking glasses reflecting off each other // my basement scene #3
lyrics:
pink eye // far from residential areas with phone and charger and eye drops and no purse and no pockets
lyrics:
pvr pregnant teens // before abstract tech support schedule // dad turns 50
lyrics:
sharing one-bed room // hotel bolts down all fixtures other than clock // a vacation
lyrics:
mommymommymommymommy // i text while driving communications between parents
lyrics:
girl next-door break-up nudes // international date site // my basement scene #4
lyrics:
shedding fur lit by dvd home menu snow // my basement scene #5
lyrics:
new suburb before streetlights // post-millennium/post-mom-move
lyrics:
holiday in house with kids // pre-millennium/pre-mom-move // not summer
lyrics:
fursona request thread // home phoning cell before deleting first nudes // my basement scene #6
lyrics:
pollen like snow // not summer
lyrics:
Sri Panwa Phuket Luxury Pool Villa Hotel
shadowdog is a stream of consciousness-style first-person narrative which begins somewhere in the subject’s early childhood (perhaps around their first interactions/experiences with technology) and ends somewhere in their later adulthood. (though the album order is not chronological.)
i consider it a blindingly brilliant and unrelenting portrait of a net-developed and -saturated inner and outer world, and how the cycle of abuse can manifest in it - particularly on the idea that paraphilias can originate from childhood trauma arising from easy access to endless instant gratification in endless forms, and that moral corruption can be caused/exacerbated by being “raised by the internet” - as well as generally the social and psychological impacts of the internet on children and adolescent development, and ultimately humanity/society at large.
some review excerpts i like
This album is also deeply unsettling in a way I struggle to listen to. Most “creepy” albums don’t have the stomach-churning approach to sexuality that this does, since it all feels lost in the chaos while still bubbling through the surface in brief moments of clarity, almost as if it no longer has any effect on the brain until you happen to reach a point where it rubs up against your most traumatic memories. Now that I can relate to, even if I don’t have a terminally online perspective like so many others in my generation.
Most of the music that gets branded with the “post-internet” label often has an ironic or detached edge to it, yet still presents this idealistic image of the internet as a way to facilitate [a change] from the banalities of everyday life. tirestires’ Shadowdog ignores even the suggestion of putting up that sort of facade at all, instead presenting a bleaker view of the concept; overstimulating yet ultimately mind-numbing, an outlet to fulfill every perversion no matter how overly-specific or morally dubious, full of incoherent sludge not even comprehensible to the minds who engineered it. Whereas the sort of thing that gets labeled “hyperpop” presents an alternate reality where one is free from embarrassment, tirestires provides the reality check, showing the world how deep the abyss truly is.
~ verai
The thing about this album is that it’s actually very normal. Listen to these songs, like really listen to them, and you will discover that they are in fact very straightforward emo-pop tunes with funky dance beats. Like, best reference point is, of all bands, Passion Pit.
So: why. Why write normal songs and then make them… like this. Well–and to be clear, basically the only thing I have to go off of is the song titles, I can’t understand a god damn thing this guy is saying–I get the feeling that this album is about the kind of veneer of suburban nuclear-family normalcy that you put on when, in fact, that nuclear family is killing you. Like, one of the things that’s stuck with me from my days listening to the You’re Wrong About podcast is that, up until maybe the 70s, we as a society simply did not acknowledge that child sexual abuse existed. And once we did acknowledge it, we were forced to confront the fact that the majority of it happens within the context of the family, and no one could deal with the implications of that, so instead everyone made up elaborate fictions about satanic cults. That’s what this album is about. “Abolish the family” is maybe the smartest thing Marx ever said.
~ merton
The lyrics of this one are buried deep under layers and layers of vocal effects, strange cadences, and the overwhelming surge of sound that are the instrumental tracks, but if you dig into them and find out what’s being sung then it uncovers a poisoned, trauma-scarred heart that wears the blindingly high-contrast production and surreal summery melodies around it as armour to protect itself with. … the longer the album goes on the more it becomes clear that our main character’s brain is fried from growing up online with easy and instantaneous access to the worst possible things available. Sexual innuendos bleed into how they process the ‘real world’, life around them becomes an obstacle in the way of them being able to get off, and the most horrifying experiences dance on the edges of their consciousness, casually dropping lines that I can’t quote in this review because in and out of context they’re just…traumatic in itself.
Discovering that the artist and I are the same age made everything make so much more sense as well. This isn’t just an isolated thing or an unfortunate but rare start in life - I’d argue that everyone who grew up online through the 2000s had roughly the same kind of experience, given that the web was more of a wild west as compared to the increasingly corporate and homogeneous creature it is now. Growing up online and being isolated offline is an incredibly risky combination, and it almost always comes at the cost of having how you see the world become warped in one way or another far beyond how it would ‘naturally’ develop because of seeing things that you’re far too young to process.
no other album sounds like this. its certainly one of the most interesting sounding original albums put on a streaming site. think of after sex and breaking apart baby monitor and the percussion at the end of elder crossing guard. he shit out on of the most interestingly produced AND written bandcamp albums ever then dipped for teh lulz (i assume). that takes courage. he talks about horrible shit that happen on the internet but dont let urself get lost amongst the well known f-list lyrical content on here that ppl like to think about. moments like “frame lasts forever/laugh lasts forever” and of course the whole last song is pretty methodically written poetry. tackles the strange overtly sexual element of the internet we (as kids who grew up with the internet) were forced to face at a very young age that likely affected our development forever. it’s all just a mutation of the sexual repression and toxicity that generations before us faced now manifesting the form of horrifying hardcore porn drawn by people who have not had sex. maybe spongebob squarepants is there. i forgot what i was talking about
awesome… even if it is horrible. heres a quirky and superficial way to describe it: like playing your own personal trauma on the sega saturn. writing that made me want to gauge my eyes out. fuck you
~[deleted]
Buried under layers of dissonance and syncopation are beautiful melodies demented into a decidedly cryptic feel to the album. If you pay careful attention to the instruments, it is not difficult to recognize the obvious sounds of a folk band. Yet from this relatively “natural” sound tirestires adds breaks, glitching, and completely synthetic sounds to create a whole different beast never explored in the world of indietronica or glitch pop. The music is corrupted, like a glitched computer file. … Shockingly graphic imagery of sex straddles mundane, even comical descriptions of routine and innocence. In “unclogging roof drain on her // bare rests”, a vague scene of the morning after a one night stand is coupled with a retelling of quite literally unclogging a roof drain. The online world and the real one merge into each other. … His interactions with his parents seem removed from himself, lacking in description and emotion. Yet his time alone, searching for sex online to fill his void is given with meticulous detail.
one of my favorite things about music distribution in the digital age is the great potential for incredible mystique, and the unforgettable experience of uncovering it as a dedicated listener. desperately browsing archived pages once belonging to a now-missing artist, grasping at second-hand accounts of information relevant to them, sharing downloads of their work with others.. it seems easier now than ever before to do what tirestires has done here: casually drop a masterpiece, refuse to elaborate, and vanish without much of a trace, as the work goes on to gain a cult following. by now you may have heard the saying that the internet is like a “perpetually burning library of alexandria”, and as painful as that truth may be, at the very least, it makes moments like this just that much more profound. in its shockingly brief official lifespan, shadowdog captured the interest of enough people to be safely preserved, despite its own creator’s decision to remove it from bandcamp. in fact, one of those people was none other than anthony fantano, whose tweet about the album is the only thing currently still visible on the tirestires page, perhaps indicating that was the final straw that lead him to taking everything down? or maybe he just thought it was funny, i dunno.
adequately describing what makes this project so endlessly captivating in the first place is tricky, bc there’s just so much going on here. the song titles alone feel impenetrable from the start (just the way i like it!), filled to the brim with various phrases & sentence fragments relating to family events, sexual encounters, and the online world. it’s not like the music itself answers very many questions either, as the production is fucking relentlessly intricate all around, forming some of the most unbelievably disorienting-yet-catchy pop songs i’ve ever heard, and the lyric sheet provided (which you’ll definitely need if you want to understand a word he’s saying behind all the effects) only reveals what is essentially a set of cryptic poems. attempting to read along with them while listening to each track quickly reveals another barrier, perhaps the most strange of all: none of these things are fully aligned to how they’re arranged in the songs themselves. certain lines could be repeated, chopped up, or otherwise obstructed at any time, and every syllable is sung in however many notes the melody calls for, with little to no regard for sentence structure, often resulting in whole words being awkwardly split up between verses. basically, imagine an entire album like that viral video about singing one syllable out of sync, on steroids.
the overall product formed by this combination of elements is something i could only describe as “digital mania”. an endless slew of robotic fragments of an anonymous individual cutting in and out, at times mundane or simply incomprehensible, and at times shockingly graphic. the singer recounts events ranging from a game of hide and seek or attending a wedding, to receiving nudes or fucking his partner live on stream. there’s definitely something resembling a “story” to be gathered across these passages, further evidenced by the recurring instances of “my basement scene [x]” seen in several of the song’s titles, but putting it all together beyond some specific scenarios & general concepts feels impossible, most likely by design. it exists as a sort of breadcrumb trail left behind by someone we may or may not ever truly know more about, akin to reading through a lost diary you found in a dumpster, which makes things all the more fascinating.
thematically speaking, i appreciate the raw feeling of hypersexuality and its integration with the internet depicted here, especially in the one blunt acknowledgement of the horrible shit this guy has seen even as a child. not to get overly personal, but as someone who first became aware of online porn & shock content at a dangerously young age (i’m talking like, 7-8 years old), and sometimes feels like a prisoner to my own sexuality, coming across a piece of art that even vaguely deals with such ideas really means a lot to me. it may not be pretty, and i can think of at least a line or two that may make him sound seriously questionable to some (particularly the one about going onto a message board and posting someone’s nudes, presumably an ex’s), but this is the reality we live in, and i don’t think it’s our place to fuckin psychoanalyze the dude over individual disturbing moments in a mysterious project he wrote years ago about his messy teenage years[1] anyway. it is what it is, and the triumphant chant of “i finally delete her nudes” at the end of the same song already indicates a ‘redemption arc’ of sorts, leaving him no longer enslaved by this depravity.
even if you chose to completely ignore all of that and stuck exclusively to the tunes themselves, tho, i think you’d certainly still get a great experience out of this thing if you’re into weirdo pop music at all. i must re-iterate: these songs are fucking miles more catchy and even emotionally resonant than they have any right to be, considering the overall complexity of the production and how most of the words sound virtually nonsensical on the surface. the instrumentation is brilliant as well, featuring a wide range of acoustic & electronic sounds melded into something far greater and more surreal than the sum of its parts.
all in all, shadowdog is nothing short of an instant classic for the post-internet generations, and even feels a bit ahead of the curve in many respects. i’d totally understand if this was released in 2021, following the rise of movements like HexD & Hyperpop that heavily indulge in extreme digital distortions of vocals & instruments as a main element (not to mention the rising number of youth realizing just how much the internet has been fucking them up), but this was 2015, and had already been in the making for years!! the best comparison for this overall approach to music at the time would possibly be Vaporwave, which at least lines up with what the artist himself had to say in the description of a track’s old demo, but even that doesn’t fit perfectly. in any case, tho, this is an absolutely essential experience for anyone even remotely interested in this style of music, moved by the concepts at play here, or both. i have over 700 scrobbles on it (at the time of writing!) for a reason. this shit is mind-blowing.
[1] word has it that the lyrics here actually depict a fictional story from a first person perspective, rather than anything completely autobiographical like i & others had initially assumed. and in that case, there's even less reason for anyone to be outraged by any disturbing lines, so my point still stands, i guess !
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