#how am i feeling homesick for a 2009 video game

[perilegs]

no video game will ever feel as much like home as dao does. i saw an alistair clip and got mildly emotional over how much i miss him.

[nihilnovisubsole]

i feel like we say this every year now, but wow, 2019 sure was a ride, wasn’t it?

sometimes i worry so much about coming off as negative that i’m not emotionally honest about my personal life. so, as much as i wish i could tell you otherwise, i’m not really ending 2019 on a high note. for several months, i’ve been working on something that’s been a shambling slog of rejection, false hope, and a lot of wasted energy. i’ll survive - i always do - but it’s still been frustrating, and it’s definitely affected my ability to work on my other projects. in fact, i’m not even going to tally up a word count for 2019. i know it’s less than 2018. nothing i can do but do better next time. many of my friends have hit huge, happy personal milestones this year - engagements, big moves, dream jobs, graduate degrees. i’m proud of every one of them, and because i’m so proud of them, i wish i had something of that magnitude to share with them, too.

[again, i say this as a joke, not to be depressing, but you know i’m in a rut because i’ve been drawing more again. when i’m happy, i write. when i write, i’m happy. when i push through my forearm injury to draw, you know there’s something i’m trying to escape from. probably the writing.]

on the other hand, i don’t want to let the gloomy second half of the year cloud the fact that i really, actually, finally, for real put a novel out. i’d built it up in my head for so long, it feels strangely ordinary to have done the one thing i’ve wanted to do since i was eight years old. because i’m... well, me, i have to remind myself that it’s a real achievement, not just the bare minimum to be an accomplished human being. i did it. i wrote it, i designed the cover, i formatted the ebook, i tweeted about it, i saw it through from start to finish and made it real. even if it hasn’t made me an overnight millionaire. even if i didn’t publish it in the way i dreamed of being published in elementary school.

it’s also a sign of how far i’ve come that i see me taking a summer break to dash off a 38,000-word fanfic as a trivial footnote. [and a very well-received one, thank you!] i remember all the afternoons i hunched over my college desk and grit my teeth about only being able to write 200 words a day. i remember how hard i worked to drag myself over the 13,000-word finish line of the fallout big bang. lord knows i remember playing repetitive video games until 4 AM, stewing in the fear that i’d never make it in the only field i want to pursue. nowadays i don’t think, apart from a chosen few, any writer “makes it” the way we think of “making it.” you never get to rest on your laurels. you always have to keep working. it’s why you have to enjoy it. even if i’m not a bestseller, i’m lucky i do.

because it’s 2019, everyone is doing retrospectives on 2009, and it’s weird for me to contemplate even existing in 2009 and 2010. for years, i’ve thought about writing a nonfiction piece about what happened back then, and something always stops me before i get it off the ground. either i cringe at my memories, or i cringe at my nonfiction writing style, or i want to wait until i’ve become some kind of outrageous success so i have something more narratively satisfying to end it with. mostly, i recoil in horror at the idea that, to really write it, i’d have to be completely open about a wretched time in my life. after a decade of facing outward on social media, i’ve become one of those stiff-upper-lip people who is intensely private about the things that actually bother me. you kill a bad thing by acting in public like it never existed. if you write a navel-gazing essay about it, you’ve made it immortal. so maybe i will. maybe i won’t.

in the meantime, i wonder if i can meet myself halfway and learn to talk about my younger self with more neutrality. i’ve spent the decade brutalizing past-me with a spiked baseball bat over my questionable grooming, or my edgy, cynical attitudes, or things i said out of jealousy or ignorant, arrogant meanness that irreversibly damaged friendships with people who didn’t deserve it. bashing your old self’s brain in doesn’t change the choices you made. it just leaves you exhausted and covered in gore and feeling gross. i always said that if i let myself forget how much it hurt, i’d slip up and make the same mistake again. but that’s not true, is it? i think now the real victory would be to let it stay in the past and not feel the obsessive urge to keep scourging myself. to paraphrase a dear friend who i don’t get to talk to enough, “everyone is already cruel to teenage girls. you don’t have to be, too.”

around the time i graduated from college, i had a premonition that it would take about a decade after 2010 to get back on my feet. i couldn’t explain why then, and i can’t now either. it’s just a feeling. by some people’s standards, i may have already done it. by other people’s - like my own - i still have a long, long way to go. which is silly, because i couldn’t even tell you what “getting back on my feet” looks like. i just know that it has been almost ten years, and i have a sense that i’m standing on one of those precipices of change where you've become sick of yourself. i’ve started feeling homesick for places i’ve never been. i’m fidgety about my writing projects. i’m not sure what i want to throw myself into next. i’d love to move to another country, which is surreal and bewildering, since i’ve spent the whole last decade wanting to move back to the home i lost. what can i do with that? i don’t know. i want things so badly, i wear myself out. i’ve always struggled to accept that sometimes you just have to wait and see.

i thought about setting new year’s goals, like “talk more about dangerous crowns,” or “publish a twine game,” or “finish another novel,” or something like that. but to be honest, i already hold myself to such ridiculous standards that pressing the boot on my back even harder feels like a bad idea. maybe 2020 is the year to work harder without trying to prescribe what should come of it. i may not know where i’m going or whether i’m on my way, but at least i know next year, i’ll have something new to report.

[sonoflucis-archive]

I couldn’t sleep for hours because your eyes were burned into me. Seafoam, just enough green to not quite be blue and the whole ocean contained within. Enough to drown me.

Funny how something wet can burn, like too much salt dried on your skin. 

I wish I wasn’t this confused container stuffed too full of too many memories and too much else that will never even matter here, its only purpose is to make me as disjointed as the memories themselves, and if my own pieces will never line up then how will they fit with anyone else?

I know people think I’m fixated but it’s the first thing that’s been ‘home’ since I’ve been born, like I was familiar with every stone and shitty ramshackle rest stop. 

Everything in my head, in my memory was “It can’t be, but it is” and I guess I don’t know how to live in this world when memories of somewhere else are more real and right. 

It’s a lot. I’m too much. I’m too much even for me. I don’t even want to believe mySELF half of the time.  

I’ve gone by Nox since 2009 at least, and used the moniker of ‘the vermin prince’ even longer. I feared fire more than anything else when I was a child, and upon seeing a documentary about Mt. Kilauea I crawled sobbing and shrieking into my mother’s arms when I was only four or five. Video games were the first thing I cared about aside from magic in shitty 80′s movies, and I’ve been good at them since I could hold a controller. My aunt dabbled in Eastern mysticism despite being obnoxiously christian and told me that all things repeated... maybe “or something” etc. At six or seven, we visited the grotto of the redemption, and while my grubby little child hands ran along the walls, a chunk of rose quartz the size of my fist fell off into my hand. I hid it and kept it. Later on, my family joked about how the “crystal chose me.” I started to panic and cry at the suggestion. No one knew why, not even me. I think they decided I was afraid I might get in trouble.

When my dad explained to me  that his work was dangerous, I wasn’t worried, and I explained that his magic would protect him “like always.” They thought I was utterly hopeless and blamed my aunt for filling my head with ‘fantasy garbage’ when really, she only ever showed me movies and books  that she thought would quell my constant homesickness. 

It’s like. I’ve lived with this constant truth my entire life with a certainty that even the most faithful believers can’t really mimic. I never expect anyone to be able to level with me, and I believe that my truth is not your truth and vice versa. I never... think I’m going to find that home because it’s probably. Another planet or another universe altogether. I do fixate bc I guess I’m trying to fill holes and man this world always has and probably always will feel foreign to me. When I was studying in Yamanashi and the short time I spent in Tokyo were the closest I EVER felt to home. 

Sometimes I get violent flashbacks of things that have ‘never happened’ and sometimes it lines up so closely that I don’t know where I am. This is my existence and I have had to live with it my entire life. It’s not the only place and time and thing I remember vividly. It’s just the one I’m closest to. Someday maybe I’ll write down every snippet I can isolate. Maybe someday I’ll line up the pieces and they’ll make sense, but I doubt it. 

[theseventhhex]

Balam Acab Interview

Alec Koone

The project of Ithaca, New York’s Alec Koone, Balam Acab - named after a Mayan demigod who created rainbows by piercing clouds with arrows - began as an experimental noise project while he was still a Pennsylvania high-school student. He resuscitated the name a few years later as a music student at Ithaca College, incorporating dubstep, U.K. bass, and R&B elements into his atmospheric sounds, drawing comparisons to Grouper as well as drag/witch house artists such as Salem and White Ring. Balam Acab's critically acclaimed debut EP, ‘See Birds’, was released in 2010, followed by several other compelling works. After a lengthy hiatus, Alec has returned with a range of striking tracks in 2018 – still in fine form and capable of melding genres with striking outcomes… We talk to Alec about labouring over music, escaping the public eye and social media…

TSH: ‘Free Etherea’ was recently made available on iTunes, tell us more about your intentions at the time of making it...

Alec: I actually made ‘Free Etherea’ in December of 2009 and it was the first project that I had made using computer music. I felt that it was eventually good enough to share with more than just a couple of friends. It basically started off as a Madlib and J Dilla kind of rip-off project and then I made it a mixtape during my first winter break as a freshman and added more textural stuff.

TSH: What made you want to finally release this collection of songs?

Alec: I just wanted my most hardcore fans to know about it, but it’s been generally available since 2009. I just uploaded it to a digital streaming site under the name Balam Acab so people could find it and have the ability to hear it, instead of it going unheard.

TSH: What did a track like ‘In Church’ signify to you at the time?

Alec: Well, I named that song ‘In Church’ because I was sampling all the percussive sounds from the ambience of a church as well as choirs and church bells. There wasn’t much thought beyond that.

TSH: What resonates with you most regarding a track like ‘College’?

Alec: You know, that one is technically a remix but I was happy because that was the first song of mine that got on any type of blog recognition. I remember it being popular on Hype Machine back in 2009, but it seems like Hype Machine isn’t as relevant these days. I was so excited because back then it got to the top 15 and was one of my most loved tracks.

TSH: Did you decide to make more music recently because your creative drive started to nag you again?

Alec: Kind of. I mean music can be therapeutic but it can also be really frustrating when it doesn’t work out. However, most of the time it’s just fun for me.

TSH: Were you missing the physicality of music?

Alec: Well, I’ve been on a 4 to 5 year hiatus between official releases like ‘WANDER/WONDER’ and ‘CHILD DEATH’ and I was as kind of getting sick of sitting behind a computer. ‘WANDER/WONDER’ and ‘See Birds’ were made entirely with samples and I was just drawing them out. However, with ‘CHILD DEATH’ I had a Juno synth and I’d play guitar on it and I’d have a lot of live vocals instead of samples. Now I feel like I can write better melodies if I’ve got a keyboard or a guitar in my hands, as opposed to just coming up with something and drawing it in.

TSH: With ‘CHILD DEATH’ you spent a lot of time working on all of the tracks compared to previous albums. Do you still labour over your work or is it more free- flowing now?

Alec: It depends really. I guess I still labour over my music as much as I did with ‘CHILD DEATH’. If it’s going to be put out, even if it’s in a semi-official capacity, I’ll put a lot of work in. All in all, I just don’t have the time to sit down and work on music everyday like I did with ‘CHILD DEATH’. Having said that, when I am creative, I still put in 12+ hour days when I’m working on serious music.

TSH: What are the origins of your recent single ‘I Am Homesick’?

Alec: That’s a collaboration with my friend Slug Christ who is a rapper an producer. I had a song made that I sent to him and he told me to take all the drums out of it and just send the music part back. So that’s what I did and he super-slowed down what I had sent him and added in trap like drums. I really liked what he did.

TSH: You’ve previously mentioned that your songs have 100+ layers of sounds in them. Is stripping back often a challenge for you?

Alec: I’ve been learning how to strip back, for sure. When a part is not really doing what it should, I’ll take it out and test the song without it - if I feel like it’s not taking anything away from track by not having it, then I’ll cut it out, which is what the process is like in having to deal with so many layers. I think the track which had the least amount of different sounds on ‘CHILD DEATH’ was somewhere between 80 to 100.

TSH: Is your outlook to still not be in the public eye, and just make music on the side?

Alec: Yeah. I just want to be a normal person. I feel like I wouldn’t be able to make good music if I was a careerist type of musician. I’ve tried that before and I got to the point where I couldn’t make anything good because there was so much pressure on getting a new album out and touring it. I hate touring. I won’t be happy with sitting down and churning out an album alongside deadlines, because if I haven’t lived or had experiences to influence me then it won’t work.

TSH: What sort of sounds have you been leaning towards with recent music?

Alec: These days music can often go either way for me. I’ve been making a lot of darker stuff, but also a lot of hyper-euphoric, almost Disney-esque sounding stuff with lots of orchestral elements to it.

TSH: What led to you and a friend of yours feeling convinced that Sega was spying on you through a basement window?

Alec: Haha! Me and my childhood best friend from elementary school would meet every day. He’d come over to mine and we would make comics, write short stories, design videos and come up with ideas for video games. We’d draw all the maps, characters and weapons in the game. So we wanted to make a video game console that had the picture not only on the TV but on the controller too. Shortly after Sega Dreamcast came out with that type of design and we were thinking they were spying on us, ha!

TSH: Would you say that you’re a spiritual individual?

Alec: Yeah, I think so. I always describe my type of spirituality as concrete spirituality. I’m not really into the metaphysical type of stuff anymore. I believe in stuff that’s grounded in real life.

TSH: You also embrace social media too...

Alec: I do, and that’s because it’s all a joke to me. I’ll talk to anyone on social media. Big artists tend to not interact with their fans, which I think is an unnecessary barrier to have. I mean if you’re releasing music and affecting your fans, then there’s probably something between you that you’ll connect over, so why not just interact? Anyhow, I’ve made a lot of friends through social media.

TSH: What matters most with your musical preferences form here on in?

Alec: What matters most to me is that I know that I’ve made something that I think fills some type of void in the musical realm that Balam Acab exists in. I make music that I legitimately enjoy listening to and that I think is good, which is how I’ll always see things.

Balam Acab - “Apart”

Noided in Flint, MI - Single