#it sucks so bad as both a conlang and a musical thing. but it’s very cool as a poetic thing

[e77y]

Last lesson with my voice professor went great 🥲❤️ I only cried a little. She gave me some names of choruses and opera choirs to audition for in the city I’m moving to next semester, and she said she’ll come to any performances I do (bc she lives in that area and just commutes up here), and I did an… acted-out (?) runthrough of my recital piece and I think it went super well. Knock on wood but I’m excited :3

[reygwenwrites]

Astro's Magical Musical Adventures!!!

By Rey Gwen

March 15th, 2024

When I was 13 years old, I thought Astro was (very simply put) cool as fuck. I’m 20 years old now, and I still think Astro is cool as fuck. Being in musical spaces alongside Astro has opened my eyes to the versatility of his work- not only does he know anything and everything about music theory, but he also works on conlangs (by definition: a language that has been artificially created; a constructed language) and assortments of other hobbies that make him all the more interesting and super fun to talk to.

The release of Mint Gum at the beginning of February marks the 13th album Astro has put on Spotify. My favorite track is “ok girl !”, an electronic journey that feels like being whisked away to the liveliness of a big city in the summertime. The next track “Era” (my second favorite track) provides the same sense of being transported into whimsical life which is a skillset that Astro has proven time and time again he has mastered.

Needless to say- I'm thrilled to be talking to one of the most talented people I know, and I'm honored to say that Astro is one of my best friends.

REY GWEN: How do you even begin making music?

ASTRO: If I were to give a total newbie steps to making music in the way I make music, I would suggest they first learn to play the piano. My childhood self would have hated this advice, but playing the piano is both an unbelievably useful tool for musical expression and a gateway to music theory. If you learn to play all your favorite songs on the piano, you will learn quickly enough about chord functions and scales.

Speaking of chord functions, learn about chord functions. You can call it functional harmony, or roman numeral analysis, or whatever, but naming your chords in relation to the key is, I think, the most eye-opening thing you can do when learning to analyze music. Patterns are so much easier to identify and understand in roman numeral analysis. When I was teaching myself tonal music theory by just making music, I gleaned some intuition about how chords function, although I had no clue how to communicate that intuition. The sooner you start naming your chords things like "IV" and "vi" and so on, the better.

Western pop music has the advantage of mostly consisting of the chords I, IV, V, and vi. I could write a million words about the Discourse this has caused, but I'll say here that it's useful for beginners because there's so much beautiful things to be said about and expressed through the relationships of those four chords. Learn I IV V vi, and learn them well.

While I'm cramming advice,

Save everything you create. Make archives. Export as .flac or .wav. I am so angry at myself for not saving full-quality exports of anything before 2019.

Don't be shy to make remixes, or covers, or to 'steal' ideas altogether. You'll learn so much. You're probably competent enough to recognize what it means to take and transform an idea. You're not intending to lie about the sources of your material, so don't even act like you would be taking credit for others' work (which is immoral). Copyright is bullshit anyways, and I mean this sincerely.

Know that your music will perpetually sound bad. You will never stop pointing out flaws in your own work. That just means you're getting better! Isn't that sweet?

In the same vein, be smart about receiving critiques. When people point out the ways in which your music sucks, you will feel horrible. But they will be right in some way. You should try your hardest to feel grateful that someone isn't willing to lie and placate you. Instead of lingering on your ill-advised choices, come out as a smarter person who will make even better art. (This is much easier said than done!)

Ask a trusted adult to help you pirate FL studio

GWEN: Most of your songs provoke certain emotions, is this something you take into account before you start creating, or do the emotions unfold upon further work on the song?

ASTRO: I don't really consider anything before I start a song. Every song starts as some random synthesizer I wanted to hear, or a chord progression I wanted to play around with. I only think about the emotions I want to evoke as I'm developing a song, thinking about the album it will sit on, and reflecting on my evolving relationship with the song.

I've realized my perspective on a song's emotional presence totally depends on my experience with the song, which is radically different from my audience. Looking at your above description of my song "ok girl !", I've realized I have a totally different view of that song. To me, it feels intimidating, claustrophobic, obsessive, painful, and shameful. And I can't just listen to that song in a way that doesn't make me think about those feelings. By contrast, you saw it as brighter, like a bustling city in the summer. I find it incredible how (instrumental) (electronic) music invites such vivid yet disparate imaginations.

In general, I want to be more purposeful with my music's emotional aspects than before. I've been working on this song called "Obsession" where I'm again trying to tackle obsession, claustrophobia, and shame through the language of an energetic, electric sound. Honestly, I've been here before — this is the vague idea that drove my 2020 album 10k Degrees.

I doubt my real intent will come across in "Obsession" to my audience, and I'm okay with that. It's probably better to have my art inspire every person to inspect and extract their own emotions, rather than being so obvious as to cause the same emotions in everyone who experiences it. Isn't that why modern art is so interesting?

GWEN: How do you decide which songs go on albums? Do you have any songs sitting in a vault somewhere?

ASTRO: I made a promise to myself back in like 2019 that I would never again release a song if it weren't part of a bigger album. I don't feel like I can say a whole lot with one song alone. So, in short, every (non-remix) song will be released as part of an album, hopefully for the rest of my career. Except "ROSALIE", I guess.

I used to make albums sequentially, but lately I've been working on several simultaneously. This approach has been fun. It lets me think less of each album having to be better than the previous, which was an annoying, critical, unproductive feedback loop that binded me during 2022 and 2023. somewhere in the milky way was gonna be the blueprint for this new method of creation. I had another few album concepts in mind around that time (namely The Lakefront, Beloved, and Mint Gum) that didn't get past 2 or 3 songs, so I kinda just left them in their vaults. I was (and still am) adamant about not releasing them unless I had a whole album to put out. 2023 had me feeling stupid and unproductive because I had no full albums, only little collections of songs. 2023 also had me feeling stupid because I really wanted to make an album with vocals (more about that later), and felt guilty about the mere thought of releasing an instrumental album without finishing that vocal album first.

Mint Gum was a cute remedy of sorts to my conceptual slump. I took these little collections of 2-3 songs, which were made to fulfill some album concept that I gave up on, and just released them as one big album. Mint Gum is composed of a few vaults of mine. And it was so much fun! As I was releasing it, I was worried that I wouldn't develop an emotional connection to Mint Gum the same way I have with every other project, but I already have cherished memories and associations with the album.

I also have one very special vault from 2021 that I'm finally getting around to releasing very soon.

GWEN: Your remixes you put on Youtube are iconic, see: Katy Perry's Magical Musical Adventures!!! , how do you decide which songs get the Astro-treatment?

ASTRO: My remixes are really just an expression of the songs I love the most, the songs that I just can't get out of my head and want to hear through my own lens. In the past, I would sometimes go into a remix thinking "I want to make my own version that fits better with my taste". This is still pretty true — a lot of my remixes are non-EDM songs shoved into an EDM context because I just like the instrumentation of electronic music.

But lately I've been thinking of my remixes not as forward but as lateral. My remix of "Anti-Hero" by Taylor Swift isn't straight up 'how I would have produced Anti-Hero if tasked with it'. Because Taylor didn't ask me to do that. It's a reaction essay and a love poem. And I can expect the listeners to already be familiar with the elements of "Anti-Hero", so there's a musical lingo I can play with. I can be eccentric if you already know the original song. Sometimes this musical lingo even involves incorporating other songs, albeit I never know how well this lands. I don't know if sampling Yiruma's "River Flows in You" hits as hard for other people in my "Anti-Hero" remix, because I really can't be certain other people have the same history with that song as I do.

Most of the remixes I make honestly don't go anywhere. I feel like I'm starting a new remix every day or every other day, usually just some song I catch myself lip syncing to. It only works out if I'm feeling inspired to produce and compose too, the same way I would need to be for an original song. The pop acapella acts as scaffolding and an idea elicitor. I think pop vocals have so much harmonic richness to give, in a way that usually goes unappreciated in the original production.

GWEN: Who are your main musical inspirations? How did you start getting into making music?

ASTRO: I first got into making music when I was a wee lad forced to take piano lessons. I quit after three lessons and instead played video games about music, namely Wii Music.

As an aside, people HATE this game with all their hearts and I will not stand for it. It infamously has no score metric, so performing a song is actually reduced to self-expression. That is the best way for art to be, because this game isn't about being right, it's about making art. When I was a little boy I would queue these popular songs like "September" by Earth, Wind & Fire but refuse to play the 'right' notes, instead creating a new work all my own. When you play 'wrong' notes, the game fills it in with plausible pitches and chords. You can learn a lot about this algorithm and know precisely how to play the 'wrong' notes to create what you want. Wii Music is an incredible game and I credit it with my music career.

My parents were kinda disappointed in me for quitting piano lessons. They said my music would go nowhere if I couldn't play piano. They were pretty much right (the piano is an invaluable skill) but in rebellion, I took up drum lessons with the (very cool!) John Sparrow from the Milwaukee band Violent Femmes. I drummed along to Minecraft parodies with him like the very normal child I was.

I picked up piano later, had an incredible pitch recognition (I don't know if it was innate or if I acquired it from Wii Music), and wrote a ton of music for piano in notebooks. The irony is I can read and write sheet music when I concentrate, but I'm not fluent in it like a musician really should be.

I got free composition software on the family computer and started composing there. I don't know at what point I'd say I started producing (as opposed to just composing), probably somewhere in 2017. Learning to produce has actually been an arduous lifelong process. I spent so many years being mediocre, and at any given time, I only really like my last year or two of work. Everything old feels bad, which means I'm still getting better and more aware of my own process.

My biggest musical inspirations are:

Porter Robinson and Madeon. These come as a pair because they really defined my middle school taste for electronic music, which I still draw from today. I guess I'd call them pop, in contrast with the more experimental EDM I listen to. Their music has the polish you'd expect from a popular artist while still holding onto incredible character in every song.

Jane Remover. I've been a fan since Spaceage Radio (dear God that was so long ago) and it's insane how catchy everything she puts out is. No project of hers have any skips. I sincerely credit her remix of Teenage Dream for fueling my summer 2020 nightcore renaissance, an awakening which still influences my perspective on electronic music.

SOPHIE. Her songs are the pinnacle of pop earworms, which is especially mystifying considering how strange most of her music sounds. Her soundscapes are sparse with the most extraterrestrial instruments, but every element feels perfectly at home. I'm really jealous of how cleanly she can mix her strange sounds, because even mixing conventional sounds is difficult for me.

GWEN: I know you just released, but do you have any more projects planned?

ASTRO: I have so many projects planned. The next album is already done and coming absurdly soon, it's the very special vault I was talking about before.

I'm also actively working on two other albums. Album 15 is actually a sincere attempt at baking particular emotions into the fabric of my music. I'm trying to get the listener to feel the same madness/obsession I felt through my song "ok girl !". It probably won't come across to the audience because of how particular the experiences are to me, and it's still basically an instrumental album, but it's been a meaningful exercise to sonify these feelings.

Album 16 has been my precious project since 2022. Progress on it is so insanely slow, but that doesn't really matter, right? I really want to work with vocalists on this one because I have anthems that must be sung, God damn it! I've toyed with the idea of using UTAUloids to get the job done, and I definitely do want to make an UTAU album at some point, but Album 16 is not the place for that. Maybe when I do a Toki Pona album?

I also have a (comically large) remix collection in the works. Who knows when that will be done. It'll be waiting for you.

Astro on Spotify

Astro on Youtube

Astro on Bandcamp