#jamie paige

[connethie]

until the sun burns out

[skadikaos]

tetos i made for machine love !! a truly terrific teto tribute ❤️💚

[jamiepaige]

Constant Companions Closeup #11: MACHINE LOVE

(also on bandcamp and spotify!)

Welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Yesterday was the title track, My Darling, My Companion, which means today is the final track on the album - a song about the truths that lay in hiding within artifice, and a computer falling in love - Machine Love!

Before we get started on this particularly long closeup - I'll be doing a follow-up post after this one, answering various miscellaneous questions I've gotten over the course of writing these! If you've got anything you wanna hear more from me about, album-related or otherwise, feel free to reply to this post or send me an ask! It may very well end up part of the bonus closeup :~)

---

Let's circle back to the very first track, Dyad.

In that track's closeup, I mentioned the main sonic touchstones of this release relative to my previous ones being guitars and vocal synths. The whole guitar rock thing I think I've gone into detail enough about, what with all the inspirations I've rattled off in other posts, but there likely is still a burning question for some long-time listeners.

Why vocal synths? Why am I not singing on like half of this album? I thought you were a singer, Jamie Paige, so what is this Hatsune Miku robot Vocaloid crap?

Truth be told, the Vocaloid scene and community has always been a massive source of inspiration for me. So much of my favorite music ever, music that inspires me or touches my heart or makes me go apeshit, has been sung by synthesized vocalists in a language I don't even speak. I grew up with it, and it's grown up with me - music just as intricate, mind-boggling, twisted, fun, and ridiculously creative is being put out every single day by vocal synth producers, and nowadays it's coming from English speaking musicians in droves!

Before this year began, I'd made at least one major contribution to the culture, but in spite of my genuine adoration of everything vocal synth related, I felt like I was just looking in from the other side. Caught between worlds, existing outside of any communities, simply gesturing vaguely towards what I wanted to do.

But I wanted more! I wanted to make the same kinds of things that stirred my heart and made me want to write! I wanted to sing with those same voices! I wanted it to be true - to be like you!

---

I won't lie to you and tell you Kasane Teto has always been my favorite vocal synth. That title used to go to GUMI, and in general, I wasn't particularly attached to any UTAU voicebanks as a younger vocal synth fan. (Nowadays, I genuinely open up OpenUTAU just as much as SynthV because I've fallen deeply in love with Adachi Rei, but that's a story for my next album.) Obviously, I knew of Teto, and found her presence in things like Triple Baka delightful, but for the most part, she was mostly something of an oddity, a wayward piece of vocal synth history that had her Fans like any other.

However, there was one Teto song I've been inexplicably attached to since the moment I first heard it - Song of the Eared Robot, by nwp8861. I was introduced via this particular cover, which I love, but I quickly gravitated to the original. Something about the warbly, childish nature of her very first voicebank, the ambitiously orchestrated and unabashedly digital instrumental, the lyrics referencing fundamental frequencies and Markov chains and compiling code all just spoke to me!

That song stuck with me, laying in a part of my heart that had been collecting dust, all the way to April of 2023.

Now, yes, Teto wasn't always my favorite, and I had other vocal synths I was attached to, but I don't live under a rock, and I still understood how monumental the announcement of Kasane Teto's Synth V voicebank was - to the point that I interrupted a call full of FFXIV-playing friends who knew barely anything about vocal synths and gave them an impromptu TED talk because I was so excited.

(An excerpt of a summary of that night's events, written the morning after. i was up my own ass a little bit but in my defense Kasane Teto had just been announced for Synthesizer V)

I was watching, in real time, a dream made manifest. It's literally one of the Bits with Teto! That she'd be a Vocaloid one day too! And here she was, on the fan favorite engine, sounding genuinely fucking incredible. Especially in hindsight, it's such a beautiful and perfect twist of fate for her.

I saw myself in her. A weird little outcast, explosively reborn and thrust straight into a community's open arms with love. I wanted it to be true - To be like that, too.

It didn't fully hit until later, hearing another cover of a song I'd almost forgotten.

Machine Love, my love letter to the entire world of unbridled creativity and artistry surrounding vocal synths filtered through one sentimental little song, was fully written by the start of May, maybe 4 days after I had gotten my hands on Teto SV and long before a certain compilation album was even a glint in my eye.

If you haven't heard DAEMON/DOLL yet, you really, really, really should go listen to it - yes, I mastered this album, many of my friends and collaborators are featured, and I have two entire songs on it, but I genuinely mean it when I say I believe it's some of the best fucking music that's come out this year in general. In many respects, it also feels like a companion (hah) to Constant Companions.

I had finished writing Machine Love by this point, but it was working on this album in its entirety - discovering artists like Anh Duy, Eggtan, and beat_shobon through it, and hearing everyone in top form making this twin-drilled chimera fucker sing her heart out - that not only made me confident in my decision to go down this artistic path, but that made me fall completely in love with Kasane Teto. And honestly, how could I not? She feels like a microcosm of everything that makes vocal synths so special, this community of creatives all leaving their marks and touchstones along the trail of a great big shared folk mythos. Yeah, maybe the folk hero we're all collectively mythologizing is an anime girl, but yknow maybe Odysseus could take some branding cues from hatsune miku idfk

Basically, even if he says he wants to kill me, I owe fucking everything to rice for inviting me to work on DAEMON/DOLL.

---

On that note, my vision for Machine Love's MV was pretty clear from the beginning.

the actual factual setup for the above shot, which was done entirely in-camera with my laptop, a tv, and two video files manually synced using VLC

The fundamental idea was always there - live-action shots of animation playing back on various screens, edited together to feel somewhat seamless. However, I really struggled with what exactly was going to be on said screens for a while; Big commissions were very far out of my budget, but I knew this song needed something grandiose.

Ultimately, what I arrived at was exactly the kind of scrappy, DIY bullshit it was always meant to be.

I asked my Twitter mutuals for help. And spent a couple months in Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion hell turning all the Teto art I got into a bunch of tiny little mini MVs, some of them parodying real vocal synth MVs, some of simply just evocative of vocal synth MVs, all of them painstakingly edited by yours truly and filmed with the help of some friends over the next couple months across two states and many more cities just to be painstakingly edited and synced up again by yours truly.

THE NEXT MV I DO WILL BE SMALLER IN SCOPE

---

And with that, I believe that's the album!

There's a reason it ends with Machine Love, and not with the title track. I do think that in some respects My Darling, My Companion would have made a better closer, but that song only really resolves one of the thematic strands running through the album.

There isn't really a definitive answer to the specific question "Baby, do you know what you wanna hear?", but it evokes a theme running through the entire album - wanting something, knowing that you want something, and simply needing to find the courage to do it or say it or be it. My Darling, My Companion is in many ways a declaration of intent, an acceptance of what needs to happen, but Machine Love, to me, is that action being done. The words being said!

And now, if I may give this a somewhat selfish tint - with the explosive response my works from this album have gotten, my contributions to things like DAEMON/DOLL and Flavor Foley, the collaborations I've done and that I still have in the pipeline, the friends I've made and the community I've found a spot for myself in, and the newfound voices that I can lay my heart bare with -

Well, shit, I know what I wanna hear, and I've gotten to hear it. I'm a vocaloP. It's real!

Thank you all so goddamn much for reading and listening. I'll see you back here either tomorrow or Monday for the bonus AMA post thing!! Make art and be gay, motherfuckers.

❤️💚

[communist-hatsunemiku]

Kohiu

[matcha-b]

meat girl my beloved

[vocaloid-tunes]

BUTCHER VANITY | FLAVOR FOLEY (Vane, Jamie Paige, rice) feat. Yi Xi

[fffanii]

12.11.24

rot for clout x cadmium colors (can we add them to the teto universe please please please rot for clout and hitomania teto need to interact NOWWWW)

[sealistic]

⭐creating the Jamie Paige-verse before anyone else does

designs taking inspo from reverieque and ricedeity's art

[magical-art-blog]

i wish that i could fall a little bit harder i wish that i could fall, like it would even matter i wish that i could fall right into your life but i'm not there at all, on the other side

(I Wish That I Could Fall ft. GUMI - JamieP)

[bluesturngold]

i adore this song's lyricism and the way the vocaloid was tuned

(also, the saxophone solo)

[thinking-with-doodles]

CONGRATULATIONS TO FLAVOR FOLEY AND BUTCHER VANITY FOR BEING THE FIRST ENGLISH SYNTHV ORIGINAL TO ACHIEVE 10 MILLION VIEWS ON YOUTUBE!!?!?!!!?!!?

[vampcat-irl-old-account]

I'm depressed but i did a thing

[nivvledoodles]

Cringetober day 12: Vocaloid

[jamiepaige]

Constant Companions Closeup #5: CADMIUM COLORS

(also on bandcamp and spotify!)

Once again, welcome back to the Constant Companions Closeups - a series of in-depth dives into the songs off of my latest album, Constant Companions! Last time, I wrote a whole diatribe about my OCs while talking about I Wish That I Could Fall, and today, we're eating paint! Cadmium Colors featuring Soneji of Project Mikan!

Consider this a content warning: this post will discuss the pandemic, struggles with mental health, and suicidal ideation/attempts. I'm hoping it'll ultimately be uplifting, but the discussions at hand are incredibly heavy, and it wouldn't do this song right to be vague. Please be warned.

---

Let's talk about COVID.

At the beginning of 2020, I was in the midst of a long-term break from making music. It wasn't completely cold turkey, and I might not have even called it a break if you'd asked me at the time, but things were dire. I was still dealing with the burnout I'd sustained from the making of Autumn Every Day; I'd had my ego bruised by a live performance at a house party that went so hilariously bad it'd hurt even the most stoic performers (imagine watching an entire packed room of people clear out in 5 minutes flat from the already hyper-exposed vantage point of being on stage in front of them and knowing you single-handedly caused that lol); I had just moved across the country, and was preoccupied with trying to make ends meet as a 22 year old dealing with pure adulthood for the first time.

I was working a shitty minimum wage job at a discount clothing store I will not be naming, slogging through late-night shifts that wouldn't get me home until 3 am some nights. I had friends and roommates, but they were all just as overworked and exhausted and dealing with their own shit as me. I was mentally ill and unmedicated. Suicidal ideation was rearing its ugly head at my lowest moments.

Then, as I turned 23, a global pandemic shut the world down, my grandpa died with me being unable to attend his funeral, and I had a catastrophic mental breakdown that suddenly turned the voices in my head into a deafening cacophony of self-inflicted malice.

In hindsight, I think being 23 kinda just does that to you

---

Fast forward to 2021. I was back at my retail job with the pandemic raging in full force, my sense of self was held together with duct tape, positive self-talk essentially didn't exist for me, and I was the loneliest and lowest I had ever been. I was working the fewest hours I could get away with, and still, almost all spare time I had was taken up either by work or by my recovery from it.

This was around the time I got an email from Crypton, of all places - the people that make Hatsune Miku, for anyone uninformed. They wanted a remix of the song Happy Synthesizer for a Digital Stars compilation. I could not for the life of me tell you how I lucked into this or why they reached out to me of all people, but they did, and I was deathly determined to prove myself worthy of it.

This was August of 2021. I was staring down the barrel, languishing in what felt like only half of a life, fantasizing about death and trying to twist my thoughts into something that could at least keep me blearily shuffling forward another couple days. It was untenable.

(I'd also recently been diagnosed with OSDD 1b - this is a whole can of worms I can't really open until we talk about Breeze Blows, but it's important to at least mention that coping with this was a significant part of this turnaround.)

It's melodramatic, but I had only two options - make things again, or die.

I finished that remix within 24 hours of getting the stems, and I will gladly toot my own horn about it - it's really fucking good, in my opinion. Bittersweet ended up coming together in a mad dash over the next couple months as well. I was making music again.

Even though I was exponentially busier, things paradoxically got easier. I made the creative process a priority in my life, and not only did it give me an outlet for everything that had otherwise been eating away at my soul, but it struck a chord with other people who had been struggling as well. Things just... started getting brighter.

So I kept making music and living and yadda yadda blah blah here I am. This is all a lot of words and very personal stories of mental health struggles to say this:

One: The line between being an artist and being one of countless people forced to work jobs that go nowhere, that put their life at risk, that force them to strip parts of themselves away - it is a faint and transparent line built on circumstances of class and privilege and luck. Making Art and being an Artist aren't magical elevated states of existence, but something anyone is capable of if given the space to nurture their creativity. I believe the world should be a place where any person can do this.

Two: It's easy to convince yourself that art is meaningless in the face of the world at large. And yes, revolutions aren't fought by poetry and paintings, and people aren't fed through songs. But art is a source and a medium for connection; Art is how we find beauty in a disorganized and entropic world; Art is what we come home to and what words we write and pictures we paint and songs we sing to remind us that people matter to us and love is real and life is worth fucking living. Maybe that's corny and stupid, but it's true.

Three: So help me God, I will never work retail again in my entire life.

---

This is another song that is heavily inspired by artists like Prefab Sprout, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and other artists of that ilk - very 80s, very flowery and sentimental lyricism, focused on telling a story. I greatly admire songs that aren't afraid to paint otherwise banal or ordinary scenes in abstract reverence!! I wanted the verses to contrast heavily with each other in that way, with verse one's relentless poeticisms (prosaic practice of depravity) and idioms turned on their head (suspending innocents above their disbelief) against verse two's incredibly straightforward depiction of a factory worker's circumstances.

The flowery language might have worked against me somewhat, though! I've seen a lot of folks that thought the ending was darker or much more defeatist than I intended, and while some of that is just inevitable with a work of art, I want to be clear.

Translator's note: this means "don't kill yourself, you idiot"!!

As you may have picked up from the previous post in this series, this song does heavily feature a leitmotif or two predominantly performed under pudgy pretenses. I'm not going to go on that whole novella-length spiel again, but rest assured knowing that this song, too, is one that makes me think about my OCs. Since it's something many people missed, however, I will take a moment to point out that this song quotes none other than Autumn Every Day off of my album of the same name!

Painting and visual art have been something of a reoccurring obsession of mine in my own art. I grew up around visual artists, have always been friends with many visual artists, and generally have a really intense love of it as a medium and a mode of expression. However, there's also always been a sense of... well, I don't want to call it jealousy, but it's jealousy. I've tried many times to start making visual art of my own, and I have made some things, but it's been a struggle, and I worry sometimes that my eye has permanently outstripped my ability.

However, in my quest to toss out grand expectations and simply have fun making art, I did recently pick up a cheap little drawing tablet! I'm excited to be a beginner at something artistic again...

Finally, I want to thank a couple people: Soneji of Project Mikan for the gorgeous, soaring saxophone solo; friend_xp for the mindboggling MV editing; and especially my good friend Que for the GORGEOUS painterly art that goes along with this song! Que's style was just perfect for this, and really tied the whole thing together immaculately!! There's no joke or deeper lore or anything I just fucking love Que's art go follow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And with that, I think this post is complete!! If you have anything else you wanna know about, ask away in the replies! Tomorrow will be Breeze Blows with Marcy Nabors and Marlow Jacobs!!!

MAKE ART AND BE GAY

[communist-hatsunemiku]

Machine Love

[matcha-b]

^q^