Desync EP
written by sunnexo - April 2022Nederlandse versie >
Hello there! Welcome to my final school project: Desync.
A 5-track EP featuring experimental music.
So how did I start with such a big project? I’ve never made an EP before but I’ve been wanting to for a long time; I had tons of ideas as well. While I was deciding what to make for my final school project, school gave me the opportunity to work on music. This was perfect for me, so I went for it!
The first thing I had to do was find out what makes an album an album; what sets it apart from the usual single? The obvious answer would be the amount of tracks, but of course, there’s more to it. An album’s songs are usually connected in some way, using a theme or idea. My first goal was clear: I had to find something to make the songs related. I started writing down several ideas for the setting of this album.
I wanted to make music around a concrete concept, rather than something abstract. Browsing online I found a bunch of images that I thought would be cool to write music about. There was a lot to cover, such as the environment, storyline, and character design.
Eventually I settled with a post-apocalyptic theme, with my robot character as the protagonist. The things this robot went through would be a metaphor for the events in my own life. This concept made a solid foundation for the album.
Of course not everything went exactly as planned; I had about 10 tracks in mind with unique styles to keep the music interesting. I sadly didn’t have enough time and energy to work on all of that, which led to reducing the tracks from a standard album amount to an EP one - which is 5 down from the 10 I planned.
In order to set this EP apart from my usual songs I tried my best to collaborate with other artists across the world. The first person I collaborated with was k4mil, a really talented and independent guitarist. I wanted to work with him for a while and this EP was a perfect opportunity, so I asked k4mil to add something to one of my projects. He was able to create a fitting guitar solo in just over a week, using just an audio prompt. Unfortunately acoustic timing doesn’t fit well with digital precision, so I had to adjust the timing in post. Besides that the collab went basically flawless; it was so cool!
As I was working on the music I noticed it sounded different on different devices. I didn’t understand why this was happening so I asked for help. And to my surprise, emelka, a music producer I really admire, was willing to give advice! I was really excited to collaborate with him and the result was almost flawless. He gave really extensive feedback and I learned a lot of essential tips I’ll never forget.
After about 3 months of making music I had to look for a way to get album art and other assets. I contacted Avolicis, an amazing pixel artist, and sh^era, a great writer. As you probably know, in most media the visuals and writing come first, but with this album I wanted the visuals to support the audio instead. The music gets priority and everything else gets adapted to it, and that adaptation wasn’t as easy as I thought. Neither Avolicis nor I had experience with planning a project this big, so we had some difficulties adapting to evolving ideas.
I developed the lore with sh^era at the same time as I working on the art with Avolicis. We had to consider the story aspect of this such as my character’s role and the music’s relation to it. I kept asking myself questions like: “What would this robot be going through”, and “Why does the music sound like it does?” To try writing a narrative around this I summarized each track as a keyword; for example “chaos”, “confusion” and denial”. This streamlined the character arc nicely and we were able to introduce concepts. The final lore summarized goes like this: “A robot escapes inner chaos with someone they find in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, a cat”.
The only issue we had was agreeing on the cat’s name. My idea “Moony” was far better than sh^era’s suggestion “Mingo”, but they clearly couldn’t recognize my creative superiority. As I said before, we’ve never taken on a project on such a large scale, so it was a great learning experience. It was a long journey to the final product you can see on streaming platforms now.
With the album and writing finished I had to think about the marketing. How do I let people know I made an EP in a way that is appealing and unintrusive? From previous projects I learned it’s useful to have a strong visual identity, something immediately recognizable. I went back to Avolicis for this, and we worked to make something exactly like that. On top of that I had to think about my presence on social media. The format of marketing in social media is different than elsewhere and I had to keep my message short. I ended up with a one-line description and a trailer with animated pixel art, hoping that would get my message across.
At this point the project was going surprisingly well and I wanted to take it one step further; I wanted to make a CD. Just like it was with the rest of the project, it was a lot more difficult than I expected because of all the technical details you have to think about. Some parts were especially confusing. The simple question “What do you put on the back of a CD?” took Avolicis and I a while to answer. We were able to create an original design after a lot of research looking at existing CD designs. After weeks of work we were finished; you’ll see the final design soon!
This was a project that went through multiple stages of chaos and confusion, but through hard work and collaboration it became quite a nice result.
Thank you for reading; you can listen to Desync below.
