NEON SHOWER

NEON SHOWER was the first album I released under the ookiiani alias, at the time stylised as 大きい兄, the Japanese equivalent of ‘ookiiani’ meaning ‘big brother’ (quite literally - to this day I still don’t know if it’s valid Japanese, and was the result of a short-lived attempt to learn Japanese towards the end of high school)

I had just finished producing a series of house tracks under a completely separate alias, but found myself more and more fatigued with the process and ultimately fell out of love with producing electronic music, in that style, altogether. In an attempt to change scenery I decided to try another music genre.

I was aware of Vaporwave, the music genre typically associated with nostalgic retrofuturism, usually combining heavily processed 80s and 90s samples with huge reverb and drum machines of the era to create almost an ‘echo' of the past. This type of production style which embraced experimentation, wasn’t striving for perfect sparkly production, and allowed me to delve into an era of music I was very familiar with was the perfect break I needed from my other aliases.

After creating the ookiiani name, I began with some basic samples I found on YouTube, chopping them up into repeatable loops and adding drum samples from old drum machines.

It was also at this time I discovered - due to vaporwave’s odd obsession with marble busts - this statue of Hannibal Barca (247-183 BCE) sculpted by Sébastien Slodtz around 1704. After carefully cutting out the top section to create a bust, it became my ‘icon’ and was used on both the artwork for NEON SHOWER and many related profile pictures in years to come (and the favicon for this site!)

I sent a couple of tracks around to YouTube channels promoting Vaporwave and Future Funk music, and to my surprise a couple were interested and released the first track, titled MERCY. From there, I would create multiple other tracks, and quickly realised I had enough to put into an album. Not stopping, however, I ended up with 23 tracks to release (one is a bonus download-only one on Bandcamp), as well as building a small following on Twitter and drawing attention from other larger names in the scene.

Not wanting to lose momentum, I asked multiple producers to remix tracks from the album for future releases, and gratefully multiple people did; remixes from V//Tomo, Vinyl Dial and Panzer Paradise dropped shortly after the album’s release.

There was also a love for retro physical mediums within the scene; primarily releasing albums on cassettes. At the time I was a first-year university student, so I didn’t have the funds to immediately drop on a cassette run; however, extremely graciously, a friend at the time offered to pay - in full - for the short run of cassettes to be made. I felt I had to contribute; and so found a company which would print short-run posters and stickers, and created some ‘bonus’ material to ship with the orders.

Due to my absolutely dire maths skills, I massively overordered these, and to this day there are entire poster and sticker sets up in my Mum’s loft :)

To my surprise, the ‘deluxe edition’ (cassette with all the additional posters etc.) sold out almost instantly, and the ‘standard’ version (cassette + a couple stickers) sold out shortly after - leading to some eventful bike rides up to the local post office with a backpack full of cassettes to ship!