THOUGHTFORM

After the release of my first album, NEON SHOWER, I realised the follow-up had to be an upgrade in every way. I’d gotten into a habit of taking my laptop to the local coffee shop (now closed, unfortunately) in my university city of Sheffield, trawling through YouTube playlists for sample ideas, and collecting a large pool of tracks to chop up and reimagine.

I wanted to begin introducing original instrumentation to the tracks more, as around the time of producing this album there was a slight backlash in the community for ‘lazier’ production, taking entire songs and only applying reverb or delay effects was now becoming a slightly more unfashionable way of making vaporwave or future funk - so in an attempt to remedy this the first track - BUMBLEBEE - was entirely original.

It was also the first time I brought in other musicians to collaborate with me on the tracks; with contributions from my Dad (listed as ‘Smikus’) on bass guitar, guitar solos from musician SaNTINO (now going under ‘Santino Browne’), background harmony vocals from fellow producer Vinyl Dial and, for the more experimental track DRAGON SONG, rap vocals from producer and visual artist Oliver Asadi. Bringing in these other musicians allowed me to add much more varied production styles and alter the original samples in a much more creative way, especially on tracks like LOVE ME GOOD, where original basslines were added on the top of the chops to reharmonise the vocals and melodies.

Once the album had begun to take shape I worked for months on the production of it, aiming for a high quality experience on both headphones and speakers, with multiple car tests on the way back and forth from Uni. It was also around this time I opened Photoshop and created the artwork, which to this day is still one of my favourite pieces I’ve made:

Once it was almost complete, I reached out to a friend in the scene who ran a bedroom cassette label called Contemporary Tapes - who agreed to release it, and print a run of cassettes too - which we designed together to have custom embossed printing on the shell, as well as a rework of the cover artwork to fit the cassette shape:

Not one to pass up an opportunity, I was told that the still-active online vaporwave platform ‘Vapor Memory’ was interested in streaming an advance copy of the album to listeners, and I asked if I could create a visual album using some VJ clips from https://beeple-crap.com/ - to which they kindly agreed. The result was the THOUGHTFORM Visual Album Event, streamed live on YouTube. Afterwards, the cassette dropped on the Contemporary Tapes bandcamp, and seeing my own album in the hands of people showing their collections on Twitter was a trip!

Unfortunately, Contemporary Tapes shut down not long after the album was released on there, leaving no official way to listen to the album - however, in 2020 I re-released it myself on Bandcamp.