Interview No. 190
Interview By: @The-Great-One
Today's guest has been here in the past. Back then we talked about her rise through music. With songs such as Happy Sunday Morning! and A Night in the Attic. Since then she has been a judge of multiple contests here on Newgrounds, an Audio Moderator, and has graced the Audio Portal with new entries, A Stroll Down St Pancras, A Breeze From Home ~ Vocal Ver., and Street Lights. The Interviewer is pleased to welcome for its 190th Interview, the one, the only, @Troisnyx.
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Q: It has been nearly ten years since our last time together like this. The last time you were here we talked about the song As Stars that Shine (FULL). Looking back at that song and that time period, how would you describe your growth as a musician here on Newgrounds? What are your thoughts on this song today?
A: I love the musicality of As Stars that Shine. It lacks a bit in its production quality, though. One of the things I’ve routinely said about my work pre-2019 is that I did not know how to mix, and while I still love the musical choices I did then, it’s painful listening to the production. Also, I have gotten a lot better with my tonality: the melody may remain the same, but I seem to find many different kinds of chord progressions to vary what goes on underneath that melody, in the hopes of keeping it more interesting.
I would love to bring that song to a folk vocal group one day and see how they spin it. It would be
pretty fun to see and hear. Even better if we could do so with only loose drums and SATB (soprano,
alto, tenor, and bass) vocals.
Q: A Stroll Down St Pancras [Teaser] would be the beginning of a full-fledged track that you would release here in 2015. You would work with @SkankyMojo, a.k.a. AkioDaku, and Greg Slater to bring us A Stroll Down St Pancras in 2020. Five years were between the teaser and the full release. It involves a piano improv piece while you were at St Pancras Station. What is the story behind the production of this song? How did SkankyMojo and Greg Slater become involved in it?
A: Greg Slater is a close friend I’ve known since 2015; we met at Soundskills, the creative charity in Brookfield, Preston, which, among other things, has its own studio. The two of us regularly attend a weekly music group, writing songs together and even playing on each other’s songs. Greg is probably one of Preston’s single best guitarists, not just in my estimation, but in the estimation of many who have heard him in his various bands over the decades (Cold Feet, Dennis Delight, The Just Numbers, The Accused…). Greg laid down guitar on Pancras because we were in a social bubble together during the COVID-19 lockdowns, and Soundskills was closed at the time, and we needed stuff to do.
Pancras was one of those tracks for which I could toss in any instrument, and it would sound in keeping, because it was meant to evoke the buskers and passing musicians trying out the pianos at St Pancras Station. So Greg recorded the guitar parts at mine, on an Epiphone Les Paul jointly owned by my husband and me.
I don’t remember how I got SkankyMojo (then AkioDaku) to lay down bass on Pancras. I half suspect – though I may very well be wrong on this – that it was done through my own Discord server. He is a member of it. Whenever we do collaborative projects where I am at the helm, these typically happen in my server, and I suspect that I asked him there. If not, it’ll have been through Discord or NG DMs. We did have the music talk at some point and we floated the idea of a collab between us. I remember hearing about him through his participation in that year’s Newgrounds Audio Deathmatch, and I quite enjoyed his bass playing, and I was fascinated to find out that he didn’t live too far off geographically from me.
Q: We have another project on a similar level with the songs Nightfall [Teaser] released in 2015. This song would be released in 2016 as Nightfall. It started off as a test and would later be a part of the game Song of the Firefly. Your fiance’s love of space would be an inspiration. What can you tell us about this song from the teaser to the finish?
A: He is now my husband by the way, we have been married since 2022! I finished Nightfall months after I released the teaser. He informed me about BBC Introducing at the time. BBC Introducing still exists, and it is a service by which new or unsigned artists can post their tracks in the hopes of being played by local BBC radio stations at least – for example, the station serving me would be BBC Radio Lancashire. Particularly lucky tracks would end up on BBC Radio 1, 2, or 3 depending on the genre. I felt that it was my only way of getting recognition outside of Newgrounds at the time; I certainly didn’t see many avenues for me as an asylum seeker with no right to work. I submitted multiple tracks; two of them did ultimately get played on BBC Radio Lancashire; one was Uplift, the other was Nightfall, which had the distinct honour of being spun twice! I was already blown away by the teaser, that it just made sense that this project would be one of the next to be finished in the months to follow. The announcer, whose name I don’t remember, was also kind enough to plug Song of the Firefly.
The lyrics came naturally to me, and if I remember correctly, they were already ready by the time I had recorded the teaser. Song of the Firefly had illustrations of a broken and damaged moon watching over an eternal, post apocalyptic night, and I hoped that the ending of the game would feature a world where people might not have to live in fear, but instead be able to go out in safety, and express their wonder at the night sky. Sadly, the game is still in development hell, due to lack of funding and one of the team members passing away in 2020. Please, please, PLEASE throw your pennies at @Hoeloe and her team, not least because they deserve it, especially after many hard years. Heck, I’d like to ask Tom to boost her team, even though they haven’t been able to make games for years due to crippling costs of living.
Even if I were not the musician on this team, I want to see them all succeed. I want to see this game come to fruition. That would be a dream come true for them. I did remake Nightfall and From Earth’s Blackest Night in either late 2021 or early 2022, I don’t recall, and I released them for sale on Bandcamp, with the team’s blessing. I only released the remake of the latter on Newgrounds. By the time I had started remaking these songs, I had lost all the vocal stems – meaning that I had to redo all the vocals on the tracks – but the synthwork for both songs still existed, in .zip files that my husband found in a hard drive somewhere.
Q: You would work alongside @Phyrnna to make the song A Breeze From Home ~ Vocal Ver. for @matt-likes-swords game Epic Battle Fantasy 5. How did you and Phyrnna meet? How did you two become acquainted with matt-likes-swords to work on his latest entry in the EBF series?
A: We met through Newgrounds DMs in 2012. I wanted to get to know Phyrnna, and specifically without putting her on a pedestal because I imagined she’d have been thoroughly sick of that treatment. I just wanted to come as I was – I was a relative newbie to the site, having only signed up a year prior, and I wanted to make friends. My acquaintance with Matt would come later; I did follow him on Newgrounds, and I did leave comments and responses on certain posts.
But it is his Twitter account that I remember more distinctly. There may have been a good bit of back-and-forth between Phy, Matt, and later on, Ronja, about the people making fan works of the Epic Battle Fantasy series; I suspect I’ll have been brought up in their conversations at some point. Phy and I spoke infrequently on Discord DMs. She was one of the first people to have helped me with my music production, having gifted me a copy of The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook back in the day. I still consider her a good friend, and I hope that she gets the rest and refreshment she needs during her hiatus.
She approached me in 2018, because by that point I had already done a number of Epic Battle Fantasy-related covers. I had done a version of Estavius in 2012. That same year, I amalgamated all the Bullet Heaven tracks into a single arrangement, Capriccio Bullet Heaven. The following year, for the NG Audio Portal’s 10 th anniversary, there was a remix and cover competition in which I scored third place; I arranged Phy’s lullaby that she wrote for a fan’s child, Sleep Wrapped In Love. Phy already knew what I could bring to the table, so I believe that it was with this knowledge that she approached me in 2018. I was happy to bring my lyric-writing and arranging to the table. The vocal version of A Breeze From Home went as she directed: the original was a bright and cheery tune about being back in one’s home village; the vocal version was a wistful crooning song about being weary from having journeyed for so long, while also being glad to be back home.
Q: the new world would be a song that would seem to lead into the tessarakoste, the Lenten prompts of 40 days. What can you tell us about the new world and the Lenten prompts?
A: the new world and tessarakoste are separate things with separate intentions which happened to
have been done not too far apart from each other.
The former was a song whose lyrics I had already written some time back and it was lying around in my OneNote, and I needed a reason to finish it, because it was an exceedingly painful song bringing up memories of child abuse. When I found out that Chel Wong, a fellow game audio professional whom I was already friends with, was hosting the Charity Album jam (I think that’s what it’s called?) with the aim of donating all proceeds from album sales to the charity, Able Gamers, I was immediately interested. I couldn’t earn money from my craft at the time due to me still being stuck in the asylum system, but I could at least partake in a charitable project. That year’s themes were “asleep” and “awake.” This song lent itself naturally to the “asleep” half of that year’s Charity Album jam, and so I finished it up before the deadline that year.
The latter, tessarakoste, was a way for me to make my Lent a bit more contemplative. We were in the third and final lockdown, at the time this was happening. I had nothing that I could feasibly give up, not in the situation I was in at the time, and so my then fiancé and I thought of ways to deepen my interior life instead. We settled on the idea of me praying through my music-making. We discussed what prompts I could potentially set to music, and we came up with a list of 40, as well as a separate list of backup prompts if any of the base 40 were too difficult for me to set to music in a single night. The rules I had set myself were simple: come up with a song, however simple, each night. Express any prompt as best as you can. Once a prompt is considered done for the night, there’s no going back to it. Move on. And so there was this constant sense of “moving on” that I needed to be mindful of through the entire season of Lent.
Fun fact: The Drummer’s Prayer, the song I consider my best work of 2021, was originally slated to be part of the tessarakoste album, but I had to scrap it at the time because I lived in a ground floor flat and had an upstairs neighbour who hated the slightest possible noise. They didn’t like that I was attempting to record my bodhrán for it. I was not going to be able to finish that song in a single sitting. I would ultimately record and finish it later in the year, because that song and its premise kept calling out to me long after Lent was over.
Q: @Ceevro has lead many sing-a-longs here on Newgrounds. You would participate in one entitled Barrett's Privateers Singalong. How did you become a part of this sing-a-long? Did you discover this sing-a-long collab first or was there something that drew you to this one over the others he had done?
A: I discovered it on the Audio Forum, and I think I wanted to take part in this one more than the others because it was a sea shanty, part of the folk and trad genres that I have long been used to. I was also a chorister, at the time, so I felt confident enough to contribute to it. People were recommending the sing-along collabs to me, too, so I felt they were worth checking out at least once.
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