This distinction is interesting as a rock musician because oftentimes, individual tracks are recorded as live performances, but the sum of the tracks does not feel “live” to me. Also, some recordings are made to feel as live as possible (aka a live recording), and there’s the can of worms of how listening to a live recording compares to if you were sitting in the room where the recording was taken!

This is a complicated topic, and for this short article, I’ll ruminate a bit on three angles to view this topic:

1. Audio processing of a recording vs hearing things raw in a live space.

2. Interaction between the artist and the audience.

3. The intangible physical connection of sharing a physical, social space.

I wont have the time to elaborate deeply, but always happy to chat in the comments about your thoughts on these points 😊

First, a bit of Parasocial Show and Merch Info

Shows: We have confirmed a November 11th show, and are figuring out the exact details to share soon. We also are looking to book a show in mid to late August :)

Merch: We are planning to make some new merch for our upcoming shows! Look forward to some new shirts and stickers.

The effect of processing audio on recordings

Is something changed when processing audio recordings? Overall, I would argue yes. Immediately, the classic example of heavily compressing audio comes to mind.

However, I think that this question is more nuanced than it might first seem. There is a common mis-perception that if you just take raw, recorded audio files and simply placed them together in time, then the resulting audio would sound the most natural1.

This is definitely understandable. When I first started mixing music, I also had this perspective. Over time, I’ve come to understand that no audio recording is perfectly natural. Every choice made during the recording significantly affects the recorded sound. The microphone used to record is one of the biggest factors affecting the recording. Different microphones capture the sound very differently2.

There is functional similarity between microphones and our ears. They are both systems that perceive sound. Similarly to microphones, everyone’s ears perceive (or “record”) sound differently. Some people may be more sensitive to higher frequencies, and others to lower frequencies.

This is thought about a lot in the design of microphones, headphones, and speakers3. See the great video below by Crinacle that explains many of the challenges in the design of a “flat” headphone. Long story short, everyone hears things differently, and often headphones are compromises of average perception of sound.

Returning back to the main point of this article, I think this is quite relevant for the perceived difference between hearing a band live and a “live recording”. There are many factors that are between you and the original artist: the microphones used to record, the audio mix engineer trying to make the song sound "natural” (to them), and the headphones or speakers you choose to play the audio file through4.

Interactions between artist and audience

Just like a good conversation or presentation, when playing live, there is a back and forth transfer of social energy between the artist and the audience. When the audience gets hyped, the artist might get hyped and speed up the song. If the audience is feeling more mellow, the artist might spontaneously change the set to include more slower songs later in their show than they planned. As a performer, I am seeking those special moments when music resonates with the audience, and I get a strong emotional reaction from the audience5.

I recently saw Hailey Williams live at the We Love Green festival, and it was a magical performance and moment where the audience and the artist were truly in sync from the first note to the last. See the clip below of a song from the performance (and if you’re impatient skip to 2:20, but you will lose some of the impact)6.

Intangible connection of sharing a physical space

During COVID, there were efforts by artists to create digital spaces for live performances. Many of these effectively became digital music festivals. One of my favorites was Secret Sky, which featured great artists and performances. Interestingly, the performances often played with the concept of a “live” or “real” performance. A great example is the audio-visual journey that is A.G. Cook’s “Secret Sky Acoustic EDM Set”.

SPOILERS OF THE SET (I recommend watching the set to experience it): What first starts as a simple looking acoustic set subtly evolves into an abstract art pop visual and audio experience, before eventually returning back to end back in reality.

I think it’s interesting that the Secret Sky festival was only active during COVID (2020 and 2021). I suspect one reason it did not continue is that a live experience offers more than a purely digital experience.

In addition to the two prior reasons that I have already discussed in this article, I’ll add one more here: I think there is something special and different about being physically in the same room as another person. This one is a lot harder to explain and reason about, since it’s largely an abstract, personal, and subjective point.

I will say that something I’ve learned over time. A video call is nice to maintain a relationship, but there is something special about someone making the commitment and dedicating the time to leaving the comfort of their own home and space to join you in experiencing life together. Purely digital experiences can feel somewhat cheap by comparison.

Anyways, thanks for reading my thoughts here. I hope you enjoyed and am curious if anyone has thoughts on this.

-Victor

Much like Petworth Porchfest, the only time we could find to rehearse was the day of the show. We met up for an early lunch in the city of Greenbelt, one of the first planned communities in the US, created during the New Deal1. In a time where discourse surrounding America’s socially hostile, car-centric urban fabric is at an all time high, it is interesting to walk into an experiment of the past to intentionally engineer a community. My casual research into Greenbelt later on revealed an unfortunate history– like many other such projects at the time, Greenbelt was heavily segregated early on, despite being built by a workforce of both black and white workers2. It was not until the late 60s and early 70s, with the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the passing of the Fair Housing Act by Congress in 1968, that black families started moving into Greenbelt3.

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According to Victor, a lot of hippies also moved there. When we pulled up there was a bustling farmers market teeming with older folk, so I would reckon that Victor was right. We had lunch at Cedars of Lebanon, a quaint Lebanese restaurant with excellent meze, where we chatted about the happenings in our lives as well as band business.

Around 2 pm, we went to Victor’s place and Mayson joined us to begin rehearsal. We decided to play a little slower and, compared to our slightly rushed albeit exciting tempo at Petworth Porchfest, and bringing us closer to the tempo in the studio recordings of our songs. By 4 pm we headed for Galactic Panther in Alexandria.

Now, I normally consider myself pretty laid back, but something about pre-show nerves makes me unusually anxious and bitchy. I still find it challenging to strike a balance between socializing with the other bands, warming up on the guitar, and ensuring our equipment is all set up properly.

Adding to the stress was that the sound engineer whom we were told would show up for one hour to help set up the mixing board and set the levels never arrived, leaving the fate of the mixing board to us bands. Fortunately, Victor and Fuzzy from Wailing Gita put their heads together to commandeer the board, getting our mics, keyboard, and bass DI connected, as well as solving a critical issue of the monitor mix not coming through the floor wedges.

Joe from Jerry Star was so gracious to let me use his amp for the show: a 120 Watt Peavey Triple XXX tube amp paired with an Ampeg 4x12 cabinet. Since I use my HX Stomp for all my preamp modeling, I plugged straight into the effects return of the Triple XXX, bypassing its built-in preamp. Playing through a half stack live has long been a dream of mine, so this was a pleasant surprise! I am, however, kicking myself for not playing any old school death metal riffs with it during soundcheck. I also learned a hard lesson that evening: no matter how cool it is to crank your amp into a 4x12 cab, you’re still going to have trouble hearing it when the very directional guitar speakers project your guitar tone straight towards your butt and the back of your knees.

Some highlights and observations of our set:

• During “Escher”, I screamed so hard that my diaphragm hurt for the rest of the song. Is should definitely start taking proper screaming technique seriously.

• In the first few seconds of the guitar solo on “Doppelgänger Effect”, I missed the switch on my MIDI controller to toggle the lead setting on my HX Stomp. It turns out that practicing a really hard solo also entails learning how to tap dance.

• For the first time, we successfully pulled off a beat displacement trick during the half-time section of “Haunt Me”. The realization that we all hit it at the same time was pure bliss.

Jerry Star had a raw, aggressive, fun set full of melodic drop-tuned guitar riffs, fun tapping and slapping bass parts, crashing drum fills that build up like waves, and vocals reminiscent of 90s icons like Mike Patton and Layne Staley. They also seem to have an inexplicable vendetta against babies.

Sporting a space-wizard outfit that hearkens back to the robes of 70s prog (read: Rick Wakeman of Yes), Wailing Gita plays fast and uncompromisingly. His Laufey cover caught me by surprise!

Thanks again to everyone who came to support us. We plan to play more shows throughout the year in DC. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Peter, Lamb Enjoyer

I thought it would be interesting to walk you through the process of writing the lyrics to Doppelganger Effect1. I will ramble, but what’s the artistic process without rambling sometimes? Also, in our band, the lyrics / vocal melody and instrumentation usually co-evolve, so there’s that aspect that isn’t fully captured. As a preview, here is a recent live performance of Doppelganger Effect.

We were writing Doppleganger Effect one night accompanied by the wail of sirens. As the cars rushed down 14th Street, the sirens’ frequencies shifted. I mistakenly called the phenomenon “doppelgänger effect” rather than “doppler effect” and we thought that something could come out of that. The first step was figuring out what exactly we wanted to write about.

Usually after thinking of a topic, there are lines, phrases, and words that immediately come to me. Sometimes these come from things I’ve written or thought about. In my high school art class, we learned a way to shade with a drawing pen was to make cross-hatches, intersecting parallel lines.

Because nighttime is often when we are alone with our thoughts, our different selves have more freedom to come out and intersect and conflict. As mentioned in the first snippet, I wanted to write about that tension between who we decide we are and the parts of us we suppress. Sometimes these come from trauma. Sometimes they have a different idea of what one should do. Sometimes we’re ashamed or afraid of these versions of us. The red- and blue-shift depicts the other selves moving at different speeds and directions relative to our current perspective. Maybe we consciously want to do things one way, but we keep falling into old patterns that make us act another way.

Initially I wrote it as though I were directly confronting my “other self”. But then I thought it would be more effective to write in the third person (”she”), kind of like when you’re talking to a therapist or confessing at a confession booth or venting to a close friend.

I’m not sure what I was trying to achieve with the prechorus. Maybe that’s why I scrapped it. Writing lyrics is often just brain farting based on vibes and then polishing for cohesion. A potential interpretation might be that the other self is convincing me to do something I don’t want to do, so we both lay out our wants and see how they fit our goals and desires. When we finally achieve them, we permit our other selves to do whatever they want.

I realize I’m switching first person pronouns. When you talk to yourself, do you refer to yourself as I, you, or we?

Some notes on specific lines: I got the inspiration for “migrate to the darkest parts of me” from a poem by Cecilia Llompart, “What my loneliness does” (I think). In Doppelganger Effect, the line depicts my “worst self” moving to where she wouldn’t be seen by the rest of the world, where other undesirable thoughts and identities live. The line “should I be warmed or be warned / [by] the burning of the world” was inspired by a poem I had written with the lines “how can we live / when there are people / who warm themselves / at the burning of our blood?” This was one of the lines that came to me in the moment but didn’t make sense for the story we were telling.

I changed “she’s making sense” to “I can’t repent“ to change the referent state: it’s not that I’m acting a certain way and my other self is convincing me otherwise, but I’m already acting the way my other self wants me to and it’s hard for me to reverse course (I interpreted this retroactively). I was also playing with the idea of suppression: because my other self made me act a certain way or live a certain life, I put her away.

Below we start to see a semblance of the song’s lyrics as they are written in the album. After having buried your other self, they resurface and you want to suppress them again. However, the chorus says that when you hurt them, you’re also hurting yourself because they’re inherently a part of you.

I rewrote the first prechorus and chorus and moved the prior combination to the second prechorus and chorus. I intended for the prechorus to be in the perspective of the alter ego continuing to wreak havoc on the conscious self. The mirrors are reflections of any one self, so if the worst self is in rapture or despair, the others will feel it too.

I wanted to improve the cadence of the words and so I updated “skin her to the bone” to “drag her skin from bone”. Even though “drag her skin from bone” doesn’t make a lot of sense, I liked how “daggers” and “drag her” sound similar, while “draw” and “drag” look similar. I try to use internal rhymes — or at least similar vowel patterns / assonance — so that the lyrics sing even when there’s no music. Other examples from this chorus: “shame” and “aching”; “mirrors” and “scream her”; “rapture” and “catch her”. I don’t know this for sure, but maybe another case for using similar vowels is that the body parts you use when you sing have already adjusted to those shapes and so they’re easy to repeat.

Here is another case where I wanted to convey something more active. I changed “here she comes again” to “there she goes again” so illustrate that she’s doing something instead of just approaching. The repetition of the “g” consonant in both “goes” and “again” is also nice, like you’re choking.

In addition, I changed “drag her skin from bone” to “drag her from the bone” for a couple reasons. First, it makes more sense. Second, it’s easier to hit notes in that range that have more open vowels like the “o” in “from” rather than the “i” in “skin”. This is another habit I developed through songwriting: writing lyrics with vowels that make it easier to sing the notes associated with the lyric without sounding too same-y.

At this stage, I also wrote out the second verse. More internal rhymes: the “ar” in “darker”, “parts”, and “martyr”; “blurs” and “hurt”; “with her” and “wither”; “scattered” and “matter”; in the second stanza (paragraph, sorta) of the second verse each line starts with “time”, “might”, “light”, and “(if) I’ll”.

Here is when I added a melody. Peter had laid down a few riffs at this point, so I sang over them, though the melody is slightly different from what it is now. I was writing over thanksgiving and my sisters said the melody in bar 37 sounds like the Sofia the First theme song. We ultimately changed the ends of the choruses (bars 39-40 and 46-49). The Sofia the First section is still in the song :P

At this point I think we had to take a break until late January because of the winter holidays and travel. I made a change from “drag her from the bone” to “drag her by the bone”. I was imagining dragging my other self by her collarbone, which is kind of brutal now that I think about it. In addition to the imagery, I liked how much brighter “by” sounds compared to “from”. When I write poetry I often think about the tone of the words. When singing, one can sing the same word brighter or darker, though some words lend themselves to a “base” level of brightness or darkness.

I remember being intentional about using “w” consonants—hence changing “but” to “while”—in addition to the “r” consonants. I wanted to convey through the consonants and alliteration a feeling of anger (grrrrr…) and wailing sadness (waah…). Speaking of wailing, our show with Wailing Gita is this Sunday! More on that later.

We added a bridge and solo and another odd time part. I didn’t end up singing over the bridge because it didn’t feel necessary. Maybe I just forgot to sing it once and continued to forget to sing it forever — path dependence ya know. I do like it when music changes once you play it live. Another example of that is the lyrics say “so much more to take”. My d’s and t’s are quite sibilant, so after singing it live, I internalized “take” to “say”. Hence the lyrics I sing are “so much more to say”.

The final lyrics are available on the track’s Bandcamp page and below. I tried to highlight internal rhymes and similar phonemes.

Doppelganger Effect started with a mistake that was then fleshed out into a concept for a song. Most of the early stages focused on storytelling. Latter stages refined the story through cadence, rhyme, qualities of the phonemes, and how the song would be performed.

There’s so much more to say, but this is all for now.

xx Jo

NEXT SHOW: 6/21 @ Galactic Panther

We will be joining Wailing Gita and Jerry Star at the Galactic Panther art gallery in Alexandria on June 21 for a night of energetic, eclectic, and mind-bending music! Tickets are available now on Eventbrite, and the venue is a 10-min walk from the King St-Old Town metro station on the blue or yellow line. We hope to see you there!

(Side note: See below for details of our next show on June 21st at Galactic Panther!!!)

I feel very lucky to have a brother who I get along with well, while also being very different1. Because of our differences, my brother has introduced me to a lot of music I wouldn’t have listened to on my own. I’ve always been on the more rock, progressive, and experimental side, while my brother has been more into pop, soul, rap, and R&B. For example, at the same time that I was listening to Frank Zappa, my brother was listening to Beyonce. Similarly, he’s recently been introducing me to a lot of really good and cool French music. I thought I’d share a couple of songs that he recommended to me that I enjoyed in particular.

First on the list is KONGOLESE SOUS BBL by THEODORA.

I was immediately struck by how the song is mixed. The vocal is mixed in a modern pop vocal style, with a lot of reverb and vocal effects, giving a spacy and luxurious feeling. In contrast, the percussion is extremely dry, providing a stark contrast to the vocals. It’s quite interesting and unique that the vocal and the percussion, two core elements of the song, seem to live in completely different aural spaces. Even more interesting is how the bass glues everything together when it comes in, finally releasing the tension of the contrast. (Of course) I also really enjoy the dance-inducing beat :)

The second song on the list is BB BRINGUE by (D)Juno.

I’m always a sucker for a triplet feel. 3 is one of my favorite odd time signatures2. It’s very fun to sway left and right and feel like you’re landing on different syncopated parts of the beat. Also, the vibe of the song and the video is very fun and enjoyable for me; it really captures the feeling of being in the zone at a good party with good friends.

Next show, June 21st @ Galactic Panther

Some details from Peter’s last post:

We will be joining Wailing Gita and Jerry Star at the Galactic Panther art gallery in Alexandria on June 21 for a night of energetic, eclectic, and mind-bending music! Tickets are available now on Eventbrite, and the venue is a 10-min walk from the King St-Old Town metro station on the blue or yellow line. We hope to see you there!

- Victor

We ran a tight schedule– since Jo arrived back in DC the night before, our only opportunity to rehearse was the very morning of Porchfest. While we would normally want more than one rehearsal before a show, our play through of the set went really smoothly thanks to our individual practice throughout May leading up to Porchfest. Good to know that spending hours late in the depths of the night relearning my guitar solos has paid off! Here’s a rough breakdown of my schedule leading up to the show:

8:00 AM - Wake up after getting little sleep because of pre-show nerves/excitement

8:30 AM - Jo arrives at my apartment to help hauling our gear

8:50 AM - Uber together to Victor’s house in Maryland

9:30 AM - Arrive at Victor’s and set for rehearsal. Begin chugging the yerba mate that Jo brought to share

10:00 AM - Decide on the setlist order and run through the full set

10:45 AM - Feel all 150 mg of caffeine in the yerba mate coursing through my veins. Review specific sections and parts on songs

11:15 AM - Begin packing and loading our gear to the cars

11:40 AM - Drive to Petworth

12:10 PM - Arrive at our host’s place, and go for lunch at Mita Cafe, a cute Japanese-Ethiopian spot. Our review is that their sushi and paninis are amazing, and it’s quite rare to find a place that serves both.

1:00 PM - Set up on our host’s porch. The challenge here was that we only had one PA speaker, so we had to find place it where it could project to the audience while also serving as a monitor for us. We settled for the (stage) right corner right in front of the drums.

1:30 PM - Soundcheck. Mayson brought a wireless unit which came in really handy, as we could check the sound from the street, where the audience stood.

2:00 PM - Showtime!

One lady among the crowd was moved by Victor’s dexterous drumming to the point of tears as she screamed praises: “God bless you, sticking to your talent. YOU’RE SO GOOD!“ If you’re reading this, we’re truly honored that our music could give you with such a transcendental experience!

New Show Announcement!

We will be joining Wailing Gita and Jerry Star at the Galactic Panther art gallery in Alexandria on June 21 for a night of energetic, eclectic, and mind-bending music! Tickets are available now on Eventbrite, and the venue is a 10-min walk from the King St-Old Town metro station on the blue or yellow line. We hope to see you there!

- Peter the Sleepless

I’ve been learning to scream1 recently, starting with a false cord base2. Two metal vocalists I admire are Tatiana of Jinjer and Poppy. Tatiana has a deep, thick, guttural scream inspired by Otep and Mudvayne. In an interview, she mentioned shaping her tone so that her screams are indistinguishable from a man’s. Per esempio:

The sky could collapse from her growls. In contrast, Poppy’s screams are higher pitched and use more of the head voice, more banshee-like than demonic, or maybe a cute demon, cult of the lamb-style.3

Part of the tonal difference could come from differences in vocal types, techniques that feel comfortable to each of them, and tone preferences as they relate to the other instruments or to the mix. With the broad diversity of women’s voices, I wonder to what extent tone choices are driven by a desire to perform gender or conform to some preconceived idea of power.

There was something I read a while ago that in finance, women with lower voices are perceived as more dominant, authoritative, and competent. Some women intentionally lower the pitch of their speech to be perceived that way — you might be familiar with Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos who does this. However, women in leadership don’t have the same perceptions. The two chains are similar:

• Finance leaders are mostly men, and male leaders associate masculine traits with competence. Lower voices are perceived as more masculine, so lower voices are perceived as more competent.

• Metal musicians are mostly men, and men associate masculine traits with power and authority. Darker, deeper voices are perceived as more masculine, so darker, deeper voices are perceived as more powerful and authoritative.

Though women might be incentivized to use the voice to compensate for the lack of perception of power due to being a woman — I know I do sometimes — there are high-voiced men like Kellin Quinn of Sleeping With Sirens and Bryan Garris of Knocked Loose who don’t deepen or thicken their voices. Have they faced any pressure or desire to do so? It’s surprising that there are still men in the metal scene who say things like “I don’t normally like women vocalists, but [insert compliment here].” I have not experienced that personally, but Courtney LaPlante of Spiritbox talks about it in this interview.

Sometimes when I scream, I resent myself for sounding too girly instead of the aggressive and commanding masculine ideal even after adding compression4 which I think makes the voice more piercing. These are my internalized expectations for how a metal singer should sound, which stems from 1) that males overrepresent metal vocalists and 2) societal notions that masculine emotions are qualitatively different. When I scream and sound like a girl, I feel like I’m being crazy or too emotional rather than justified and conveying something of substance.

Personally I feel the most feminine when I let out my suppressed rage. Maybe that says something about the world we live in. Maybe I’m just an eldest daughter. Maybe it’s Maybelline. In any case, I want my (musical) aggression to be taken as seriously as a man’s, to be equally authoritative without sacrificing the feminine in my voice. In Jinjer’s words: “You teach me how to be a man / Though I am someone’s daughter / The path of warrior was set for me / And I had to try on the armor / No, it doesn’t suit me / And it feels so heavy”. The armor is the tone. The battle is the song. The war is the representation of women in metal.

While metal screams demand the masculine, clean vocals in pop music put forth an ideal sound of femininity. My sense of the current Western vocal beauty standard is the bedroom-pop whisper mix accentuated with breathy vowels and sometimes pouty voices ala Lorde, Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter, or Pink Pantheress. The K-Pop industry on the other hand loves electric sopranos with light, bright voices, or “clean” in Ejae’s terms. An aside: I’m really glad Ejae blew up because her darker, richer voice is not what one would expect coming out of K-Pop, but she did it! On one hand, singers are able to signal femininity through these techniques, which can be empowering. However, aspiring towards this specific form of femininity is disappointing for those of us for whom it isn’t an authentic representation.

How do we balance defying stereotypes with being accepted for our idiosyncratic femininities? It requires the decoupling of qualities of the genre with qualities of the individual. Maybe that’s obvious, but it’s really difficult and necessitates change in society more broadly. Even though gender expectations have evolved, the lack of representation in certain genres reinforces sonic identities that exacerbate gender stereotypes. When there are more women in metal, when we no longer associate dominance and authority with the masculine, the metal vocal beauty standard evolves and expands5.

xx Jo

If you’re a woman in metal, I’d love to hear more about your experiences!

Leave a comment

Today, I’ll be talking about how Matt Tong’s (subtle reference to AAPI month???) drumming on Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm album inspired the drum part I play on Twiggy, off of our debut album:

Show alert: May 30th at 2pm at Petworth Porchfest!@!

Before getting into it, wanted to note that we’ll be playing at 5505 7th St NW on May 30th at 2pm. Stealing some content from Peter’s post last week:

We will be coming back live this year at Petworth Porchfest on May 30 at 2 pm! This marks our first show of the year, and we are thrilled once again to play through the entirety of our debut album, Inner Tensions, as well as our latest single “Call It Off!” to you in the cozy, friendly neighborhood of Petworth. Grab your friends, some sunscreen, a cool beverage, and pull up! There is no better opportunity for day drinking.

Ok back to Twiggy.

Inspiration

Around the time we were writing Twiggy, I was listening to Silent Alarm a lot. Matt Tong’s drumming on the album is arresting, and I really admire his energy, creativity, and confident beat.

I feel like he’s a drummer that plays exactly what is required of him with intense focus and incredible energy. He writes drum parts meticulously and carefully; he doesn’t overcomplicate things, while also speaking clearly with his unique voice. In my opinion, Matt is one of the key creative voices in early Bloc Party and defined a large part of their sound.

For Twiggy, a particular inspiration was Like Eating Glass:

Matt launches into the song with an intense beat, and the song forms around him, setting the tone for the album and the band. When we were writing Twiggy, we weren’t sure how to start the song. I said don’t worry, I’ll get us started ;)

Twiggy’s verse drum part is also inspired by the odd and angular accents in Matt’s playing. He finds a nice balance between straightforward beats and changing it up to accentuate and highlight different musical aspects in the song. Banquet is a good example:

If you have any thoughts, feel free to comment, always happy to talk drumming :) I’m excited to kick off my contributions to “The Rendezvous”, and looking forward to rambling more in the future!

- Victor

P.S. I tend to fuse a lot of drum influences together, and while editing, I realized there is probably some form of inspiration from komaki’s playing for tricot in Twiggy as well. Teaser for future komaki appreciation post in the future???

We in Parasocial (Jo, Peter, Victor) will take turns every week to write an article to be published on Wednesday afternoon. You can expect us to write about…

• Music that we like or inspired our songs

• Announcements for shows and record releases

• Post-show reflections

• Songwriting/recording updates

• Breaking down our creative process (e.g. composition, mixing, equipment)

• Music op-eds (expect some fiery takes from Victor)

… and other musings.

Petworth Porchfest 2026

Onto our next announcement. We will be coming back live this year at Petworth Porchfest on May 30 at 2 pm! This marks our first show of the year, and we are thrilled once again to play through the entirety of our debut album, Inner Tensions, as well as our latest single “Call It Off!” to you in the cozy, friendly neighborhood of Petworth. Grab your friends, some sunscreen, a cool beverage, and pull up! There is no better opportunity for day drinking.

Happy AAPI Heritage Month!

Since our inaugural post also happens to occur during AAPI Heritage Month, which serves to celebrate the culture, history, and contributions of Americans of Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander descent, I wanted to take the time to spotlight some AAPI artists that friends of the band have recommended. To any of you reading this, hello and thank you for taking the time to share your music!

Abby - “Heart Don’t Stand a Chance” by Anderson.Paak

He’s probably best known for Silk Sonic with Bruno Mars, but his solo work and other collabs are also very worth checking out. i admire how he pays homage to a rich history of jazz, funk, soul, and hiphop while looking to the future in his own work.

Christian - “Paragraphs” by Luke Chiang

I found Luke Chiang during time of uni and covid. His slower paced music and soothing tone helped me stay calm through the chaos of it all.

Lauren - “Music” by underscores

I started listening to her during the meteoric rise of hyperpop during lockdown. We’re both the same age, from SF, and we grew up listening to similar music; in this, I find her genre-defying sound both fresh and nostalgic and can’t help but have a soft spot for her music.

Winston - Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, Fort Minor

Shinoda pushed the boundaries of what heavy music could be, delivering iconic rap sections in Linkin Park songs, such as “In The End” and “Faint,” playing guitar while sharing vocal duties and acting as a foil to the late Chester Bennington.

He further demonstrates his musical tenacity in his solo project, Fort Minor, where he wrote all lyrics and music, and played all instruments. He also uses this platform as a voice to highlight historical AAPI issues such as the interment of Japanese-Americans during WWII in the track “Kenji.”

It’s no exaggeration to say that Shinoda’s sound influenced a generation.

Mayson - “Mercury” by Steve Lacy

Cool cuz it’s in 3. And it was really popular which was surprising for the sound

I can’t think of another song that’s as close to a waltz rhythm that’s as popular in recent times

He just does the indie sound SO WELL

Christine - “Reverie” by Sarah Kinsley

I like how all her songs build in energy starting w some type of simple hook. She has a classical background that you can tell from her songwriting whether it’s piano driven or more digitally sound heavy. Her vocal melodies and deliveries are super thrilling to listen to cuz you have no idea where they’ll go (in addition to just being very powerful and unique). Plus she does a lot of her own instrumentation and production!

Editor’s note: shout out to Christine’s music project, Kind of Christine. Check out her latest EP, Under the Earth!

Jo - “Rich Kids“ by Polyphia ft. Yvette Young

Victor - “Old Friends” by Haybaby

Ayako - “Afterglow” by Luna Li

Robin - “Everglades” by Your Trusted Officials

Finally, I would like to recommend “殭屍復活 (Horrendous Corpse Resurrection)” by Ripped to Shreds. The brainchild of Taiwanese-American musician Andrew Lee, Ripped to Shreds plays good ol’ death metal that explores themes of Chinese folklore, anti-imperialism, wuxia, and “obscure Taiwanese funeral rites”. Lee is also outspoken about increasing Asian-American representation and visibility, as well as affirming anti-racism in the extreme metal scene. I particularly enjoyed his tour vlogs on the underground grind/metal scene in China and Taiwan, giving insight into a small but dedicated community hungering to hear more extreme music from the rest of the world.

“殭屍復活 (Horrendous Corpse Resurrection)” is nasty yet fun– buzzy riffs played through a Boss HM-2, interplaying guttural vocals, blast beats, all of which culminates in a ridiculously flashy power-metal-inspired harmonized shred guitar solo.

Whether they are sad-girl indie or death metal, established or underground, hopefully you will resonate with an artist or two here. I know for sure that I am still in an infancy stage of discovering the art of AAPI communities, so compiling this list has been fun and educational for me.

Thank you so much for checking out our very first post on the Rendezvous, and stay tuned for more articles!

Peter - guitarist, shredder extraordinaire of Parasocial