How Is Shadows of the Cascade?

The Beginning!

I began making music in 2014 after listening to lots of Animal Collective. In particular, Loch Raven was the first song I ever heard that made my realize music went beyond the Top 40 and Switchfoot. "What!" I thought, "Music can be good? You can really just sit down and make distilled goodness without compromising it for the sake of sophistication or something?".

It's a very repetitive ordeal; three chords, one repeating drum line without fills, a constantly repeating background vocal melody. It doesn't try to be anything else though, and the unique atmosphere they had in mind, they built perfectly. It would have been much worse if it was one minute shorter or longer, if they threw in a key change, if it had a conventional drum groove - if it made any compromise in pursuit of being radio ready.

The Realization That Compromise Is Lame!

I spent a lot of time thereafter, before and after school, trying to imitate that abandonment of musical "oughts" and make songs exactly how my subconscious wanted them. No interest in structural depth if to me it just made songs worse - gave them "downs" that didn't need to exist. Why couldn't the whole thing be "the good part"?

Here we are a decade and change later, and even though I don't think I've matched Loch Raven's brilliance, I nevertheless have not compromised one iota of what I wanted in any song I've made. I started with a lot of free and cracked VSTs and a copy of Mixcraft Pro Studio 7 from my high school music teacher.

The Future!

In recent years, I've been itching to channel that desire - to obliterate all compromise - into a video game. To distill all the good parts of the games I enjoy into one cohesive, quite good game. I reckon every game developer wants his video game to be all good, so I'm under no illusion I'm unique in that regard. Still, to that end I've spent the last couple years messing with Godot, Blender, and Krita and learning about all manner of file technology: audio codecs, image formats, compression methods. Many things that will be involved with the creation of most any video game. Writing also, although I've been practicing that since grade school.