mercuryvalley

[mercuryvalley]

Every couple of months I get Justice brainworms. Gotta listen to all those live albums on repeat for like a week straight to get them to go away. Not that it's a bad thing. Also I wish Phantom Part 1.5 from A Cross The Universe had a version without crowd noise. That track goes crazy.

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Rebrand is done. Things will probably get funky on streaming services (Apple Music/iTunes won't let me rename myself at all which is fucking insane), but I won't know exactly how funky until it goes through I guess. I am now Mercury Valley!

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This also means a rebrand for the music is coming. Haven't finished the logo yet, I'll update this side of things once it's done.

I'M FUCKING TRANS!!! GRAHHHHHHHH MY NEW NAME IS VIOLET AND I USE SHE/HER PLEASE AND THANK YOU!!!!!!

[mercuryvalley]

Made a remix of Galvanize, in part due to the silly dancing in Sonic 3, but mostly because it kicks ass. Listen here:

[mercuryvalley]

This year's wrapped (on Tidal instead of Spotify, but same thing) is very predictable for me, but maybe you'll find it interesting.

Starting with songs:

So, uh, I listened to these two albums a lot this year. Hyperdrama especially, because going and seeing Justice live had me hyped for months leading up to it. Get Off The Internet isn't my favorite album or anything (although 404, the remix album, is on repeat for me rn lol), but it has some excellent bangers on it for sure.

So, ok, you can definitely tell who two of my top five artists are, but who are the others?

So. Justice is not a surprise. Woman Worldwide is one of my favorite albums, period. Hyperdrama is decent, but the tracks like Incognito and Generator (my 4th and 5th most listened to tracks this year, mind you), just don't hit as hard as their earlier work, especially coming off of WWW. I'll still listen to this album from time to time from now on, but the hype I had for it definitely died off after I saw their live show. Now, the imminent live album for their current tour, that could become a mainstay for me 👀

I have a LOT of deadmau5 interspersed in my playlists, Random Album Title is my favorite house album, and he did put out a few things this year that I listened to a fair bit (Some EP, Re_Jaded, etc). Seeing him at #2 is both surprising and not surprising, since I don't feel like I go out of my way to listen to specific tracks of his all that often these days, but at the same time, he's in almost every playlist I have, so I can only expect so much.

Grabbitz is my favorite artist right now, Time Isn't Real is another contender for my favorite album, and I finally realized there's a deluxe version this year, soooo yeah, that plus Let Them Only See Butterflies and In the Dark means I'm honestly surprised he's not #2.

Eliminate is one of the most unique producers in bass music, and his shift towards more 150 BPM hardcore shit pleases me greatly. Twisted (aka MOREPWR VIP) is living in my head rent free as we speak. This is the year I finally dug into his back catalogue a bit more too. Wasn't super sure he would make the list, but I guess I listened to Get Off The Internet more than I thought lol

And to round out the top 5, we have Noisia. Closer from 2022 has become my favorite drum and bass album, which probably constitutes about 80% of my Noisia listening from this year. They have plenty of wacky and fantastic bangers, but that album is something I can throw on whenever and be pretty happy.

Honorable mentions who did not make the list:

Porter Robinson's album SMILE! :D is great, but it hasn't been the type of album I've gone back to over and over (so far at least). Cheerleader is #7 on my track list, just behind yet another Justice track from Hyperdrama, lol

Pendulum is a band I really only started to dig into this year, but I haven't picked out a specific album I jive with yet. Mostly because all they've done is EPs and singles since Immersion in 2010. As you can tell, I tend to listen to a fair amount of albums, so that hurts their chances a bit.

Au5 is probably the producer I respect the most in the EDM sphere. Bridges Between was a fine album, but if it didn't have the cheesy, breathy, reverbed out female pop vocals on nearly every track, I would've liked it a lot more.

Reaper is one of my favorite drum and bass artists, but with him, I tend to pick a few tracks to hyperfixate on. This year, the two winners by far were Black Fires and Monster.

Zonderling put out Variant, which I listened to a LOT this year (the track and the EP). Unfortunately, I only have one other Zonderling track in my collection at the moment, but I have plans to change that, for sure.

And last but not least, Infected Mushroom is actually nowhere to be seen in my entire top 100 tracks. Which is WILD to me. They've been in my top 5 artists for several years in a row, even being the number 1 slot, so I'm very surprised that I apparently fell off the hype train for them. I guess the next time they put out a true album, they'll probably creep back up, but as much as I love Converting Vegetarians II and More Than Just A Name, they apparently can't carry those two enough to make the list.

[mercuryvalley]

Gonna throw down some EDM background music for an event for like 7 hours on saturday. If I recorded it, would any of you be interested, and if so, do you know a good place to upload it?

[mercuryvalley]

Idk if i posted about it, but a while ago (Julyish?), I tried switching to Linux because I was fed up with Microsoft's bullshit, only to discover Linux would ruin many things for me. Upon switching back, several music project files just kinda broke, and some never recovered and I had to replace them with equivalents. Some of these plugins, I used a LOT. Ever since, if I want to open a pre-migration project, I have to resign myself to spending hours trying to get things exactly back to how they were. And let me tell you, that is not great for motivation to work on music. I'm chipping away at it, but it's very frustrating knowing the old version of the project sounded better, and I can never get those sounds back.

[mercuryvalley]

Link to the youtube playlist is live :)

Signals of the Stranded is out now! Listen to the soundtrack for the abandoned crew of a wrecked spaceship, floating helplessly, waiting for rescue. Coming to all streaming services, starting today.

[mercuryvalley]

Signals of the Stranded is out now! Listen to the soundtrack for the abandoned crew of a wrecked spaceship, floating helplessly, waiting for rescue. Coming to all streaming services, starting today.

[mercuryvalley]

EP IS DONE

8 TRACKS COME OUT TOMORROW (hopefully lol)

Lmfao the video game I made music for got canceled, but the music is already done so uhhh EP incoming I guess?

[mercuryvalley]

Lmfao the video game I made music for got canceled, but the music is already done so uhhh EP incoming I guess?

[mercuryvalley]

You know a work in progress track is good if it summons your cat into your lap. You know it's REALLY good when they fall asleep there lol

[mercuryvalley]

Song of the day: Porter Robinson - Russian Roulette

Genre: Hyperpop, Happy Hardcore

This one is going to be hard to talk about. TW: Self harm, suicide

This song is the only example I can think of where it is too powerful to be added to my regular listening catalogue. I'm serious, if this thing comes up at any point, I'm tearing up at a minimum. It's the best song off of this excellent album, which as a whole is about Porter's awkwardness and missteps as an adult so far in his life. And I respect that, because there's plenty of stories of how awkward teenage years are, but as a 24 year old living an awkward life, I'm glad to see my era represented so closely to what I experienced myself, for better or worse.

Let's rip the bandaid off right now, I've come very close to killing myself. As in, the only thing stopping me from attempting an overdose was my own lack of energy stopping me from getting out of bed. Obviously this isn't one to one with russian roulette, but since it wasn't certainly going to kill me, it felt like the same kind of gamble: the one I wanted to lose.

The pressures Porter describes that lead him to this point are something on a scale I couldn't imagine. He's a superstar producer, one of the biggest names in electronic music, and one that has a track record of consistently putting out very high quality work. He talks about how he feels this pressure throughout this album, including the opener where he basically voices his fear over releasing something his fans don't like and tarnishing a pretty spotless discography, but in this track, he specifically mentions things like Pitchfork calling him "the next big thing" and wanting to make money off of his identity and prestige, which clearly doesn't sit well with him. But feeling that he has no other way out of that situation once he's been entrenched in it, he contemplates playing russian roulette as a means of escape. He also mentions a friend losing his head and not doing anything about it, which may specifically be a nod to the late Avicii. Porter has cited Avicii's death as a wake up call for him (and many others in the scene) to get sober, and while I don't know if they were close friends or not, Porter feels that they were close enough that he should've done something.

So there he is, two verses and two choruses saying how much he wants to die, plus an extra quiet repeat chorus which forces listeners to get uncomfortably intimate with him in what could be his final moments. But then out of that quietness comes instead a list of reasons why he wants to stay alive, at least for a bit longer. The first one is the most impactful to me: "I wanna see my mom one more time." My mom died after a looong battle with cancer a little over a year ago, and I have to say, you often take for granted what you have until it's gone. If I had known how much I miss her now, she would've been at the top of my list too in my darkest hours.

He lists off several things like that. "I wanna kiss my cat one more time" also hits hard since I have two cats, one of which is newer to the house and is sleeping on me as I type this. "I wanna thank my dad one more time." "I wanna play in the snow one more time." "I wanna marry her one more time." And after listing off enough of these, he comes to the realization that he doesn't really want to go through with this, repeating the simple yet VERY powerful "I wanna live, I don't wanna die" over and over into one of the biggest drops on the album, an all out happy hardcore rave of positive energy at the revelation that he does have things to live for.

Cheesy? Maybe. But in the aftermath of the drop, a goofy text to speech voice comes in to address that, saying "Clichés like this are beautiful, because they reflect us, and we are beautiful" (which is punctuated with a pretty funny YAY sound effect that gets cut off abruptly). And the text to speech voice delivers, very clearly and plainly for those who need it, the moral of the story:

Don't kill yourself, you idiot

And some people need to hear that as unambiguously as possible. If I was 17 or 18, I would be one of those people. This song is literally going to save people's lives, I guarantee it. That's the kind of power I can only wish to reflect on the world if I ever get that big as an artist. Go listen to SMILE! :D and let me know what you think! Such a good album.

[mercuryvalley]

Song of the day: Grabbitz - Lights All Around You

Genre: Synthpop

Hey you! If you haven't listened to the deluxe version of Time Isn't Real, do yourself a favor and take a listen. The original is a strong contender for my favorite album, dealing with Grabbitz becoming a successful artist and what that's done to his personal life. There's a lot to dig into there, but I bring it up because at the end of the album as it originally released, the song Another Form of Goodbye provided a pretty crushing and fitting end to the album thematically, saying goodbye to a loved one after slowly changing and growing as a person.

My one hangup with this track and this deluxe edition conceptually, is where do you go from there? How do you find an equally fitting end without destroying the narrative the original tracks had going?

As it turns out, these tracks fit better than I had anticipated. They follow the only narrative that such a deeply personal life story could: life goes on. He takes a track to lament the loss of his previous love, and eventually finds somebody else. And you know, based on this track, she seems perfect.

Now, Grabbitz writes many songs about love, but most of them have at least some hint of morbidity to them. Float Away is about how he would rather die together with his love in the ocean than be saved and live without her. Pain Killer is about seeking out love solely as a means to make your own struggles better, disregarding how the other person feels about the situation.

But Lights All Around You has none of that. It gets close in a couple of spots, but it's from a place of genuine appreciation for the person, rather than using them as a means to feel better. It is the most wholesome song he's ever made, painting a vivid picture of his love dancing among a beautiful shower of lights, a perfect moment in time that seems to last forever and yet also far too short. And as the song fades out, the ethereal, reverbed out voice of Grabbitz closes the album with one last line: "There are shimmering lights all around you."

This perfect moment couldn't really last forever. It's bittersweet knowing that this moment of genuine love and happiness has to come to a close at some point. But hey, there's no song to follow this and say that it did. So it serves as a great piece of escapist fantasy, being able to experience this kind of moment vicariously, with nothing to interrupt it. This dance can last forever, if you let it. I like to imagine it's faded out but continuing silently in the background. Until you hit play on the next song you choose and interrupt it. But when I hear this track end, it just feels wrong to break the silence with anything else. And I have to say, it takes some real talent to make silence so impactful.

[mercuryvalley]

I'm moving my occasional Song of the Day posts over to this account since it's more music-y :)

Song of the day: Grabbitz - Pretty Melody 70

Genre: Melodic Dubstep

So, I did not know until recently that Time Isn't Real, probably my favorite album, has a DELUXE VERSION??? And I like all the new tracks on it a lot (except When You & Me Dance, which I'm lukewarm on). But when I heard the lead line come in on the second half of the drop, I was awestruck. It's also the melody used in Surrender Peace, which is where I heard it first, but this track used it first and in such a different way! I was amazed he could take a melody that I knew as kinda in-your-face, punky, rebellious, and he tweaks it just a bit so it becomes this really bittersweet and sentimental layer to this song. Totally out of left field, and I would expect hearing the two tracks in release order for the first time would've had a similar effect. I've had that bit stuck in my head all day.

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Omg thank you!! :D

@soysaucevictim

[mercuryvalley]

Low key want to make my own DJ software as a max for live device in Ableton. The only thing stopping me is I do not own Ableton.