#so should draw more sonic stuff but i am so busy over at my main with other stuff hahaha

[messedupessysonicsheit]

NUZZLE NUZZLE THAT EDGY BOI (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ❤

Ayo long time no see over here, haven’t posted or rebloged anything over here for like 4 months pfft, even tho my drafts got like over 200 things in it haha xD But yeah here have some random art I made as a warm up today, because I haven’t drawn these for awhile and thought hey why not sketch them up as my warm up

The anatomy and the sizes of the two looks really weird, but still happy with how they turned out bc hey this was a rushed af doodle and it still looks good yes yes

[taglegend]

Tag Fact #3 -  I’ve come to realize I’ve always been a fan artist more than I thought. so here is a timeline of influences that shaped my childhood to now. from nostalgic times, to sad changes, to great loss, to strange rises to fame and phases, to stepping stones and finally a laughing place. all the things that make up your favorite fan artist Tag.

1. Rayman (bumped into this in the year of 1999) was actually the first fandom (with crossovers) I bumped into when I was 9. although the internet wasn’t available at the time it was still fun to dwell in home amusements. I remember the storylines and the OC’s I made but they’re kind of embarrassing and it’s probably a good thing there was no internet. I’ve done fanart and comic crossovers of Rayman with Calvin and Hobbs and Nights Into Dreams, spinoffs of Sonic the Hedgehog OC’s, Yoshi with Pikachu, and the Pokemon/Digimon craze with OC’s and other Nintendo comic shorts. but the drawings and comics are long gone and disappeared in the garage in a backpack due to suspecting my sister’s dad accidentally throwing them away. years later towards the year 2018 (now 28), we decided to move to North Carolina and it was my chance to find them again. unfortunately the backpack was gone just like I suspected (my main stuff), but for some reason I found my Pokemon/Digimon fanart, a good batch of Super Mario drawings (vaguely remember doing these), my sister’s drawings and some other neighborhood kids’ drawings in a dirty box. I was partially happy I found something at least but it was the backpack I wanted the most. sometimes I regret not looking for the backpack (’cause I was too busy being a kid) but it’s alright, noone needs to see that shit anyway, ha ha. anyways, I recall being a fan of Rayman from 1999 ‘til 2002.

2. Sonic Adventure 2 Battle (bumped into this in the year of 2003) my second fandom I bumped into when I was 12 going on 13. at the time, my sister and I both liked the Sonic The Hedgehog Franchise based on the Battle remake and ended up making our own secret fanart club that consisted of only us two members. she liked Sonic (and that was her boyfriend, ha ha) and I liked Knuckles (and he was my boyfriend, ha ha) and we were crazy in love about Shadow’s backstory. we listened to the game’s soundtracks as we drew fanart and comics after school and man, those were good times. however, as we grew older towards the year of 2005, we ended up having separate rooms and I believe it played a part in disconnecting on the same interest. then one day, I asked her why she wasn’t into Sonic anymore and she replied, “Because I grew up.” I was sad after that and slowly observed that she was influenced by the emo culture and the new friends she’s made. I was the only member of our little club for a little longer...but eventually I moved on too. I still have some surviving fanart we did together but it doesn’t mean shit anymore since she turned out to be an abusive mother from the last I’ve heard of her. 

3. Gorillaz (bumped into this in the year of 2006). as the Sonic years were at its end, I first heard the song “Feel Good Inc” on Music Choice and seeing the first image of them as displayed on this post (except the fan-made background doesn’t count since I can’t find the original artwork). this was my third fandom and later had proper access to the internet to the website I still currently use called DeviantArt. at first I liked 2D but eventually fell for Murdoc and developed a spiritual connection towards the character as obviously seen in my old fanart and rare photos of my devotion shrines on Valentine’s Day and his birthday every year. for the longest time since being a permanent fan from 2006-2017 (11 1/2 years) I had no knowledge that it was a political propaganda band and other realizations I don’t want to talk about. I only followed them because it was a cartoon and not the bullshit behind the musical project. the world I’ve built and support for them for all those 11 1/2 years shattered the fuck out of me and I just wanted to be left alone to find myself again, somehow. activity stopped on all my profiles, the flow of fanart stopped since I now cringe from the fan service and felt I was used for my talent. I didn’t want to be reminded of it all so I took down all my Gorillaz fanart and archived them for old followers’ nostalgia but also in the hopes they’ll be forgotten in my timeline. I ceased to exist in the fandom for huge personal reasons but it’s best to not say why. I know for sure that the fandom wonders what happened but it’s none of their business. THE END.

4. Waluigi (although I knew he’s been around since 2000 during childhood, I took deep interest once I revisited the character again in the year of December 2013). as silly as this sounds, when I revisited him again, the character was so bizarre that I ended up staying up 3 nights and 3 days in a row just looking all over the internet on everything about him and the questionable “hush-hush” absence of a backstory. despite there being no backstory he slowly gained a cult following and in many ways it’s a good thing. however, since the early 2010′s tension has been building up between Nintendo and its fans about him starring in a main game but everyone hasn’t fully gotten it in their heads that it’s not gonna happen. as long as Nintendo is in control of that, the fandom will not win, I’m sorry to say. on the other hand, if it’s going to be this way, then that’s what fanart and comic projects are for. as for me, I am doing my very best to get my comic project “Waluigi Land” going. again, I apologize if it’s taking very long to get Chapter 2 going if you’ve been keeping track but aha moments need to develop before I start permanent drawing (since concepts, character design and storyline needed improvement badly). as of right now I am still a Waluigi fan and I will not quit on him.

5. Turbo from Wreck-It-Ralph (although it debuted in 2012, I watched the movie two years later into the year 2014). for some bizarro reason, I had an unhealthy obsession with this character to the point where I dressed up as him for Halloween 2014. only 2 fanarts of him and the Turbo Twins exist on my profiles, mainly because my mind was more focused on just ‘thinking about him’ or ‘being him’ rather than drawing physical drawings. luckily, this supposed alleged fandom didn’t last long a little after Halloween so I chalk it up as a very short phase. to this day I don’t know what has gotten over me about him. the only thing I can think of now is that I think it’s because the character had yellow eyes and teeth but I don’t know. now that I think of it, that little fucker was ugly as hell and I STILL don’t know what had gotten over me. one day, my brother mentioned what that was about, and I said to him, “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

6. Undertale (although it debuted in 2015, I later took interest in it in 2016). It was all about Sans and Papyrus. I couldn’t get enough of the skeleton bros. eventually Toriel and Mettaton EX became my favorites but it took a long time to draw more of all 4 of them because I had other important things to do in my life plus I was still waiting for the next Gorillaz album to revive my imaginative juices (or so I thought). I really want to have this as one of my frequent fandoms but I just don’t have time for it anymore. it’s still in the back of my head to want to draw them but at this point I still have other better interests to be in. and besides, I’m lazy just like Sans.

7. Cuphead (June 28th, 2017 was the official day I called quits on the British-based band Gorillaz due to the bullshit behind it. since that date I was lost, had no inspiration to look forward to and no cartoon guy to make me smile...but lo and behold of the same year, I took an interest in playing the game Cuphead and man...that shit was a frightening exaggerated metaphor for being on that one drug (forgot the name though) and having sex at the same time but man that was the best fun I’ve had in years. I mean, it’s like, enemies are just so happy to murder you and that scared the shit outta me. and the facial exaggeration?....I think I should stop, ha ha. anyways, the Moldenhauers saved my ass from spiraling down, they have no clue. anyways, eventually I became a permanent fan of their work so to ease the hurt and erase my past from the G-fandom I had to re-wire my brain into a different cartoon category that’s a rather more American, so anything Toon related like Roger Rabbit, Felix the Cat or another favorite that’s a western-based cartoon makes me feel better, especially my new man .......King Dice <3 <3<3<3. however, there was something about this new fandom category I still didn’t quite understand until the date March 14th, 2020. I finally understood what it was but I feel I shouldn’t bring it up. anyways, Cuphead and anything western or rubber hose is my last stop in inspiration for the remaining years of my life. many say never say never but I believe I’ve found my laughing place and that’s all that matters.

[dustedmagazine]

Ian Mathers: Year in Review 2017

If there’s a general thread to be found in all the summings-up of 2017, both here at Dusted and elsewhere, unsurprisingly it mostly seems to be that 2017 was a crap year. It’s been heartening to see many friends and loved ones reflecting on the personal successes they’ve had despite the ongoing decay and dissolution of things on a less personal level, but honestly I can’t even claim that. I’m writing this on just barely the other side of a stomach bug that, between my wife and I, disrupted plans and made things miserable for us for over a week now, and that was just 2017’s last kick at the can in terms of medical problems for two of us. (Hers chronic, mine acute — meaning I have the scarier medical procedure coming up but also the hope things will go back to “normal.”) All of that probably indicates why, despite me finding just as much a respite in music as any of my colleagues, 2017 was my worst year for listening to current music since I started keeping track.

 There’s no magical number of albums or songs one “should” listen to, of course, not even if you write about music, but I think it’s fair to acknowledge that a breadth of listening can be helpful in terms of context and everything else. And of course none of us, these days, can listen to more than a fragment of what’s out there, especially once you add in day jobs, relationships, commuting, sleeping, etc., etc. I don’t so much set a yearly goal for myself as just know how many albums I intended to give a listen to, because of things I’ve read or existing love for a band or songs I hear somewhere or what have you, and the last few years I’ve been mostly successful at getting through that backlog by the end of the year. This year, with 51 records under my belt, I’ve still listened to a lot more than most people out there, albeit not necessarily in the smaller sphere of those of us who read or write for Dusted. But I still have 42(!) albums sitting in my folder, reproaching me. There’s everything from stuff I’ve never heard that colleagues here have made persuasive cases for to new, highly-praised efforts by bands I’ve loved for years. I am not sure exactly what slowed me down all year, but 2017 was a year where I wore my favorite Mountain Goats t-shirt to multiple medical procedures as a lucky talisman and still couldn’t bring myself to play their new album for months after it came out (it’s good; I think I’ll wind up loving it; I haven’t given it enough time yet).  

This, incidentally, is why I enjoy these kind of year-end wrap ups and peeks behind the curtain; god knows there’s no writer who’s an infallible machine, consuming all records of interest and immediately ranking them, but especially on this end of the business where we’re doing it for love, not money, these kinds of things become concerns more often than you might think. I want to read the people I want to read about music because I appreciate their taste, their skill and their passion, not because I think I can select some magic combination that will tell me every record I’ll love that year.  

The happier side to my relatively smaller listening pool in 2017 is that I quickly did find a lot of records I adored, and I played them a lot. External commitments, particularly to Dusted, were basically all that worked to motivate me, so a lot of those records I loved I wrote about here. When it came time to try and draw up a personal best-of I found even after being fairly strict with myself I could only get it down to 25, just under half of the records I spent real time with in 2017. Of those, I wrote about 17 here at Dusted; two more were covered here by others (Patrick Masterson’s excellent piece on Godspeed You! Black Emperor is here and Bill Meyer got me to finally check out Bardo Pond, who I had been correctly suspecting I would love for literally years, here). Then there’s Fujiya & Miyagi’s self-titled album/EP collection, which I had covered the first two thirds of here and here; there’s maybe no better sign of the way the end of 2017 collapsed in on me than that I couldn’t find the time and energy to write up an excellent album by a band I love that I’d been eagerly looking forward to writing about since last year (in any case, it works even better in resequenced album form, please do check it out). After that we’re left with five albums I loved, in some cases for practically all of 2017, that I meant to write about for Dusted, even if just here. After I’ve got my complete list of 25 with links to the reviews as applicable.  

EMA — Exile in the Outer Ring

Erika M Anderson made my favorite record of 2014 and came back this year with another powerfully personal, noisy, prescient and clear-eyed collection of songs, this time aimed at a totally different void than The Future’s Void was. I’m not sure I saw a better horror movie in 2017 than the crawling, dreadful fuzz of “Breathalyzer” (even as the video deflects that, for good reason), but for every trauma this record vivisects (abuse and its effects on “7 Years” and “Where the Darkness Begin,” misogyny on “Receive Love,” poverty on “Down and Out”) there’s a defiant charge like “I Wanna Destroy” or “33 Nihilistic and Female” (or even “Aryan Nation,” maybe the record’s most potent mix of the two) to keep this from being just a plunge into the pessimistic abyss. Anderson’s an honest enough observer and artist that she never pretends to have the answers, or even know how to find them, but this marks six years of her work being absolutely vital. Understanding, diagnosis, defiance, support; in 2017 we need all of them, at once, and plenty of them.

 High Plains — Cinderland

Scott Morgan (aka loscil, who I’ve praised here before) and cellist Mark Bridges first met on residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2014 and made Cinderland in Wyoming, even though they live in British Columbia and Wisconsin, respectively; all, fittingly enough, for an album so intensely concerned with geography and a kind of sonic terroir. These 9 tracks (coming in at a compact 36:16 total) were recorded using a portable studio, allowing Bridges’ cello, the local Steinway and Morgan’s field recordings and electronic manipulation to be captured in the raw. Even on a track like the piano-sampling “Ten Sleep” this doesn’t just feel like loscil with a cellist playing along, though, and the collaboration ultimately feels like even more than the sum of its parts. Whether it’s the intensely cinematic duo playing on the opening title track or the drop to end all drops on the terrifying “A White Truck” or the luxuriating in the sound of Bridges’ cello on “Black Shimmer,” Cinderland is very much an invitation to this distinct place and time; I suspect it is either the best or worst possible album for playing when driving at night in the winter. 

 Mogwai — Every Country’s Sun

It would be a mistake to assign too much seriousness to Mogwai’s music, however broodingly powerful it might be in action (see the breakdown of how they came up with song titles this time on their YouTube channel for a good example of what I mean), but leaving aside soundtracks and compilations this is the long-running Scottish band’s first album as an official quartet, and it comes after two excellent records that both seemed to embrace their long history (Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will.) and strike off in exciting new directions (Rave Tapes). Sure enough Every Country’s Sun splits the difference, and hasn’t lost an ounce of muscle, even if on “Don’t Believe the Fife” they really make you wait for it. There’s rarely been a Mogwai track as gentle as “aka 47” or as desert-fried as “20 Size,” but “Party in the Dark” is merely the latest example in a long line that the band function just as well with vocals and the closing title track is maybe their most violently elegiac crescendo since the great “Helicon 1.” Whether it’s the straightforward thrash through “Old Poisons” or the synthesized crunch of “Brain Sweeties,” there’s a little something of everything here.

 The National — Sleep Well Beast

If the main hit against the National for a while was that they kind of just always sounded the same (which was about as true and as damning as it was when it’s been used against anyone from the Ramones on down), then the expanded palette of Sleep Well Beast ought to satisfy. Honestly, for me it took a while to integrate those elements into my listening, particularly because they’re more prominent on the mid-tempo kind of National song that always take longer to blossom for me. But then the National are probably the band I love the most that have the strongest track record of me wondering if I don’t love them any more until I’ve played the new record 5-6 times. Here, even now that I appreciate anew Matt Berninger’s powerfully ambiguous lyrics and performance and the well-oiled interplay of the rest of the band this feels like a bit of a growing-pains record to me; at 56 minutes it feels like a few of the songs could have been trimmed by a minute or two (and the interesting digital collage of the title track should be maybe half the length of its 6:26 and moved back to let “Dark Side of the Gym” end the record, like it feels like it should). But, and this is a very large but, the National still manage to write and play beautifully about emotions I’m not sure anyone else quite hits and they still felt like an essential part of my year.

 SubRosa — Subdued Live at Roadburn 2017          

After you listen to enough music, love enough things, it’s rare enough for a band to stop you in your tracks on first listen. It’s even rarer for the same band to manage the same thing twice — after all, part of the very stunning effect in the first place is the surprise of the new. Salt Lake City’s SubRosa is now the only band to manage to do this to me, not just twice, but twice with the same song. I first heard their song “Whippoorwill,” from 2011’s No Help for the Mighty Ones and was instantly transfixed by the song and the band’s crushing, transcendent doom metal (complete with electric violins). I didn’t even know until recently that the band and the Roadburn festival had put out this 2017 live set, their first time playing the more acoustic “Subdued” versions anywhere except around their home turf. The first track here is “Whippoorwill,” now mesmerizing in a completely distinct way from the album version, and the rest of the album follows suit. Every rendition here, from the earliest material to songs from 2013’s More Constant Than the Gods, is undertaken with a patient gravitas and a stark beauty that is neither more or less beautiful than the more conventionally metal album versions, but instead somehow makes both these versions and the original even more profoundly moving and powerful. For the first time in a long time, I found myself unable to do anything else for the entire length of my first listen to this album.

Favourites of 2017

Anastasia Minster — Hour of the Wolf

Bardo Pond — Under the Pines

Blanck Mass — World Eater

Demen — Nektyr

DREAMDECAY — YÚ

Elbow — Little Fictions

EMA — Exile in the Outer Ring

Fovea Hex — The Salt Garden II

Fujiya & Miyagi — Fujiya & Miyagi

Godspeed You! Black Emperor — Luciferian Towers

High Plains — Cinderland

Jens Lekman — Life Will See You Now

Joe Goddard — Electric Lines

Kelly Lee Owens — s/t

King Woman — Created in the Image of Suffering

Los Campesinos! — Sick Scenes

Mew — Visuals

Mogwai — Every Country’s Sun

The National — Sleep Well Beast

Saltland — A Common Truth

Sam Amidon — The Following Mountain

Shooting Guns — Flavour Country

Slowdive — Slowdive

SubRosa — Subdued Live at Roadburn 2017

Xiu Xiu — Forget