rice: welcome to the first song!

in case you haven't picked up on it, each FLAVOR FOLEY member gets to direct 2 songs per album. you can tell who is the director by who's listed first in the credits. "Static" was directed by me!!! rice!!!!!

i don’t know how to make song demos LOL so when i pitch song concepts to the others i use sketches instead!! here’s my very first "Static" pitches!!!!

"static" initial pitch sketches (rice)

sometimes i see people do variations of static miku’s design with pants instead of a skirt (like when they draw male characters singing the song or whatever) and i always keep an eye out for if anyone independently comes up with the clown pants that her first concept had but no one has yet :(

oh, yeah, so about casting! i think people think that we write these songs about the characters, but in reality we usually write the song concept first, and then cast a character to the concept after. i can see how people make that mistake though… on account of the fact that we're really fucking good at casting……

for this one we simply thought miku was the best thematic fit…  and also it was kind of a practical decision; we were like hey we don't have a miku song yet? we're a vocaloid circle we kind of need a miku song in our discography?? how else are they going to know that we're open for work to write the miku expo theme song if we don't have a miku song in our discography ?? and then this unbelievably acftually fucking worked LMFAO #UNPARALLELDSTRAT

Vane: yeah i'm actually really suprised was hadn't done a miku song up until the start of this album run. were we fuckin stupid were we praying on our own fucking downfalls. #UNPARALLELEDSTRAT

rice: i can't believe this fucking worked. genuine actual career advice by the way having a miku song in your discography will open a lot of doors for you if vocaloid is your career path. thank you crypton future media

Vane: thank you crypton future media

Jamie: Thank You Crypton Future Media Creators Of Hatsune Miku

Vane: I had a lot of fun working on static!!! Jamie handled alot of initial composition direction (stuff like putting down chords) while I handled a little bit more of the initial arrangement direction (adding funny xylophone). Jamie obviously expanded upon it with her awesome cool brain and that's how we got the flashed out arrangement we have now! (wow shes so cool sighhhs dreamily)

rice: bro are you gay

Jamie: (guy who listens to vocaloid music voice) i'm a really big fan of freaky hyperactive microgenres of japanese pop music, and a band that i think is an exemplary example of this is plus-tech squeeze box. internet nerds will tell you they make 'picopop' or 'akishibu-kei', which are fancy genre-y ways of saying they sound like decades of pop culture condensed into a thick demiglace and divvied up into ~3 minute portions. the cover for their album Cartoom! is a little butch hartman, a lotta genndy tartakovsky, overwhelmingly That Particular Kind Of Late 90s Early Aughts Revival Of 60s Style Animation but refracted through a dream. it sounds exactly like that, too. they're very much the kind of band to be your favorite musician's favorite musicians. (they also did a song for the spongebob movie soundtrack? that doesn't have much to do with anything but i think it's fun)

i wasn't really confident in my ability to do this myself, but thankfully, we're a freaking band and i am surrounded on all sides by incredibly talented people, so vane nailed down a rough arrangement based on some chords i played.

old cartoon samples blaring at you! double-time tempos! loud, bright, happy, cheery! sugary sweet just like your childhood! it's so fun, isn't it? it was all so fun, right? don't you wanna go back? do it all again? have all that fun over again? be the king of rock and roll, completely?

Rice: that album jamie was talking about freaking rules by the way. the visual direction for the MV was mostly inspired by it!

the other visual inspirations were other childhood cartoons of ours like Max and Ruby, The Mighty B, Charlie and Lola, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter…….. i also took some inspiration from modern animations like Hai Yorokonde and uhhhhhhhh this pop team epic skit

first finalized illustrations of the design (rice)

also, here's two backgrounds i'd made for static that never got used. no deep reason i just couldn't count

Vane: The initial prechorus was in 4/4, but I ended up suggesting the prechorus be a waltz! I thought it would be really cute, befitting, and in general just very musically interesting for it to switch into ¾ for that section. I also had a much more sinister and evil reason…For a second prechorus, I could very clearly hear my good friend enid singing adlibs in the instrumental! I really wanted to bring them onto the track to have some live vocals to compliment the second prechorus and make it a little more haunting and unsettling!! Enid did such an amazing job arranging and singing this section, and I just really want a take a section to highlight it!!

I also did just some weird ass bullshit sound design for the prechorus. I really wanted the fnaf jerma sound in there also. He sound's so wonderful in there he's being enriched. Here's some of that isolated! also the Haunting Ghost its a theramin i like theramins :)

rice: after the others had done the production, i wrote the entire melodyline! i was really happy with this one, i'm glad people like it, it took some trial and error…. the first verse melody i wrote for this consisted entirely of sextuplets but we decided it was a bit much so we scrapped it pretty fast. actually it was so fast that i didnt save it so i can't show you oops. sorry. but i got it on the second try ✌

Vane: This is a really small thing, but I changed the very very end of the topline of the chorus! The original topline for the "this is how it should be" part sounded like this!

I ended up changing it to this!

I thought that having the melody ascend here made it feel a bit more like the ending of a children's cartoon intro!! I was scared to show rice because I was like "i am fucking with their awesome perfect amazing topline should i die should i go to hell" and im so glad that they liked it

rice: I REMEMBER THAT the topline i wrote went mostly unchanged during the lyric writing process but that was the biggest change and it made me smile it was so smart. vane you're soooooooo smart

Vane: backtracking a bit: we really were just doing some bullshit for the intro. i was laughing so fucking hard when we first played this back

rice: SPEAKING OF THE INTRO i haven't seen a single comment that has figured this out so i'll just tell you: the weird shadow at the left of 0:05 in the music video is a distorted stock video of a piano falling from the sky and breaking. you can hear it in the SFX too

Vane: one last thing i love el chavo del ocho. my parents are both from mexico, so i have very fond memories of watching the show with them as a kid. i wanted to put a little homage to it since it was such a nostalgic part of my childhood, and i wanted to do something that my parents would recognize. they got really excited when they heard it in the song which made me very happy :) also my mom’s favorite genre is cumbia, so the little cumbia percussion was for her. and also for Me i love cumbia. selena quintanilla FOREVER RAHHH!!!!!!!

Jamie: i had originally written a very long and scathing critique of nostalgia as a concept immediately after we released the song, intending to eventually put it in these very flavor foley files you're reading right now. looking back on it, i was maybe a bit too on my soapbox about politics in said critique, so i won't be sharing it here - those thoughts are probably better suited for a more sober context. even more than that, though… well, this is intended to be sympathetic, y'know? nostalgia isn't evil, per se. our pasts are a big part of us, our memories are flawed, and the grass always seems greener in our old pictures. like most things, though, too much of it can kill you.

…doesn't mean it can't be nice for a moment, every so often.

song art by abi

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