Hi, thanks so much for listening to this collection. As the description states, this is a compilation of old, hard to find, unfinished, et cetera, music I've written in the time I've been writing, from 2014 through now. Its name, "Connections and Feelings", is a lyric taken from the Popcatcher song, A Rough Draft (Copy). It just sort of felt right, given the song's title. I decided to break up some of the tracks with interludes like the one you're hearing now because without them, the lack of context would make this pretty indigestible, and the variation in quality would be disorienting. If you'd rather read along to my notes as you listen to this release, I've included them in text form in the "lyrics" section of each of these interlude tracks. And be sure to check the credits down below the track listing. Before I talk about the song you just heard and the batch of songs you're about to hear I wanted to give a brief overview of this collection as a whole. Essentially, it goes in reverse chronological order, but with some exceptions. Up next immediately are songs I wrote for a band I was in called Living Room Ghost, all but one of these haven't seen the light of day until now. The next are a sampling of the commissions I wrote as a secondary source of income over the course of a few years. Following that are songs I wrote for Youtube videos of mine. Note that these don't include many of the songs that play during the end card sequences, those are demos for future completed releases of mine. After that are the soundtracks to three games I composed for. Then, outtakes from my EP "Never The Same Again, Thank Goodness", which vary in completeness from "sketch" to "nearly completed". After that, my formerly offline debut EP, "Orange", as well as three early demos from before its conception. Lastly, a "lost EP" if you will, of material that was recorded by a friend, who helped out in many other areas of its development. This is a long compilation, I think the songs themselves clock in at over 2 hours, and these interludes are going to make that even longer. Because everything I release is pay what you want, I urge you to give this release a download, and to maybe, just, organize the songs you like and construct a more reasonable, concise playlist. Personally, I have a rough idea of how I'd present an album's worth of the material in here if I were to have done so, but I don't want to influence expectations much. I'd also recommend you take this in chunks. I cannot imagine listening to this entire thing in one sitting, and I'm familiar with these tracks. I feel like it'd be way too much to take in all at once. As for that first song you just heard, it was written in early 2018, but just never fit on any subsequent release despite being pretty finished when I went back in and gave it vocals in 2019 as I was writing for As Much As I Forget. It's been long enough now that I'm fairly certain continuing to try to retrofit it into releases will remain fruitless, although funnily enough it also doesn't really fit with any of the other sets of songs here. Technically it was written as I was writing the material that actually wound up on Never The Same, but the demos in that batch of songs are much older, and most of the B-sides from my subsequent material wound up getting repurposed or wasn't close enough to being finished to carve out a spot for them, so I couldn't put it there. I love this track though, I hadn't heard it very much since I finished it, and I'm impressed by how different it is from the material I was writing at the time. It's one of, like, three Twinkle Park songs with a verse-chorus structure, that's weird! The set of material you're about to hear is, as mentioned, from a band I formed after moving to southern california. I reached out to a craigslist ad and wound up meeting my primary co-songwriter for the project, Christian, who shared so many sensibilities and interests with me it was almost uncanny. So I guess I'm one of few people who can say in full sincerity I met one of my best friends and favorite people on craigslist. We wrote some songs, found a few other musicians in the area, rehearsed twice, quarantine hit, our drummer left, our bassist got busy with grad school, we cycled through about twelve names, but we still continued writing. Eventually, when I realized it was time to move out of the area, we decided to cut our losses and scrap the project, salvaging what songs we could for personal projects. While I took a few of the songs I wrote for Living Room Ghost and incorporated them into what will be my next release, the majority of them were left on the cutting room floor. These are the five songs I felt were worth assembling and releasing. The eagle-eyed among you may realize that one of these song titles is familiar, and yes, it was previously released as a demo. What you hear on this release is altered, although I don't know how noticeable all but one of the changes will be, and I suspect the one noticeable change will probably come as a disappointment to some and a massive relief to others, so I'm sorry, and also, you're welcome. I'll explain my decision on that and a bit more about our process after you've had a chance to hear these songs.

The first thing I need to address here is the vocals. Yeah, the original version of Cheap Booze had my voice on it. Technically, so does this version, along with that of my bandmate Christian, who also did the part of the second vocalist on Don't Come Around Here. So, yeah, there are still human vocals on that track, not quite so much as the vocal synth Eleanor Forte. Originally, all of these songs were supposed to have my voice on it, but, uh, I was literally learning to sing…by recording these songs. So it was extremely arduous, required a lot of frequent rerecording, and in the end the only vocal take I was truly happy with was the one on the Brave Little Abacus cover. Of all those songs, that's the one I'm happyist has a vocal I really love. It wouldn't have done the original justice without it. Listening back, it's hilarious how obvious my California accent is when I sing. The way I say the word "you" is just, like, ugh, you little valley girl you! But still, even after releasing the version of cheap booze with my vocals on it, I just couldn't enjoy the song with such a different performance on there than the one I heard in my head. You'll also notice the track "Toluca Lake" featured absolutely no vocals of any kind, and, yeah, I just hated every vocal melody and any and all lyrics I ever tried to fit it to. Which sucks, because I love how diverse that instrumental is–it has mandolin on it! Those songs aren't presented in the order they were written, but rather a rough track listing that I think flows decently. Like, that Brave Little Abacus track wasn't originally going to be on a full length, it was supposed to be the B-side to a single. If ever I were to describe a project of mine as having been stuck in development hell, it's the Living Room Ghost full length, no question, but that's not for lack of trying. You'd think Covid would've had something to do with that, and, ehhh, yeahhh, kinda? But Chris and I both worked at a rehearsal studio at the time, Stage One Studios in Orange County, shouts out to Rob, you're the only good boss I ever had. This meant we could go in late at night and record all we wanted in one of the rehearsal rooms. This also meant we were free to toil over this thing as much as we wanted, constantly tracking and re-tracking instruments, restructuring songs, fucking with the tracklist, cutting songs, adding songs back in, mashing song fragments together, reaching out to guest musicians, you name it. If you want an idea of how bad this got, The song you just heard, Some Blood, was originally four minutes, but I kept making it longer until it hit nearly fucking seven and a half. If you want another example, I wrote out sheet music for every single orchestral instrument on the record in hopes we could find musicians to record them proper. In the end, as far as the material you just heard goes, my friend William from the band Kara's Walk Home wound up contributing trumpet on Cheap Booze, and that was it. While it was an incredibly creatively rich time for me, it also meant this album was stuck on the same material that wasn't getting finished in the time it took us to finish newer, better material, and it just never came together. It always felt like, at any point we could have released something, there were always concessions being made. Still, it was, aside from being able to live with my wife and our cat for the first time, my one solace throughout my time living in that place I disliked as much as I felt like it disliked me. The next songs you're going to hear were originally written as commissions for various clients over the years. This acted as supplementary income as I was working two part-time jobs that themselves weren't making ends meet. I'll get into what these songs were written for after you've had a chance to hear them.

Alright so, that first track was written for my friend Neelan for his video on nightcore. I was tasked with writing an "original nightcore remix", which was a lot of fun. There's a pretty direct caramelldansen reference in there. Next was the outro music for the podcast Let's Fight a Boss. Rather than talk about the track itself, which was so much fun to write, I just want to say that this was the single most important commission I ever received. I was flattered to work on it because I'd loved that podcast for a long time, and John, Bryan and Niamh were lovely to work with, but the actual reason is that if I hadn't gotten that gig exactly when I did, I would have literally ran out of money, and not been able to pay rent. I was having a miserable time finding employment when I first moved to Orange County, and it was draining my savings account. Like, completely draining it. The day I got that commission was the day I got a call back from the coffee shop I'd wind up working at saying I got the job, so the money I received from this commission was what allowed me to coast just that bit longer from when I started that job to when I was given my first paycheck. Following that track was music I wrote for a piece of animation done for the webcomic, "Off The Table". Then, a song for a project my wife did back in animation school. The next three tracks are all podcast themes. The last three songs were all written for the YouTube channel Illymations, who I did audio for for a few years. She was always great to work with, and writing those tracks in the style of different game soundtracks was a blast. Technically, that last song was written a good while beforehand, and we retrofitted it into a video of hers. I miss doing commissions sometimes, it was always a lot of fun to be told "hey, I want a song in the style of this genre, go wild" and being able to realize those ideas. I sadly just don't have time anymore, even for the ones that seem really exciting or fun, because of YouTube, but honestly that's not a bad problem to have at all. So sorry if you've reached out about commissioning me, I promise I've had to turn everyone down. And speaking of the channel, here are some songs I wrote for my YouTube videos!

Not much to say on these because they kinda speak for themselves. I wanted to write something like a PS2-era Silent Hill track, so I did and found an excuse to put it in a video. The next one is a direct play on an Azumanga Daioh gag. After that was the 2000's R&B track for the Ookumo-chan Flashback video. As I recall I just kinda wanted to write something in that style, a running thread for sure. Writing songs for video is a great excuse to sorta fulfill part of what commissions were good for. I have a pretty consistent "style" or ethos or whatever for "core" songs of mine, so to speak, and I don't really want to have to commit to writing fully fledged songs that adhere to anything else just in order to find something worth releasing. Following that was a song I wrote for my video on Serial Experiments Lain. I wrote this because that song has like, two music tracks in total, and figured another song that aesthetically fit with it would probably be good to have around. The orgel is a sort of loose thematic thread in that game, so it felt right. I think I mentioned it in the video this next one appears in, but Daughters of Darkness has this insane, smoked out, feverish funk OST, and I wanted to see how close I could get to that style. Turns out I did okay cus a lot of folks in the comments didn't realize I wrote it. These last two tracks were just kinda written because I was playing around with my digital audio workspace while I took a break from videos at the end of 2021. I thought the ubiquity of Gymnopedie no.1 in game OSTs is really funny, so I wanted to try my hand at it, treating it as a sort of faux-right of passage, despite it not even being for a game. The next one was me finding a synth pad I liked the sound of in a sample pack and just kinda going on impulse from there. It was written in one sitting, and it definitely kinda sounds like that, but I don't foresee it getting put anywhere else, and I like it, so here it is. Even if it sounds like a bootleg version of the Zora's Lake theme from Ocarina of TIme. Next up are those game soundtracks.

The first five of those songs you just heard were all from the game Tales From Toppletown. These were the only songs I wrote for the project, with the rest being handled by a different composer. The full soundtrack is still available on the Pop Spirit bandcamp, but for the sake of completeness I wanted to put them here too. I'm still really proud of these songs, honestly, I got to play around with some composition techniques I don't really get to. After that are three songs written for a game jam game that isn't around anymore from 2019. Lastly, the final four songs are from a game I made all the way back in 2016, which, given that it's 6 years old, you cannot play it. I'm doing you a favor. I'm pretty impressed by this soundtrack despite being utterly embarrassed by the game itself, though, I think it's better than a lot of the music I was writing for my actual, main music project at the time. Not too much to say about these though, so onto the next batch: songs written for, and eventually scrapped from, my album Never The Same Again, Thank Goodness. this isn't presented in any sort of chronological order, just what felt right.

Yeah, we're kinda getting into the stinky stuff now. Never The Same Again was technically written over the course of three years, but the songs that actually made it onto that release were written in late 2017 and early 2018. I wrote like, thirty fucking songs for that EP, originally envisioning a full length, but it was, like my writing for Living Room Ghost, a process of simultaneous explosive creative energy and rapid improvement, so each time I'd write a song, I'd scrap an old one, and I eventually had to come to terms with the fact that I only liked four of these songs, four of the newest, and that's what became Never The Same. I remember there was a point while I was writing where I showed a demo to a friend of mine, and when it got to the chorus he was like, "this is the part in the commercial where the car drives at the camera and the narrator tells you what its horsepower is". Brutal feedback but he was so right. Which is the reason there aren't more of those in this release, they at most have, like, one good idea in a sea of utter garbage, and it'd bloat an already extremely bloated compilation to have a ton of fifteen second snippets. That first song has a brand new mix, I hadn't heard it in so long that when I did I was like, wait, this is fucking cranked, what the fuck? I knew I had the ability to mix it in a way that'd capture the energy I was going for, so I did. It was only ever performed live once, so like, seven people have ever heard it before now. This was the only mix of this batch I really touched with any depth. After that was Seafoam. I wrote this when I was listening to a lot of the calypso music my grandma and her brother would share back and forth with one another. Don't ask how that was the end product. It was supposed to get vocals eventually but a melody never came to me. I struggled a lot with writing lyrics at the time because I just kinda didn't know what to write about. You might recognize that, as well as the following tracks, from an older compilation record that's not around anymore. I realized this next one's original title, Electric Super Loving You was too similar to an indie game I hadn't heard of at the time. The working title was "Apple Soda", so I just went with that. Shouts out to Manzanita Sol. This song embarrasses me more than most because there's a riff in there that's like, almost exact to one that appears in the Emperor X song "Defiance". I swear, for all the deliberate compositional references I make, that one was completely unintentional. After that blunder is the song Coconut Soup, which was co-written by the co-founder of Pop Spirit, Tim Lindsay. I had a rough, rudimentary midi piano demo, and he really brought it to life. It was supposed to be an intro, but I liked it as an outro here. After that are three tracks, that are really more like four, but also kinda more like four, but like, a different four. I labeled two of them as "sketches" because they're not quite demos, they're very gestural. The first track of these three opens with an original stab at the verse of my song Legs. I'm gonna be honest, I like this more than the final version, because it sounds better to me faster. I know that's shallow, but Legs is a song I was never truly happy with, and part of that was loving so many of the individual ideas, just not how they came together. What follows is another section of Legs that I completely forgot wasn't originally written for legs. I left some sections from that scrapped song in after it that I thought were cool. I want to say that's a demo from 2016, so it was old by the time I decided repurpose it. Following that is an ancient Twinkle Park song that originally went under the name "Two Word Title". It was easily my most ambitious track up to that point, which is why it fuckin sucked. It took me a long time to learn how to make sudden tonal shifts in a song blend together okay. What you hear here isn't the full thing, it's just a few parts stitched together. Primarily, a guitar riff I always loved that I wound up repurposing for Probably Inevitable, and then a verse that would occasionally get stuck in my head that made it into Leash, albeit with altered lyrics. Honestly, I think that jump is the single greatest example of my growth as an artist. It's also got the greatest span between having an idea and implementing it in a finished song. The original was from 2016, and Leash was from 2021, so five whole years. Just a little math lesson for you. After that is an early version of Blood Fountain. Some of it is still really similar to the final version, just much less polished, and there's some stuff in there I forgot even was in there. Hearing that original verse with the extended melody and the wrong chords is so funny now. Rewriting that with the bitcrushed guitar and the slowed down breakbeat really feels in hindsight like the moment Twinkle Park became what it was. The only reason I still have a version this early is because it was unlisted on my soundcloud for a number of years, which I didn't even realize. I probably would've deleted it to save space a few years prior if I had. Next up is a set of three demos from 2014 and 2015, followed by my debut EP, Orange.

The three demos here technically predate Twinkle Park entirely. I wanted to write cutesy acoustic instrumental music back then. Yuck! I'm kidding, it's just hilarious how different what I make now is. "Settle" was the first thing I every recorded by myself. I used an ancient microphone I bought as a child to make Lets Plays with, and drum samples from animal crossing wild world, and one of those vintage consumer-grade casio keyboards. I like this thing, it's slinky and dinky in ways I think are charming. "And Two" was supposed to be the second track on an EP that never got made. It's old enough I don't even think I have the other songs anymore, but they're nothing special, I assure you. The third of the three demos is itself three demos that were written just a bit before I decided to make Twinkle Park. I don't remember their purpose, I was probably just writing for the sake of writing. I should write for the sake of writing more often. So, with these Orange tracks comes the origin story for Twinkle Park. They appear here in the order I wrote them, and they were the first three songs I ever wrote for the project. I was driving home from a show a band I was in at the time played, and it kinda hit me all at once, like, man, I really want to make electronic music. If the music I'm writing solo is acoustic-focused, I want to experiment with making something that's totally computer-centric, with electric guitars. I want to make shoegaze. I want to write songs with vocals and I want to use Vocaloid. And so, I did just that. I got home and I wrote Lester. And then I pirated Hatsune Miku, I had her sing the simplest vocal part in the world, and Twinkle Park was born. Not the name though, that had to come later. Twinkle Park has been a vocaloid project since day one, or more specifically a vocal synth project, since I've used Utau and now almost exclusively use Synth-V. I just love the tech so much, it's so fascinating and exciting to me. Both as an exploration of the sort of transcendent life a character has outside their context, like how certain personality traits are universally ascribed to them, although that's never been a facet of my music, and just, like, the simple fact that I can plug some lyrics and a melody into a piece of software and have the voice behind some of my favorite songs ever perform something I wrote. Also, plainly, it's really convenient, and the control over the nuances of a vocal track is something I'm not allowed anywhere else. It's freeing to not have to worry about actually singing something, but also not putting my words in another human being's mouth. Like, I don't wanna put that on someone else. Anyway, back to Orange. This will sound insane, because nobody was listening to my music to begin with, but I had actually intended to release it under a pseudonym and never attach myself to it directly. It was easily the most vulnerable set of songs I'd ever written, not just because it put a voice and words to the feelings I was imbuing into the music, but because I thought it was way too weird and rough around the edges and I didn't even know if it was any good in the first place, so I didn't think my friends would like it. That's why some of the titles on that original release were ironic and why they originally opened and closed with stupid in-joke samples. I decided to fix that and restore one of the titles to its original title, the one I used before I got self conscious about all of it. By the time I'd assembled a release though I realized I actually was kinda proud of it. And y'know, looking back, oh, jesus christ, seven years later, I am proud of it. When I wrote the last movement of Sweethearts, I couldn't believe my ears, like, shit, I wrote that. It was electrifying. It's hardly anything special now, but that repeating melody is still one of my favorite things I've written, in part for that reason. That's why it appears somewhere in every album I've ever written since. But because that record has been offline for so long, because I wasn't proud of it for so long, that reference was for me, and for me only, but I'm comfortable with letting other people in on it now. Alright. We're coming up on the end here, thanks for sticking it out. This last stretch of songs is a five track EP that predates Twinkle Park. They were based on demos I was writing around the time I wrote that demo, "And Two". Very loosely based, that is. Those demos were fucking horrible, but what you're about to hear sounds, well, really slick. That's because they were recorded, extremely generously, by a friend of mine over a long weekend, who wound up guiding the project and pushing it in directions I always wanted, but didn't know how to do. I learned so much from that experience, and while I can't remember why it never got released, watching someone's process for recording and expanding upon these very simple ideas I brought completely revolutionized my sort of "musical toolbelt", so to speak. I'd go on to use what I observed, or the versions I remembered, when writing parts for bands I was in. I'd eventually record for those bands, and I used more of what I observed during those sessions when doing so. I became the go-to audio engineer among my friends, and for a brief stint thought I'd be a producer first, solo artist second. I can safely say the way I create music is my own now, but at its core its an iterative amalgamation of traits made up from every single person I've ever worked on music with, and who has been generous enough to help me. It was all invaluable, and I'm really grateful for it. The last song of this batch, the sixth song, is actually the first completed song I ever had a hand in, which was also recorded and mixed by that same friend. It has vocals by Alyssa on it, and was our first time collaborating, just shortly after we had first started dating. There's still one more song after that, though, as you can see, but I'll get to that.

I just wanted to say thanks, really, to anyone who's ever taken the chance on listening to what I do. Whether or not they're listening to this, and to everyone who's ever helped me out. So, uh, thanks. I know that's brief, but, it's hard to put it in words. The next and final song is a cover of the Powapowa-P song "Strobe Light". I decided to close with it for similar reasons I opened with the first track. It never really had a home anywhere else. I recorded it in 2018, right before moving out of my hometown, played it live once, put it up on soundcloud for a bit, and now it's here. But where I like that first track a lot, I've never been very happy with this cover. Even when I released it. I want to say "I couldn't possibly be happy with a cover of one of my favorite songs", but I'm thrilled with how that Brave Little Abacus cover came together. I think, maybe part of it, is that it sort of proved to me that everything in the original operates in perfect sync. That's not to say it's uncoverable or anything, just that when I try to look at it at any distance, I always see it as its whole. Hopefully that makes sense. I took another stab at mixing it more to my liking and still didn't get there, but I know if I don't put it out and leave it out once and for all I'm going to continue toying with the idea of futzing with it more. I'm happy to get it off my mind. In general, this release has been a process of decluttering, and being comfortable sharing more than my very best, and now that it's all out I feel a tremendous weight off my shoulders. I feel like I can approach future projects without concern for how past material fits into it. I can just, like, I dunno, hang out with whatever comes next for me, when and how it comes to me. It rules. Thanks again.