You recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening yourself at Nu House Studios. What was that process like? What did you learn about your creative process while you were working on the album?

It was a very long and chaotic process. I think it served a bit as a counter to a lot of creative stuff I was working on especially because as a professional mix engineer, I kind of have to be the organized one in the room. I have to let someone’s creativity run wild and then I have to be like, “Ok, we need to bring it all together and reign it all in and create a finished product". A lot of that deliberate and organized energy was going there and I think that naturally led the process for this album to be very chaotic. I let myself run wild with it because I knew the only way that I would enjoy myself was if it didn’t feel like work; if it felt like raw, untamed creativity.

It was also a very stop-and-start process. We’ve talked about a lot of other things that I’ve been working on over the years between Nu House Studio and Dreamwell and A Constant Knowledge Of Death. All of those came first for the past few years, so it was always just squeezing bits of this album in when I could; when it felt right to and when I felt motivated to. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t forcing myself to try to work on this. I had to be like, “I can’t think about anything else but wanting to work on this right now”. A lot of that came on some of the days I’d be struggling more mentally to the point where it would be like, “I really can’t fathom having to do commission work for somebody today. I don’t wanna do a bad job at it. I’ll just put that energy toward this album instead, where I can channel it better”.

There was a lot of re-recording because things were done so far apart. The earliest stuff I did for this album was in 2021-2022. It got to the point where I had improved my process and my sound so many times that I would redo songs multiple times. That’s very counter to how I work with most of what I do. With doing commissions, I have to make sure not to second guess myself too much or completely rework things because it’s introducing chaos into it and I’m losing time that I don’t have for those sorts of things. That was the same thing with the Dreamwell album, In My Saddest Dreams, I Am Beside You, which was also a pretty straightforward process. This is the first album I’ve done in a very long time that has pretty much only been me. It was a creative representation of me without anybody else having major contributions on it.

I can only have my first solo album once. I am usually very much in favour of imperfection and just letting it be instead of doing something over and over again until I hit some impossible standard of perfection, but that was much harder on this album. There were multiple songs where I completely changed them multiple times. For some of them, I had the song title and where it was on the tracklist and then I completely scrapped the song and rewrote it. Some of that was pretty far into the process. [laughs]

What song did you have the most re-records of?

I had a demo version of “i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening” that very much sounded like bedroom slowcore and then I ended up adding a lot of heavier guitars with live drums. Then I went back in the direction of stripping things back and added electronic drums but a lot of it was not hitting as well. I ended up blending the two. The final version is very much driven by the live drums and the heavy guitars but there’s some electronic elements mixed in too, just a little more subtly than I had them. On that third version of it, I pretty much had distortion and bit-crushing on everything. [laughs] That was causing a lot of issues and I was getting stuck with the mix process so I ended up compromising on that a little.

“my fears have become fetishes” was one where I had a completely different type of song in mind - more of a metalcore / hardcore type song. I had a couple versions of that and each time I was like, “This song is pissing me off!” [laughs] It wasn’t objectively bad and people I was showing it to liked it but I think it reminded me too much of other stuff that I’d done in other bands. It was like, “Ok, I have one riff going into another riff and I’m gonna record that whole thing. Then I’m going to do some screams over it. Cool.”

The riff soup.

Yeah! I was seeking something more out of my songwriting at that point than riff soup. I’ve been in so many bands that are more or less heavy bands that have a pretty straightforward arrangement and process and I wanted to turn that on its head because I need novelty in my creative process to stay interested. [laughs] “my fears” was the one where finally, on the third or fourth try, I got it right. That was about three months before I finished the album and after I released the first single, “i am driving a car with a cute girl and pretending the world isn’t ending”. I released that single without having finished the album just because I was like, “It’s time to have something released for this band and I know I’ll have the album done eventually”. That’s kind of the problem with having done this as long as I have, I have a lot of faith in myself now and I put myself in increasingly treacherous scheduling situations. [laughs]

I had most of the album in some state of recorded and drafted but "my fears" was still pretty much not done at all and I kinda hated what I had. It was the day that I dropped “i am driving a car” and I was going on a walk with my roommates - as we call it “walkmaxxing” - to the pond near our house. One of them put on a Nightcore version of the Alvin and the Chipmunks’ version of “Call Me” by Blondie. [laughs] It just had this weird, warbly, drunken, psychedelic quality to it where it felt like being on a bender in a rainy city in some old-timey movie. I had all of the ideas in my head for the song while we were on the walk and I was like, “I need to get home and do this!” I wrote the whole thing - most of the lyrics included - in about 12 hours. Part of what I needed to be satisfied with these songs on the album wasn’t some objective measure of quality; it was more like I wasn’t going to be satisfied with a draft of a song unless it was so infectious to me that I couldn’t stop working on it. Otherwise, I would just toss a song out. I had to be obsessed over it instantly to keep it as a song on the album. I think that’s how I wrote most of the songs because I had that seed planted and either something happened with it right away or it didn’t.

It’s like allowing yourself to be the conduit for creativity.

I had been wanting to do a solo project for a while and I was busy with my other bands. James [Goldman of A Constant Knowledge of Death and Nu House Studios] had been working on the album for his solo project, Blade of Marrow, and I was like, “Oh that’s cool! I should do something like that too”. He was doing a similar thing of exploring a lot of different styles that didn’t really fit with any of the other bands he was in and letting it be a very personal thing. I started getting that in my head. In July 2021, before I quit and started working on the studio full time, I was driving to my goodbye lunch on the very last day of my old job and by the end of the drive, I had an outline of the album with the song titles and what genres they were. It was one of those lightning-striking moments. You spend a lot of your life consuming all this different media and as it simmers in your brain, you’re slowly becoming a vessel for creativity to strike. The way I see it is making yourself an ideal lightning rod for some source of inspiration that feels like it’s coming from outside of yourself. It’s otherworldly. It’s the Universe or God or whatever giving you a message that you have to translate into this form that’s made for humans to consume. It’s communicating this sort of divine energy.

The thing is that even when you have that lightning strike moment, it still might be four years before you figure out what’s right. Whenever I was working on the songs, I was trying to work from that same intuition of, “Does this feel right? Do I have that obsession over this or am I in my head about it and just going through the motions?” and finally, I got there. [laughs] I stuck to the outline I received that day in 2021 mostly, except for the part that “my fears have become fetishes” was supposed to be a very straightforward metalcore song. I was like, “That doesn’t work, I have a different vision. I guess I have to spit in the face of God sometimes”. So I was like, “I’m just going to use that as the first line on this album now”. [laughs]

That line really grabs you!

That’s what I wanted, to instantly pull the listener in.

Do you have something that helps you stay in tune with your intuition or with the Universe?

A lot of those things are activities that I need to do to maintain a baseline of sanity and mental health. I’ve been practicing yoga for about 3 full years now which is also about the same time I started rock climbing. The process of learning yoga and slow, deliberate movement with breathing allows me to get into that state where I’m out of my head and more in my intuition. I feel like I’m moving naturally and flowing. A lot of that translated into how I climbed rocks, so that is a meditative activity for me too. I’ve also just tried to take better care of myself. Since 2021 I’ve become mostly sober, not drinking or smoking. I’m trying to sleep more. I’m going to therapy and doing EMDR.

I want to be more of a consumer - I don’t mean that in a capitalistic way, I mean that I want to take in more art. For a lot of my life, I’ve kind of narrowed my range to writing that’s directly related to my craft like I’ll read mixing books and stuff. I’m slowly trying to just read more in general. It’s always a tough process with ADHD. [laughs] I’m trying to watch more movies, listen to all kinds of music, and just draw inspiration from anywhere; from the natural world, from my experiences. Even if there’s no immediate reason why something is useful to me, it’s useful because it’s stirring up emotions which are the actual important part of creation. I’m not just regurgitating something I heard from someone else.

A lot of learning mindfulness is being able to observe how I’m feeling about something in the moment honestly and not ignoring my feelings. When I’m working on music, I’m like, “How do I honestly feel about this?” because there’s so many potential sources of bias. I could be doubting myself for certain reasons or I could be wanting to believe that what I’m making is good. “Good” is such an unsatisfying word. I could write any sort of anything and have it be “good” enough because it’s fairly easy to create acceptable music. I could write an album like that in probably a day at this point.

I was watching a whole bunch of catatonicyouths’ videos the other day. Sometimes I doubt if my music is cringe or not and I’m like, “I don’t even know how to construct these songs. How would I go about making any of these songs?” I don’t know if I could because I’m too in it to create a song that is that removed from what is considered acceptable that it’s actually a train wreck. I could make a ton of really mediocre, boring music but I don’t know how I would go about creating something that’s truly horrific. I was using that as a creative concept like, “What if I was to intentionally make an album that’s horrific to a meme level? What would be the process of that?” [laughs]

You’d have to have so many weird samples.

Yeah, I was thinking it would be a really fun album to make. At the same time, I was multitasking five things and I was also listening to Garden of Delete by Oneohtrix Point Never which has a lot of sampling. I was like, “I should make an album that’s like this but it just samples those songs!” [laughs] I know I’m here to talk about the first ameokama album, but I’m actually going to leak the second one.

If you think this one’s chaotic, just wait.

[laughter]

The brain rot is contagious.

The brain rot is what makes life worth living.

[Chaos ensues]

Going back to “my fears”, you have the line, “I tore apart my skin and set her free” unleashing what I saw you refer to as the Screaming Goddess. What was the process of bringing her to life like?

At one point, I interpreted that process as letting myself transition but I realized it’s so much more than that. I think there’s a lot of that in this album where what I’m dealing with is informed by the process of transitioning but the real depth to it happens with the self-discovery that happened after that initial process of letting myself transition. I never wanted to write an album that was like, “This is about transitioning". That line is referencing is a time around 2020 during the initial COVID quarantine when I was going through that huge existential crisis that a lot of people were going through. That’s when I was doing a lot of heavy meditation because I didn’t have a lot of other things to do. A lot of that is not trying to find a message or a solution or anything but just letting your thoughts arise. That particular day it felt like the only thing that was arising was blood-curdling screaming in my head. I was like, “What does this mean? What’s going on?” A couple years before that I read this book called Inner Guide Meditation which was based a lot around Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes and the different universal energies that are repressed and expressed within each of us. A lot of those are represented by stuff in the tarot cards or in astrology. My opinion is that those are just manifestations of things that are repressed and expressed within us and we project those things onto the cards when we look at them and indirectly tell ourselves what we need to hear.

After reading that and having that moment, one of my ideas was that a lot of those archetypes have a kind of evil energy when they’re repressed inside of you. They’re misbehaving because you’re not honouring them. When you let them be expressed they can come out in positive and productive ways. I was latching onto the High Priestess card when I was going through this and seeing that as the energy that needed to be expressed. If you Google that card, the first things that come up are mystery, intuition, and the subconscious mind. That’s what I was going through with the creative process and letting it be intuitive. I realized that what I was representing with the High Priestess was not only transitioning and allowing myself to be feminine but also engaging in types of activities where I could allow myself to enter this trance-like state, operate intuitively, and almost be feral in a way. [laughs] A lot of that was performing but also engaging in kink or writing or even something like rock climbing. Some days I feel like I’m climbing a demon. I feel like I’m defying physics in an evil way - not in an evil evil way but in a hot demon girl way. All these activities aren’t causing harm but they’re expressing intensity and movement and sexuality. But in the repressed state, it felt like I was going crazy and there was an evil screaming demon in my head.

All that sounds really insane to talk about. More recently I started doing internal family systems through my therapist and a lot of it was the same idea like, “You have the inner child and you have the wounded self”. You have all these parts of yourself that you have to honour and dialogue with. I was like, “This is basically the same thing! But maybe there’s less entities”. [laughs] I feel like I’m doing the same thing with the ultimate goal of operating from my intuition rather than from past pain and trauma. And all that is a long-winded way of saying what the first song on the album’s about too.

To keep on “my fears” just a little bit longer, you have a line that references David Wojnarowicz’s art piece “Untitled (Between C & D)”. What does this art piece mean to you and why did you decide to reference it in the song?

A friend had posted that specific piece on Instagram and it was so powerful to me. I was just like, “Who is this?” We’re exposed to so much outrage and especially as a queer person, political and physical violence against queer people awakens something in you. The other thing I like about it is it’s referencing how everyone else is living in this kind of bubble. In general straight, cis people live within their safe vision of what the world is and by doing so they’re able to ignore the suffering of repressed minorities. This piece by Wojnarowicz is trying to willfully force these people in their bubble to understand what it’s like to suffer as a queer person, “You can’t turn a blind eye. You will know the pain that I have to endure that is inflicted by or condoned by the power structures”. The last minute of that song is invoking that with, “You will taste my suffering” and “I will welcome you to your bad dream” which is quoted from that piece.

There are some forms of violence that come from being traumatized and from repressing yourself. In fact, I’d say most bigotry is coming from that place of some form of repression because there’s no other reason than repression to be angry at people who are different than you. The violence that’s coming from the repressed is coming from that state of intuition and reaching beyond the rational that I’m channeling in this song. If you look at things rationally, we’re fucked. But we’re trying to get into a state where despite everything, we’re going to fight against this and do something improbable without being scared of the consequences. As the world gets more and more fascist, the consequences of fighting back get worse and worse, so it’s almost like you have to be in this state to take any sort of action. One of my hopes with this song is that it subconsciously steers people toward that mentality. A lot of activist music is stating facts and throwing slogans out there and I wanted to create a song that’s almost hypnotizing people into a certain mental state. [laughs] Like when you hear a really emotionally heavy song or emotionally heavy music and you’re like, “I wanna break things and fight people!” but through different means.

I’m currently part way through reading Close to the Knives which is a book by Wojnarowicz. It’s a collection of stories. He’ll drop lines like, “Hell is a place on earth but Heaven is a place in your head”. It reminds me of one of the interludes on Sunbather where the preacher is talking. I think that’s why I’ve really gravitated towards Wojnarowicz’s writing, because some of it is so bleak but it’s interspersed with gay yearning. There’s a mix of, “Life is hell, but in my head I’m still dreaming of love and a better life”. I really like that contrast.

I’ve spent so much of my time out as a queer person being stuck in the internet brain rot and it’s really nice to read writing by queer authors who didn’t have access to that. Their thoughts aren’t being condensed into what’s going to get a lot of retweets on Twitter. I feel like it gives a greater amount of depth to how they talk about their lives and makes you feel a little less lonely because it’s not like, “I’m the only one who has ever felt anything this deeply” or something. [laughs]

It also gives some amount of hope. Queer people back then were also facing struggles that were often insurmountable to a lot of them and there’s still queer people today. Even if a lot of us don’t make it out, a part of us will live on and be able to be inspiring to another generation of queer people. I want to create something with more of that in mind. Not as much, “What will be popular right now?” but, “What can I create that will have a lasting impact?” I think queer literature from other generations is a good place to look for that inspiration.

“gila river” references the Japanese-American internment camp in Arizona and has the line, “I have a feeling I will die as my uncle was born”. What’s the story behind that song?

I am half Japanese on my mom’s side. When the US joined World War II in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was an executive order by President Roosevelt to remove all Japanese-Americans from the coastlines under the pretext, “They’re going to be loyal to the Emperor of Japan before they’re loyal to the US, so all of them are potential subversives and enemies”. All Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were brought to internment camps that were more inland; a lot of them were in the deserts of Arizona and California away from the coasts. That included my grandparents on my mom’s side. My uncle was born in the concentration camp in Gila River which is near Phoenix. That’s where my family members were detained. A lot of the feelings that were going into writing this album was the sense as a trans person of having no future; of looking at the political trajectory and being like, “I’m going to be put in a camp”. A lot of the motivation to finish this album revolved around finishing it before this new administration - that has already been talking a lot about what they want to do to trans people - takes office.

“gila river” was the first song I wrote on this album. I started at the end and worked backwards. I actually kind of liked writing it that way where I knew how it was going to end. I mostly improvised that song and recorded the spoken word on my phone in the garage at my parent’s house. Then I was like, “Ok, everything else on the album has to live up to that ending”. [laughs]

A lot of this album was meant to be self-exploration and starting at that point of origin like, “How has my family’s history shaped me?” I believe there is a lot of generational trauma because when people were moved to the internment camps, they didn’t have time to get their affairs in order. People lost their businesses and a lot of them lost their homes, especially if they were renting. They’d have to take their stuff to other people’s houses and store it. They’d lose their jobs. There was a ripple effect of poverty when Japanese-Americans were released from those camps, not to mention the terrible conditions at those camps that many didn’t survive. A lot of them were living in shacks in the desert with harsh summers and harsh winters. Even after the war, they were still fighting poverty. My mom’s generation was born into that poverty. I think there’s a sense that if you don’t do everything right in your life then horrible things will happen which comes from that trauma that every Japanese-American had to go through. From there, I was working my way backwards through the rest of my life and sorting through the rest of the ripple effect.

There’s lots of references to Japanese mythology on the album. Where did these myths factor into your path of self-discovery?

For a lot of my life, I felt like I’ve had a difficult relationship with being able to claim being Japanese at all. I remember in middle school just trying to gain acceptance among my peers. A lot of the stereotyping of the Asian kids was that they were nerdy and a lot of the white kids liked the cool stuff and listened to the cool music. I felt like I had to reject my Japaneseness to fit in with them and be treated as “cool” but at the same time I had to let them poke fun at it and make racist jokes about it like, “It’s ok, we’re just being friends and you’re not really Japanese anyway”. There was always that strained relationship of, “You’re different but it doesn’t really count”. I also felt like I wasn’t Japanese enough to be able to claim it but I’m half Japanese. I would never say that to any mixed race person who is in that position. Any time someone is making that commentary, it’s coming from a place of racism anyway. There’s no reason for me to not be able to explore that more and embrace that more and be in touch with that more. So a lot of the exploration of Japanese themes was to try to allow myself to be Japanese; to let myself express that.

That’s where the name “ameokama” comes from. It comes from “Ameonna” who is the Japanese rain yōkai. There are a couple songs on the album that are related to different yōkai, which are Japanese monsters and demons and gods and goddesses. Originally the band name was supposed to be “ameonna”. I made the Bandcamp for it in 2022 to stake my claim because I very thoroughly checked and no one had the name. Then in 2023, this deathcore band started using it. I don’t think there’s any Japanese people in that band and I think it’s all cis dudes too so it was like, “How dare you use this name of this goddess?!” I mean, I’m probably just projecting this sapphic energy. [laughs] Then I had to go back to the drawing board. I changed it to “ameokama” with “okama” being a derogatory name for a trans woman or a gay man, like calling someone a crossdresser - it’s basically a slur in Japan. Just changing that up a little bit like, "No band of straight cis guys is going to call themselves this”. [laughs]

Those themes are most present in the title track, “i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening” which came from a poem I found about Ameonna. One of the things I like about her as a figure and one of the things I like about reading these stories is that they come from so many different sources so there’s a lot of inconsistency and a lot of metaphor. “Ameonna” is also used to refer to someone who’s bad luck in Japan, like every time they go somewhere it rains or something bad happens because Ameonna brings rain wherever she goes. Then there’s a sense that she’s evil because she’s praying on people and basically turning them like a vampire into more ameonna. But she’s necessary because she brings rain and prosperity through that rain.

The other song that draws on those themes heavily is “izanami” who is the goddess of death in Japan. That song was actually one I wrote a really long time ago. I wrote it in 2015 originally as a Vivid Illusion song and I was like, “It doesn’t fit this band at all”. Then we were going to make it an ACKOD song for an earlier version of what became our Appendix album but that version of that album never happened. Around the time I was making the second Nu House compilation, I decided to make it into an ameokama song and do the vocals myself. That was actually the one song I released as ameonna. Originally when I wrote that song, I wanted it to be about the story of Orpheus saving his wife from the underworld and the voice that causes him to look back and lose her forever as kind of an analogy for depression and ideation. When I came back to the song, I was reading about the stories of the yōkai and when I came across Izanami I was like, “This is literally that same story but it’s way more metal!” [laughs]

Izanami and Izanagi are the goddess and god of life and creation. Izanami dies during childbirth and she eats the fruit of the underworld which means that she can never return to earth. The fruit causes her to rot and become full of maggots and the maggots eat her eyes. Izanagi goes to save her, shines a light on her, and is like, “OH wait… no, I’m good. She’s full of maggots and gross and rotting. I don’t like her anymore”. Izanami is so mad about the rejection that she invents the concept of the death cycle. Izanami says she’ll kill 1000 people a day because of her rejection and Izanagi will give birth to more than that. That’s basically the explanation for the cycle of natural life and death. I just had this fascination with it. Sometimes when you feel rejected and you’re in your thoughts, you’re like, “I’m so evil” but you can never be as evil as this goddess who was so mad about being rejected that she invented death. [laughs]

Another part of the Izanami story - and I wouldn’t call it a fun part of the story - is that in order to meet her quotas, she tries to convince people to kill themselves. So basically the entire song is her coming to my room from a young age and talking to me and whispering like she’s grooming me to take me to the underworld someday. She comes back and visits more often and is more convincing. There’s this mutual relationship where I’m getting that fix of temptation where it’s like, “Ok, I thought about this and actually I wanna live”. I’m getting that thrill and she knows that she’s getting closer and closer to having me forever; of getting me to eat the fruit of the underworld that will keep me from being able to come back.

“izanami” is a real gut punch.

It’s hard to say this about any song but that’s the way that song feels to me still. I wanted that ending to feel like I’m being punched in the stomach.

In your video for “i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening” you lick your hand and rain comes down like in the Ameonna story.

When Ameonna goes places she’ll lick her hand and that will summon the rain. I wanted to reference that in the video. Between guitar and rock climbing, I never get to wear fake nails. I was like, “This scene is so important in the video that I need to be wearing big nails! It is essential to this or it’s not gonna hit”. That was the only way I could imagine it. I put on the nails right before I shot that scene and then I had to chop them all off the next day to rock climb and one of them flew off while I was climbing. [laughs] A lot of this project has been getting to be really annoying about the attention to detail on the visual side. I really wanted to make the videos, the album artwork, and all the pictures tied in with each other and have a ton of attention paid to those details.

That’s led me to learning more about video as an artistic medium. I’ve been trying to get more into watching music videos from that perspective, studying what’s happening and learning how to communicate using videos. In the process I reached out to my friend Daniel Speer - who releases music as Arón Speer - and he taught me a lot about video. He shot the video for “phantom cock”. The video for “i am driving a car” was all shot by my roommate, Mara, and edited by myself. Mara has a huge list of movies that we’ve been slowly trudging our way through. My level of commitment to the bit is trying to educate myself about this entirely new medium and learning how to edit videos so I can better creatively direct a music video even if I’m not the one shooting or editing it.

We shot the “i will be clouds” video entirely with a green screen. There’s a video up on Instagram  where Will [Hall] shows the green screen side-by-side with the finished version. It was definitely a daunting task because we were like, “What do we want in the background?” I did an entire mock-up of both halves of the video with what I wanted. I was like, “Do this but better. Do this like you are much more skilled than I am, which you are”. [laughs] I did a mock up of the video with clips that I screen captured and did a rough green screen and colour graded it on my own just to be like, “This is this vibe. I know this isn’t great but something like this”. I even shot some stuff to use as background videos like I dropped the fake cherry blossoms in front of my green screen but it was really hard to drop them at a consistent speed and they didn’t fall as fast as I wanted. I took another video filling up the tub and lighting little tea candles and putting them in the tub except they ended up all floating to one side. [laughs] I’m not sure if he actually used them because I learned that it’s actually really hard to shoot those things and make them look good. He might’ve just found ones that worked better. I was really committed to getting the setting to come across in that video.

The outfits are all real and I constructed them on my own. A few years ago I had just done my hair turquoise and I knew I wanted to do the photoshoot that ended up becoming the album art so I looked for a kimono that had turquoise and pink on it. I bought that one in Little Tokyo near the end of 2021 and used that for the photos. That kind of set the colour scheme for the album. When I was doing this video, I decided to go the extra step and I got an authentic vintage obi sash from Etsy. The sandals and socks are both what would be worn and I got some of the head pieces. I also did all of my own makeup for that. I was trying to control all of the visual aspects as much as I could to try and create something. That video encapsulates the visual universe for the album, all the themes, all the colours. I wanted it to be all in one place there.

It looks so cool near the end of the video when the paint is dripping on the parasol and it mimics your eye make-up!

We didn’t end up editing it this way because the full paint looked cool, but we did separate takes with more and more of the eyeliner to make it look like it was slowly dripping. The takes with the most makeup ended up looking the coolest so we ended up going with those. The idea was to show it dripping off of my face and falling onto the umbrella. I think Will still has the umbrella because I was like, “I can’t take this home, it’s going to get paint all over my car”. [laughs] There was a lot of green screening in that video but there was also a lot of putting together the outfit and the makeup and shooting the paint scene.

The “i am driving a car” video has all sorts of different things going on, like the calendar at the end and the chupped cereal.

I appreciate that you found all the little details I had in that because I wanted to hide little bits in there. [laughs] Me and Mara were having a lot of fun workshopping those. We were like, “We don’t want to have any actual brands represented in this so what do we do?” One of the most important things I learned from talking to Daniel and from working on other creative endeavours was how important it is to be very clear about the vision so you can say what it is in a couple lines but also working in a lot of little details that go toward the vision. The way I described the “i am driving a car” video was, “Say you have those candid music videos of bands hanging out with their friends and having a really good time, this is going to be the opposite of that”. [laughs] This is all the miserable behind the scenes stuff. Every miserable step of what goes into creating this that isn’t shown in those videos. The opposite of showing the highlights of their life. [laughs]

All the, “Oh, I have to get dressed now and set up the pedal board”.

Yeah! Just trying to capture how much of my life since doing music and freelancing full-time has been solitary and isolated. Sure, you go on tour and everyone sees you and you see all your friends for a week but that’s not counting all the time you’re doing mundane tasks in your house and not leaving for a long period of time. That’s the majority of the work that happens.

Then the day comes where you’re like, “I haven’t been out of the house in two weeks”.

Maybe it’s just how I’ve gone about this, but a lot of being an artist feels very isolating. So much of what I have to do to prepare an album or even to prepare a tour is sitting around and being on a computer and doing busywork that isn’t glorious or interesting in any way. A lot of artists will put on this persona of having a really fulfilling and socially connected life and a lot of what I wanted to portray with ameokama - and with the visuals I’m putting out - is isolation and alienation.

With those two videos, the people I was working with obviously did a great job, but I think they were pushing, “What if there was another person in this video?” and I was like, “No, this has to be me because I want it to feel lonely”. Even if someone’s behind the scenes doing things to make the video happen, I want the cuts to all feel very isolated and lonely even to the point where I was playing the two different personas in “i will be clouds”. When she licks her hand and draws forth the rain it’s also like flipping that switch and becoming the screaming demon woman from that meditation session.

Do you have a favourite little detail that you were able to work into either video?

I did spend a lot of time putting together that calendar. One fun thing about that was that I actually put it on my own Gmail account and I was like, “I don’t want to delete it now!” I set all of it to have notifications and I didn’t turn them off, so there was this week in October where I was getting notifications like, “Reminder: ideation”. Despite all of the notifications in my calendar for doomscrolling and stuff, I think I had a good week all things considered. [laughs]

In the choruses for “i am driving a car” there are green screen bits where I’m playing guitar and there’s a moving background. We actually got in my car around sunset, Mara pointed the camera out my back window, and I just drove around. All of that was actual footage that we took and put in the background. We wanted it to feel more personal and have it be places we were familiar with and connected to, not just a stock video of someone in a car. [laughs] I wanted that sitcom energy where they’re definitely sitting in a car that isn’t moving and they swap the background out.

What went into making your video for “phantom cock”?

I had been thinking of also self-producing it and then a month or two ago Daniel was like, “Hey, let’s make a music video while you’re in town!” I was like, “Well, actually I have this one in mind!” [laughs] I did a similar thing where I wrote up all my ideas for it and he did a passthrough and turned that into an actual shot list like, “I want this here and this here”.

The song is about a girl who surgically replaces every part of her body with cosmetically enhanced features except for her dick, which she keeps. I came up with the title back in 2021 which was very early in transitioning, with the idea of someone having a phantom limb. So it’s like, someone gets bottom surgery and they have a phantom cock. I felt like my transition went very differently and I was like, “Actually, the parts I want to replace are every other part of me. Now that I feel feminine, I’m becoming brain wormed by all the expectations for how women are supposed to look and now I’ve developed this obsession with seeing different people and wanting to be them and thinking that being them will fix me”. The video is basically that. We were shooting a bunch of scenes where I’m being marked with different surgical lines and notes related to various insecurities. Then there’s the final form. I become too powerful and the surgeons have to kill me. [laughs]

There’s a lot of detail work in that one too. I’d been talking to Daniel a lot about movies. He was really excited that I was getting into learning more about shooting video and photo because he had a similar path where he was primarily a musician and went into freelancing but now he mostly does freelance video work. His journey took him into needing to do visual stuff for his music and eventually into doing a lot of visual work in general. He was like, “Oh, you’re going down the same dark path as I did! You’re going to be buying all these new cameras and stuff”. [laughs] I was telling him about watching some horror movies and he was like, “You need to watch Possessor!” I was like, “I can’t find it anywhere and I don’t want to buy it” so he mailed me the DVD and we watched it. I was like, “You’re right, now I have a bunch of new ideas for this music video!” [laughs] There’s so much eye candy in how the shots were staged and I was like, “This is just a beautifully shot and coloured scene that is very communicative”. How they colour-graded it was very intentional for what they were trying to portray.

A lot of how they executed the effects in the movie was with pretty simple solutions and with a fairly low budget. I don’t have a label right now and even if I did they’d be like, “Here’s a couple hundred bucks, have fun”. We don’t have budgets for building huge set pieces or anything and everything needs to be executed in pretty simple ways. With this video it was like, “This needs to feel visceral and kind of gory and physical” but there’s only so many ways to get that across. We weren’t going to have someone who was going to do really intricate physical gore so we needed to work our way around that. One of the decisions we made was using green florescent alien blood instead of red blood to go with the colour scheme I’d already chosen and also to communicate alienation. It was made out of food colouring, glow powder, and corn syrup. Then we did things like dripping it from off scene or spraying it onto people from off scene or having me spit it out so all the actual skin breaking and actual gore would be out of the scene but it’s communicating it with a low-budget solution. [laughs]

I think a really fun part of working with video is, “How do I communicate this in the most efficient, low resources sort of way? Instead of dropping a lot of money on something crazy or completely CGI-ing it”. The main effects that happen in the “phantom cock” video are the mp3-style, video compression artifact glitching. There’s this free mp3 Codec distortion plug-in that I’m using on the vocals in the glitchy parts in the song.

The song is very dance-y.

One fun part of Aki Lore is that I went to University of Miami from 2010-2015 which was peak EDM brostep era and I definitely got into that sort of music. I went to Bassnecter and Kill The Noise and I went to Ultra Music Festival in 2013. There was a period of time where we were trying to make this djent-step band. Which at the time, everyone was like, “What the fuck are you doing? This sucks!” [laughs] It did suck but it’s much more popularized now for modern metal artists to be basically making EDM metal like Poppy and Bad Omens and stuff like that. I learned some of the production techniques from that because, obviously, I wanted to be a fucking brostep DJ at one point. Luckily, I never got that far. [laughs] Then I moved to Boston and it was like, “This shit isn’t cool anymore. I need to be a hipster”. [laughs] I feel like a lot of that music is coming back - not in that form, but a lot of cybergrind artists are taking those same sounds and just fucking them up more and making them gayer. So a lot of those people who were into Skrillex in 2010 transitioned and now have their trans cybergrind projects. [laughs]

That type of music has been kind of dormant for me because I’ve been so deep in the DIY and screamo scenes. I’ve been so busy with guitar music that I haven’t gotten a chance to work on that much electronic stuff. I got to do some fun production on some of the ACKOD interludes, but it has been so long since I was making a full-on electronic song.

How has it felt returning to it?

It felt surprisingly intuitive. There’s so many directions that I could go with that. A lot of the more maximalist stuff has like a billion different drum samples and fills which overwhelms me, so when I’m making music like that I need to do less. Less is more and it comes out sounding maximalist. I had a very concise set of samples and if I wanted them to be different, I would process them with plugins because that’s a language I understand. I fucking hate software synths. They’re just overwhelming to me. [laughs] Too many options like, “Which synth do I choose?” There’s a billion parameters too. All of them are abstracted from what they actually do because they need to convince the user that they’re doing something really magical and unique but it’s just a compressor or distortion or something. It won’t just tell me that, so that really pisses me off. Or they try to make it so that you can only use pre-sets and that makes it a nightmare to me. I never want to use any of the built in effects in a software synth anyway.

I have an MS-20 monophonic analog synth and whenever I need to make an electronic bass patch, I’ll just use that. I actually used that a couple times on this album; one was that main driving bassline on “phantom cock”. It sounded pretty basic but then I ran it through a noise gate and like 10 distortions. Then it just got more and more deranged. [laughs] But it started as a very basic monophonic analog synth. I think it was to the point where I played one note and then instead of playing more notes, I pitch shifted that note because I was like, “I don’t want to play another note, I’m just gonna work with this one”. It was like I sampled the analog synth and turned it into a digital patch. [laughs] I was doing a lot of steps to make me not hate the process.

The other place I used the MS-20 was the intro to the title track, “i will be clouds”, where there’s just the vocals and that bass synth. When I was working on that song, I basically wanted to make something that sounded like a lot of what’s on Double Negative by Low. That is one of my all time favourite albums and one of my biggest production influences. So brostep and Low and Black Dresses, that’s how I learned how to make electronic music. [laughs]

I used it on “cluster B” also. The bass drone on there was the same synth. I looped that in Ableton and improvised all the noise over it. So it actually shows up quite a few places on the album.

“Cluster B” sounds so cool.

I improvised a few noise layers on that one. A lot of the other sounds on there were recorded by Sylvia Haynes, who I’ve worked with on a lot of mixes and masters. She added string bass and saxophone on the last few songs on the album; “cluster B”, “i will be clouds”, and “gila river”. The first half of “i will be clouds” is the MS-20 bassline and the second half is string bass. There’s actually no electric bass on that song. That gives it another unique touch. She also did some harmonics on the bass in the outro for “i will be clouds” and that’s also a nice texture.

I believe there were only three musical contributors. Two of them were drummers and then Sylvia with the bass and saxophone. James did a couple of the songs and Avery from Mud Whale did a couple of the songs too. She did “izanami” which was crazy. It took us 10 hours to record the drum parts for that song. We were kind of brainstorming them as we wrote and there were multiple layers of drums in some places. My session for that song was kind of a nightmare and some stuff wasn’t lined up with tempo so I was trying to fix the song while we were recording. [laughs] The other one she did drums on was “i will be clouds”.

Another fun thing that happened was I set the release date for this album originally to be in March 2025 and then because I was going on tour for most of December with Dreamwell, I was like, “Well, I need to finish this album in November”. So I took all of that month to finish everything up which included doing multiple of the tracks on drums. Avery was on her way out to do drums for “my fears”, “phantom cock”, and “cluster B”. She was literally in the car on her way and James messaged our house’s group chat like, “I just tested positive for COVID”. Then I’m like, “Oh shit!” I was at Target and I tested in the parking lot because I was like, “I need to tell Avery if I’m positive”. I had felt kinda sick the last week but this was a week later. I took the test and I was like, “Oh, I had COVID!” I felt fine at this point and I had to text her and be like, “Hey, I guess you can’t do this this weekend”. My deadline was so tight that we couldn’t really reschedule.

I was quarantining in the basement trying to play drums on “my fears” and I think James could hear me upstairs like, “This bitch is struggling”. [laughs] I can do a lot of things but I can’t play drums, not well at least. Doing multiple things at once is hard for me; I can barely do vocals and play guitar at the same time. He was a couple days into quarantining and took a test and he was negative so he was like, “Do you want me to do these drums? I’ll wear a mask and do them”. [laughs] He just went down there and did it.

The other funny part of that is that I was only working on the first part of the song which is kinda jazzy and he’s like, “Yeah, I can just do this really quick for you” and I’m like, “Ok, do you wanna listen to the whole song before you commit to this?” He’s like, “No, I’ll be fine”. Then after doing the first half I was like, “Yeah, there’s blasts and weird rhythms” and he was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that. I don’t think I would’ve done this if I had’ve realized the song was this hard because I’m tired from having COVID a week ago and recording that song”. [laughs] The process of trying to finish the last 30-40% of the album in that last month was very chaotic.

Which part of i will be clouds in the morning and rain in the evening are you proudest of?

In my opinion, I feel like most things on the album are better than most things I’ve done outside of the album. I think one song where I hear it I’m like, “Holy shit, how did that happen??” is “izanami”. It feels like the climax of the album and it has a little bit of everything. But really I’m pretty proud of the album. [laughs] I feel like I really did compose it as an album.

The way everything flows into each other is seamless.

That’s something I’ve always really liked to do and something that I pushed for with both the ACKOD albums and the Dreamwell albums. It probably is somewhat of an identifying sound for something I’m working on. So I was like, “I’ve gotta do that on this one too”. When I was working on it at first I was like, “How the fuck am I going to make these songs flow together?” With “my fears” into “phantom cock” especially I was like, “Uhhh these songs are really different!”. [laughs] For that one I was like, “Fuck a held out song ending on the last chord, that’s too normal! I’m just going to end the song with a noise wall instead”.

Do you have any plans to take ameokama on the road?

Yes, nothing concrete right now but my plan is that I want to. It’s been hard to plan too much with working on the album and everything else going on. Now that I have a slightly smaller amount of commitments, it’s something that I can start thinking about. It’s definitely something that I wanna do. I have a few people that are interested in doing that with me. It’s going to take a lot of preparation though because it’s going to be a lot different than other bands I’ve played with live. I’m absolutely going to need click tracks and backing tracks and in-ear monitors for it to work. [laughs] It’s going to be a whole new setup. I’m probably going to mix in some amount of digital amplification like having a Quad Cortex for some of the sounds and not just analog amps.

It’ll be different because I’ll be doing lead vocals for the first time and singing for the first time. A lot of me learning to do vocals has revolved around the studio which allows a lot of imperfection and allows me to work on skills like working on my delivery in short amounts and punching in a lot. It hasn’t forced me to work on endurance or consistency so I’m going to need to practise a lot to get myself into shape to even be able to perform these songs. I don’t really wanna play much guitar live because I want to be a vocalist. I think handing off the guitar parts is going to take a lot of trust and a lot of me probably being really annoying to somebody about it like, “Actually I play the part like this. I’ll show you and you have to play it exactly like that but I don’t wanna play it”. [laughs] There’s going to be a lot that goes into it.

I have no idea how listened to this album is going to be. It’s at the stage with the band where it’s a complete mystery. It’s like, “Am I going to go on a little DIY tour or will it be something bigger than that?” I kind of want to wait and see for the album to come out before I even start booking something because it could go any way and that might change how I approach it. I have a big list of people and groups in a lot of different cities that I want to play with with ameokama. I’m actively starting to plan a record release show in Boston but even then that would be a few months after it comes out because it’s going to be so much prep. I’m kinda scared of it because it’s so different but I feel like if it wasn’t a little scary and uncertain it would be boring because playing shows stops being as fun to me if I’m just going through the motions.

I think there’s also going to be some shows where I do solo sets and I might not play much of the music on the album. I might just do noise sets and ambient sets. Even when I have a backing band, I don’t think they will necessarily be in the same city so some of the stuff I do locally might just be solo sets just because it’s less coordination and more I get to fuck around.

Have that creative space.

Yeah, and it can be a unique experience too like, “Who knows what you’re about to see? I don’t know”.

Do you have anything that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?

The album’s cool, it’s coming out on February 7, and I worked real hard on it. [laughs] I’ll play live eventually. It’s got a lot of lore. [laughs]

That’s how you tell if an album’s good, if the lore like a Scooby Doo sandwich.

Oh yeah. There’s been so much. It’s been so intertwined with the happenings of my life. Which is fun because I won’t remember all of that and there will be little lore fun facts dropped in every single interview I do. [laughs] It felt really important to have all of that life behind an album I’ve made.