SUMMER SUCKS
The ambitious second album
You can listen to the album above by selecting a track. You can also listen to and download the album on Bandcamp, and on Google Drive. I personally recommend watching the lyric videos on YouTube; as you can't actually hear the lyrics, those videos clarify which lyrics go where. Also available are these videos showing the full sheet music for the album.
After doing the debut album, which had this reservedness to it born from our inexperience, I allowed for loftier goals. The second album could have just been a continuation of the style, more of the same but slightly better, but I wanted to dive into the deep end and learn through challenge. Furthermore, I liked a lot of really ambitious prog albums, with 20-minute songs and non-traditional song structures, and I longed for an album that just went.. hog wild in that direction. I had this vivid image in my head of the listener who discovers the Sunsetters project and follows the albums chronologically, of these clear expectations that would be formed by the first album: what if we just blew those expectations out of the water? What if the reserved first album is followed by something large and lengthy and filled with ideas and structure? What if it was a concept album, a rock opera, a modern epic poem, a midi masterpiece? I mean, what if we tried for that? What if we made Summer Sucks?
Of course it took us a while. Lindsay had written material for the second album even while we were still writing the first one, and as I grew the second album in scope, I took Lindsay's compositions as a basis for where we'd go. I basically decided Lindsay's pieces weren't songs but movements in larger songs. I established an "emotional structure" for the whole project: the album would parallel OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING. At the time, Rapture had four acts and a "sequel" (in the final draft, that's basically become the fifth act), and so Summer Sucks would have five songs. There was no upper limit on how long the songs would be. And roughly, how it went was, we had track 1 finalized first, then years later (after much work) we figured out 3, 4, 5, 2. The album commentary PDF we released with the album goes into more detail on the order of things and some technical design considerations. I also wrote a fictional thing for the album, something of a creation myth for the narrative, titled "Clowns."
There's a lot to say about this music, and I didn't actually say all that much in the nonfic album commentary, as I'd just finished the damn thing and was still very close to it as a creator. I took on a bigger chunk of the composition work this time around, and as an editor/arranger I was in charge of.. just about everything! The ambition and the scope of this thing were my choice, and so I took responsibility for making that happen. It was more like I directed this album. And now, five years after the 2020 release, I'd like to try to talk about this thing.
Summer Sucks Art
The sun literally sets on the Earth, and humanity burns in flame as it approaches. The root of the image is a simplistic drawing, over which are pasted characters and artefacts from different styles and sources. There are two abstracted harlequins, a hollow painted lady, and a Symbolist Odysseus drooping to resemble dripping blood. Paint and general noise cover the characters as if scattered by the intense solar winds. On the highest level, the image is beset with red paint (or blood) on the upper half, and blue digitization (or water) on the lower half, as if in conflict. The composition is busy, with a semantic order rather than an aesthetic one.
This image has a history to it dating back to the origins of the Sunsetters project. Way back in 2012, when the Sunsetters were nothing more than a bunch of song and album titles (and there were no plans for anything more than that), my old friend Cadet made a facebook status that was simply "summer sucks," and I remarked that that sounded like a great name for an album. Cadet then drew this. Several years later, I took the image and did a lot of image processing and collage over it, to reflect the more developed form of the final album. I pulled excerpts from many paintings I admired at the time, mainly from the works of Odilon Redon, but the Odysseus is from Arnold Böcklin, and the harlequin is... uh... (editor's note: it's been a while! if I figure out the source I will credit it here)
Meanwhile, after the first album, I jumped at the chance to ask Quinn for more art. I was still developing the creation myth at the time, the idea of "the Supermarket Yggdrasil," and I was struck with the image of the World Tree growing out of a supermarket built to contain it. He drew me a real big tree, alright. God it's a great picture. Click that link and scroll down!
The Inferno Begins
(Horseman Unknown)
i- And Summer Sucks Anyway | ii- Shades' Lament Without Rest, Parts 1 & 2 | iii- Batshit | iv- O Immature Amateur | v- Kurentovanje I: Harlequins | vi- Blind Well Of Destiny | vii- BEHOLD LUCIUS I AM COME
(i) It starts, as the first album did, with punk-rock. Before that song can resolve, there's an abrupt "jump cut" to (ii) a grand mystical chord sequence, a sense of falling into something deep, which brings us to the Summer Sucks chord sequence, the arpeggios which will thread through the album. (iii) Before long we are thrashing to constant blast beats, in and out of triplets, (iv) and then into a mellow ballad. The ballad comes and goes, (v) a hard rock instrumental introduces motifs and then (vi) develops the punk opening melody in a slow groove, another hard rock motif is introduced, (vii) and then we are treated to an apocalyptic finale.
"The Inferno Begins" is fifteen minutes long and consists of seven movements. All in all, it is the unrelenting metal wall of fire we must pass through if we ever hope to find the core.
There is little fanfare to welcome us; the music almost starts in medias res. This is a Rapture thing, an attempt to capture the way that story practically trips into apocalypse. The effect is enclosing. There is no clean way into the album, and there is no clean way out either. Once you're in, Summer Sucks will wheel forward endlessly like a baffling midi machine.
The narrator is Lucius Sunsetto, a teenager who hates summer because he associates it with commercial business and everything moving too fast. He considers himself something of a prophet, as any angsty teenager will do, and he mourns for the old days of gods and Yggdrasil (and, perhaps, for a lost love, a girl who dumped him). But then the surrealism begins. He shatters into three personalities, a Nameless one shooting up into the heavens, an idolatrous War sinking into the ground, and he, the true Sunsetto, wanders the Earth. He is stalked by the Predator, a specter, the sense of being hunted. He is found by a powerful ordering force, a woman named Chorus, who promises him the warmth of love if he will do as she asks: slay the cyclops. Who's the cyclops? She doesn't say. So he agrees, figuring he won't have to do anything. He wanders some more, feeling his malaise distilled into an emptiness. Finally, one more force greets him, a voice named Isis, claiming to be his God. Isis lays it all out for Sunsetto: the world is ending, the fires are increasing, no one will survive, and if there's any species on the Earth after all is said and done, they won't even know we were here, as we'll have been so thoroughly wiped out. Sunsetto's problems mean so little, and this overwhelms him. He needs an escape.
Pig Bruiser
(An American Business)
i- Shopping Wood | ii- Four Horsemen Wearing Pig Masks | iii- He Walks Alone | iv- Darkest Clowns | v- Deeper Into Cataclysm | vi- Sunsetto And The Pig King | vii- Of The Four Known Corners Of The Earth
(i) Abrupt start. We're still in an unrelenting mode, this time a medley of tunes you can dance to. There's a central bassline, the Pig Bruiser bassline, which carries us through grand chords and through a swift overture of future motifs and then into (ii) a heavier variation on itself (which brings back chords from Batshit). (iii) More motifs are thrown at us, including the central Summer Sucks chord sequence, and then the Pig Bruiser bassline gets heavier as vocals are growled. Movement 4 is a punchy hard-rock song in the lines of AC/DC, and from there (v) we revisit a motif from Inferno (from Blind Well of Destiny) and develop it into a grungy 5/8 groove, which resolves back into Darkest Clowns until (vi) the growling vocals bring us somewhere new: Sunsetto and the Pig King, a slick rhythm, interspersed with the dramatic triplets from Batshit. The last movement is theatrical, plodding, a visit from our chorus of villains, before finally returning us to the Pig Bruiser bassline. A coda foreshadows the acoustic tone of the song to come while following the God Machine chord sequence which has been popping up throughout this one.
"Pig Bruiser" is 20 minutes long and more theatrically-inclined than Inferno, but the true uniting theme to this song is the dance, a fascination with the different aesthetics of popular music.
We're still early in the Summer Sucks machine, and it's taking in a lot of stimuli and wheeling them around inside its mechanisms. In creating this song, I learned a lot about what my own mechanisms are. But this song, despite its length, is meant to be transitory. There are some motifs that break down here, are defeated and discarded, such as the God Machine motif and the Pig King motif. I suppose that makes them this song's actual identity, as they're unique to this song. The God Machine is the more interesting one, since that originates in a song that was scrapped from this album, and I'm not yet sure what that implies symbolically. I'll have to find some additional space to talk about "Pig Bruiser" sometime, then.
The story continues with Sunsetto being pursued once again by the specter of the Predator. He reasons that, if he can negate the sounds he makes, if he can reduce his sound footprint, if he can echonegate, he can slip away from this sense of being hunted and perhaps see the world through clearer eyes. That's his mindset as he is approached by four horsemen preaching War and announcing the coming of their king: The Pig King. They leave, Sunsetto wanders, and then Lucius meets the Pig King. Towering goliath, the Pig King monologues: Earth has suffered, but the war that the Clowns will bring will dwarf anything the Earth has known. He, the Pig King, is a Clown. The Clowns are our gods, the same ones Sunsetto thought were relics of a better age. They know the name of every town on Earth, as they are going to slaughter all and sell us for nothing. They will bring Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. And that's exactly what happens, as a negated and quieter Sunsetto watches. The Pig King boasts of his dominion over Earth, and over Isis, and that's when Lucius realizes the Pig King has only one eye-- he's the cyclops, and he's idolatrous, claiming to be War himself. This gives Lucius the willpower to slay the Pig King. ("How?" you ask. there's.. a symbolic thread. literally there is no explanation, so the logistics are open to interpretation.) The four horsemen cry over their king's death, now hailing Sunsetto as the Pig Bruiser. Lucius feels little confidence at this turn of events, and just.. wanders on. As he wanders, the remaining Clowns discuss amongst themselves. There's seven names: Veles, Chorus, Canio, Pierrot, Isis, Inanna, and Eugene. They see more story left, some destruction, perhaps a happy ending, but the Clown named Pierrot has something in the works called the Tarantella. Sunsetto sees the Clowns in a dream, and, as ever, wanders on.
Found the Fountain of Mab
(Fake Music, Framed)
i- ...for the cold inexhaustible no | ii- I Split The Atom | iii- Flotsam Off The Scree | iv- Kurentovanje II: Source Of The River | v- I'm A Good Joke | vi- Passerine
(i) At long last, after 35 minutes of intense forward movement, we find the eye of the storm, and hints of a formal structure. Acoustic guitar gently introduces us to a melancholic passage, with sweet melody, and harmonies on bass. There's an entire movement here, tastefully developed, uninterrupted. Sweet relief. The second movement reprises the central Summer Sucks chord sequence and turns into a bouncing groove, almost sinister, almost profound, and takes the grand emotions through a few subtler Inferno motifs, into the more traditional dance of movement three. This one is a more tired dance, as time is taking its toll, and this album has already been long. A melody foreshadowed during Sunsetto And The Pig King takes the focus here, now in its proper place, and the Batshit triplets close us off as the song slows down for a more dramatic midpoint. Movement four has I Split The Atom swirling around with BEHOLD LUCIUS I AM COME before a new steady back-beat groove plays on, closed off by the Darkest Clowns chorus, leading into an angsty reprise of Blind Well of Destiny (and Summer Sucks Anyway, by extension). The Pig Bruiser bassline makes a return, plodding along with grim inevitability. Movement five first blends the Pig Bruiser bassline with BEHOLD LUCIUS I AM COME in a black metal buildup, before crashing the momentum down with a bitter groove, blending the Pig Bruiser bassline now with the chorus to And Summer Sucks Anyway (now foreshadowing something we won't hear for a while). One last crash, we stop, we are suspended, and movement six begins. It's a reprise of movement one this time, developing the melody, growing in mood from a bitter recovery through graceful awe and into a confident finale. Sweet release.
"Found the Fountain of Mab" is what this was all for, this is what we went through the wall of fire in hopes of hearing. The third act in a five-act structure, classically, is the moment of uncharacteristic behavior and the climax of thematic development. When I decided Summer Sucks would have only five songs, and when I knew what the first song was like, I knew the third song would have to be unmistakably beautiful. Precious, even. And song two, "Pig Bruiser," was designed to set us up for this, giving us absolutely no break, but also heavily playing with motif, so we'd be primed for when "Found the Fountain of Mab" uses motif and recapitulation in a far more satisfying way. I wanted the audience, on a first listen of this album, to be genuinely unsure if Summer Sucks ever gets good... and then for this song to knock 'em dead. It rewards patience, like a secret at the center of a maze. It tastes sweeter because there's a real chance you were gonna give up before finding it.
Five years later, in the year 2025, literally as I was making this page, I rewrote the final section of the song entirely. Not the entire Passerine movement, but the part with the electric guitars. The original really didn't do much, and this was the weakest part of the whole album. But the emotional intent is the same.
Pierrot has created the Tarantella, the song which infects all listeners and dooms them to dance until they die. It brings with it a philosophical obsession over the unknowable, a mental dance to accompany the physical one. It infects Lucius, whose stamina has already been worn down by this long summer. He listens to the wind, reminded of his memories of the lover who had dumped him (the Invisible Jester), and is brought by the wind to the River of Mab. It's an ancient river, something of a World River (a flumen mundi), which carries the course of our lives. Distrought over the curse to dance, and vulnerable to his memories, Sunsetto follows the river to its source, hoping to find some profound cure, or at least divine revelation. Instead he finds the Clowns had already ruined it: the Tarantella is embedded deep in the fountain at the river's source. Hopeless, despairing, depressed, Lucius Sunsetto jumps into the fountain to drown himself. He goes unconscious, floating to the surface, drifting down the river, and has a divine revelation in the form of a Dream: As a forest is engulfed in flames, one tree scolds another, warning not to seek relief in the water. Second revelation: Mockingbirds sell their stolen song to the hungry masses. Lucius can't make sense of this dream, finds both images are contradictions, and yet he wakes up anyway on the bank of the river, to the sound of birdsong. He is no longer dancing. He has been cured. And he sits awhile, listening to the birds and the rushing of the river Mab.
Tired Anthem
(Beauty and the Branches)
i- Here Comes The Sun | ii- The Wind's An Invisible Jester | iii- Ready Your Engine, Eugene | iv- Ghost Of Capitalisms Past | v- Kurentovanje III: Duration Of Inferno | vi- Watch For Rolling Rocks | vii- Landslide | viii- The Wordless Sunset | ix- Remember | x- The Grand Reopening
Good god. Uh, okay.
Moving right along, the acoustic guitar at the end of "Found the Fountain of Mab" leads into (i) the acoustic intro to "Tired Anthem," but we are quickly greeted with more, and more, and more instruments, an entire midi symphony of additional guitars, strings, and saxophone. We've got a Big prog song here, with a stronger focus on melody and diverse styles. Movement one is a new melody, a brief opening, and then movement two is another new section (big inspiring stadium rock, with a trading guitar solo that quotes Here Comes The Sun and Darkest Clowns); together movements one and two are the "identity" of Tired Anthem. There's a heavier reprise of the end of Here Comes The Sun, blending with the Pig Bruiser bassline, and then movement three is an eclectic rock jam, technical and grooving and driving forward playfully. Movement four returns us to Here Comes The Sun in a much slower, more melancholic mode. It's steady, it's got a beat, it's a little precious. And then it transitions into shoegaze that builds and builds into a heavy reprise of Deeper Into Cataclysm (aka Blind Well Of Destiny, its root). (v) Big crash! Heavy metal's coming! Kurentovanje returns with a vengeance, while doing its own thrash metal climax. Then movement six finally brings back a prominent Pig Bruiser motif: Of The Four Known Corners Of The Earth was foreshadowing Watch For Rolling Rocks all along! Here we have bouncy call-and-response, with a deep vocal choir, and a dance reprise of And Summer Sucks Anyway, then a proper return to Four Known Corners and the choir takes over for us to take us into (vii) Landslide, the beginning of the grand collision of motifs past. Landslide is busy, changing moods a lot, as it's the dramatic climax, the battle over one's soul and over responsibility for the Earth. But let's count off the reprises anyway: Shopping Wood (proggy arpeggios), God Machine (drumline), Batshit (predator), Ghost Of Capitalisms Past (shoegaze)-Deeper Into Cataclysm-Blind Well Of Destiny, Sunsetto And The Pig King-Batshit (triplets), I Split The Atom, Shades' Lament Without Rest (part 1), the Batshit triplets again, Shades' Lament again, the I Split The Atom countermelody, then Shopping Wood's arpeggios one last time! (viii) But we're not done yet, as the climax continues into The Wordless Sunset! This one's primarily a musical fight between The Wind's An Invisible Jester and the Shopping Wood arpeggio chords, then Invisible Jester's bridge chords come in to unite with the Pig Bruiser bassline. Who wins? (ix) A different album entirely, apparently. Remember is a considerably developed rendition of "The Last Sunset" off of Mythology, combining it with Flotsam Off The Scree in the bridge. The overall effect is a gorgeous denouement after the chaos we've been through, a call to a memory deeper than this album led us to expect. Finally, the bass keeps on going, bringing back Rolling Rocks one last time, and leading us into (x) The Grand Reopening. It's And Summer Sucks Anyway, one last return to the stadium rock, but with a quick Darkest Clowns quote in there, and then ending us off with the closer: the Batshit triplets carrying on underneath a new melody, with grand harmonies. It all stops. Big ending. Long fade-out.
It's 34 minutes long, man. It's "Tired Anthem." It was hard to make. I wanted it to be. It's a prog rock epic, with roots in rock that veers perhaps more "classic" than the rest of the album does. It's big, it's just so damn big. Lindsay and I like some very long songs. I have opinions on even my favorite long songs, though. I think they tend to flow strangely. One of my goals with "Tired Anthem," then, was to prioritize how such a long song could flow.
Summer Sucks wasn't gonna end without throwing everything it's got at us first. By the time the song starts we're already tired, as this is a long album, and there is consideration in that this song uses a lot more tact; it's not gonna throw another "Inferno" at us, it's gonna give us movements with more ebb and flow than that. The first half of this album is a wall of fire, and the second half is a movie. There's a real narrative flow to these songs, and "Tired Anthem" is the heart of that! So this song gets to be very pretty, and often catchy, and overall a lot of fun. When I put this song on, I never want to stop it.
The rest of humanity is doomed to dance. The world is burning. The sun is coming closer to the Earth. Lucius hears the thunder as it comforts the shaking Earth, as its tears-- the rain-- evaporate. Lucius comes to terms with his breakup-- he had pushed her away, and he is thankful for the breakup's emotional pain for insulating him from the horrors of apocalypse. The Clowns, as our gods, are permanent, and so their efforts cannot overcome the impermanent emotions in us all. Meanwhile up comes Eugene, the Clown who's trying to fill the void left by the Pig King. He's a eugenicist shareholder, obsessed with money, and calls himself Death. So Lucius kills him and goes on with his life, spending no time on him. Summer goes on, and Sunsetto wanders the Earth, seeing the chaos as the sun's closeness melts cars on roads. He thinks of numbers, of calculus, of countable infinity, and of our changing tolerance for heresy. (There is sense to this: Countable infinity is a process that we cannot finish, but we still conceive of what's on the other side. Infinity is a circle, and aleph null is something only the gods see; we're in the middle of it. Maybe when the summer's over, Lucius will die and see infinity in a glance.) The voice of Chorus mocks him. On a global scale, the oceans turn to blood, another Clown takes Eugene's place, a second sun enters the sky, and somewhere Yggdrasil withers and dries up into stone.
But an ancient god was buried under Yggdrasil this whole time and now rises: Veles, giant of stone. He speaks to Lucius with his ancient wisdom: Why fill yourself with stress when you can just bury yourself in the ground and wait for it to end? (He says a lot of things, he also talks about consumerism! And he imparts the one belief of the Clowns: For any human to help themselves, a Clown must pay for it, so there is a personal incentive to terrorize humanity.) Lucius says goodbye to the dead Yggdrasil, and Veles tells him the scale of what's happening: Seven suns are appearing in our sky, we'll be dead long before the fourth one, the Earth will be a blazing eighth sun by the time the fifth sun is here, and when all seven arise, all their masses-- along with the solar system-- will have merged into one massive sun. So laying on your back and waiting for landslide sounds pretty good. But Lucius Sunsetto figures, if all hope truly is gone, he can still try a bold idea: He can make sure the Clowns are infected with the Tarantella, so they're not just at peace when we're all dead. With this idea, Lucius sets out on his last wander, and for once he's not afraid of the Predator at all. He wanders to Mount Meru (the World Mountain), where the Clown named Canio is seizing unspeakable power-- the power to shape existence, transcend samsara, transcend form, transcend all consequences for any Clown's actions. (Canio may or may not also be Pierrot. There is a conscious duality.) But Canio is so focused on this victory that he doesn't notice Sunsetto walking up behind him. And Sunsetto reunites with his other fragments-- the idolatrous War who has now Conquered, and the Nameless one (who has now found a name: it's Sunsetto too!)-- and unleashes the Tarantella, infecting himself in the process. With three dancing Sunsettos facing him down, Canio is visibly upset over something going on here, but he boasts that the Tarantella has no power over any Clown. Then Canio turns himself into a mockingbird and flies away (do you want this mystery explained for you?).
With three Sunsettos dancing at the top of Mount Meru, and nothing left to do but watch the sunset, it's true that something happens here, something wordless and grand: The sun sets. The world goes dark. Too dark, actually; it doesn't make sense, where did all the suns go? In the darkness, Sunsetto can feel the water rise to his feet, even at the top of Mount Meru. And then he can hear the wind pick up, and if he echonegates, he can just about make out a voice in the vibrations on the water: promising the world will start again, and this time with the Clowns given a task even they can't neglect.
A new sun rises over a green Earth, and all the shops open up again, only this time nobody wants to go in.
A new Yggdrasil is born, growing out into the sky atop Mount Meru. At its feet is Lucius Sunsetto, the one and only, the only human on Earth who is still infected with the Tarantella.
Clowns Who Set The Sun
(Cockroach Lazarus)
i- As Seen In A Dream (including Kurentovanje IV) | ii- Without Rest | iii- Sunsetto Is A Work Of
Generally, this is a grooving hard rock instrumental, not too busy. Specifically: (i) And Summer Sucks Anyway chords, as seen in the dream that was I'm A Good Joke, juxtaposed by a quote from the Pig Bruiser bassline, set to steady beats. A good groove to headbang to. Eventually quotes the Float Islands theme from the Kirby games, combined with the bass to O Immature Amateur. (ii) Two different BEHOLD LUCIUS I AM COME motifs combined together on a brooding synth line, joined by guitar, and bass (quoting a quick ditty from ...and the inexhaustible no). Goes right into an uptempo dance rendition of the central Summer Sucks chord sequence (quoting details from both Shades' Lament Without Rest and I Split The Atom). (iii) One last "tarantella," the Summer Sucks chord sequence set to uptempo hard rock, with I Split The Atom harmonies (and more on top of that), and with an energetic drum solo. Then a fade-out, as Summer Sucks never stops.
After four straight songs that are all well over ten minutes, we were deliberate about ending with one under that. At 8 minutes, "Clowns Who Set The Sun" is equal parts ending and epilogue, wrapping up some final motifs and exploring aspects of music the rest of the album didn't focus on (namely, suspense). At the risk of downplaying the rest of the album, "Clowns" is where we finally get something closer to an actual song. It's a lot more chill, fairly modern. I did also want to maintain a trend: a Sunsetters album ends with something closer to what the next album will be like. And, as a pretty moody collection of beats, this does have something to do with We Excavate.
The Clowns of this new Earth are tasked with carrying the one and only sun across the sky, rising it in the morning and setting it in the evening. Lucius Sunsetto dances without rest, watching over the Clowns to make sure they do this every day.
All of this is a strange dream being played to us by musicians that aren't even real. It is a strange dream, isn't it? A myth performed by a myth living on our Earth.
Lucius Sunsetto is a work of fiction.
It's kind of incredible that Summer Sucks was ever finished. If you read the album commentary PDF, you'll see a lot of instances of Lindsay and I finding exactly that fact very hard to believe. I don't even think I'm hyping it up enough.
Is it a believable album for the fictional Sunsetters to have made? In some ways, very! I think the way the plot fixates on sunsets and has a protagonist named Sunsetto are very much in keeping with things a rock band would do. And I think this album builds on the first album more than a surface examination would suggest. Though, like, this is supposed to take place only two years after their first album. I think one could reason that a lot of the material of the album was "written" before even the first album, that the guitarists were coming up with some of these riffs as teenagers and dreaming of one day getting to make this pipe-dream of an album, and maybe the singer had a lot of the plot ideas developed early like that too. Maybe they made the first album just to get used to each other, and then one thing led to another, and they decided they simply had to give this a try.
As a rock album of the early 2000s, this would have to be a CD release, and the way that makes sense to Lindsay and I is if there's two discs. The first three songs are Disc 1, and the last two songs are Disc 2. (But the digital experience is superior, as one long uninterrupted listen.)
Of all the Sunsetters albums, this is the least likely to ever be performed by Lindsay or I in real life, though I have learned some of the riffs on guitar! But it's also.. really not a priority for me. I think Summer Sucks is, fundamentally, MIDI art. It is a concept that I find easier to get lost in because it is not real. And that also allowed the music to get as complex as it did.
Lindsay and I finished the first album in 2016, and we'd already begun work on Summer Sucks before then. I took charge over getting the project done, and I finished the album in 2020, so it took between four and six years. If that sounds like a long time, bear in mind that I was teaching myself how music worked as I was doing this.
God. I still have more I can say. (Like, there's 33 movements total, and Canio reclaims the "thirty-third" power! There's a mystery for you.) I can make some other webpage where I can talk about this album! But this page needs to finish. Thank you for reading! If you listened to the music too (and I hope you did!) then thank you for that too. I think Summer Sucks is the album that would make anyone Suddenly Get and Love the Sunsetters project. Was that true for you?
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