nightstand lullaby is not a project I necessarily set out to make as personal as it ended up becoming. It started out as a project that was predominantly sonic in nature, maybe occasionally throwing in conceptual flares with mysterious song titles but ultimately staying about the physical sound. As I became more comfortable with the project it formed new appendages, ones that I can’t quite trace the root of to this day. I remember creating the tracks for beyond the monitor and insisting to myself that’d be the end of the road, that I’d go back to making it my pet project for weirdo sound experiments. That didn’t happen.
I guess I should’ve expected that. somniconsciousness was a record I made as an album I could sleep to. beyond the monitor satisfied my craving for weird music about creepypasta-esque subject matter. Nearly all of my other projects came alive purely because I wished to conjure something like them into existence. They played into my fascinations and my fantasies about music and aesthetic, sometimes actualizing into projects I would earnestly listen to even if I didn’t make them. Whether I like to admit it now or not, I created art for my own personal gratification.
It was always like this. Back when I was a child with a heavy sense of naivete, I made albums and music through a legal copy of FL Studio, mashing whatever VSTs I could find into a cacophony of sound. As I grew older, my creativity turned to darker and more experimental inspirations. What once was a child fascinated with concept albums and acts like Gorillaz grew into an artist of her own right trying in vain to get anyone’s attention. I incessantly asked an elder musician friend of mine for advice, always being disappointed at how lackluster my art was. I was obsessed with a website they perused and I put myself on its map, naively thinking it might help me.
Within the span of a couple years, I created more than thirty projects under my belt. A number of them were way too personal and way too upfront with details of my life that I do not wish to talk about. One of them ended up giving me a Kiwifarms page. In the following year I would try in vain to shove this art away, creating new aliases to distract from and build away from the stupidity of my first attempts at ‘serious art’. At one point I had constructed a fictional universe to ‘kill off’ this old music, resulting in an album I actually quite like. All of it barely worked but only for a moment. I had to go into hiding. I was still a teenager.
By the time I came back from hiding, I tried to reevaluate and renew this old art, rereleasing it under compilations and new pretenses, but it never felt right. It always felt like I was digging up a long-dead version of myself to try and reconcile, that I was giving ammunition to people who didn’t want to interact with me in good faith. I was and still am an insanely vulnerable person about my art. Because I was so timid and afraid, I nuked nearly all of my music. Some of it is very much still lost media. But when you have these types of personal connections and stories to them, how else are you supposed to feel when they’re from a version of you that died so long ago? When they’ve brought you nothing but struggle and grief your way since release?
At time of writing, September 7th, 2024, I am no longer living with the burden of everything I’ve made. I can’t say I don’t feel ashamed about some of my actions, I absolutely do, but I think I am now more than comfortable with the idea that some of these actions and the art associated are now dead. I’ve rescued some from the brink of oblivion, but I have absolved myself from the task of revitalizing my old work for new eyes. I am no longer rolling a boulder up a hill trying to repackage and reclaim what is dead and lost. I like to think I’m happier for it as a result.
And yet, sometimes it still haunts me.
As I drift further and further away from creating music as a serious hobby, I find myself making music that doesn’t feel good to make or digest anymore. It feels rudimentary, blocky, unpolished and overambitious. All hallmarks of my earliest works as a teen without many resources or outlets. I have operated in the way I make music for far too long at this point and it has come full circle. The best creations I have from this year and the last are from the work of nightstand lullaby. It is the only thing that feels right to make anymore.
dilation is a culmination of all of these feelings. It is an album about being haunted by the past, whether you’re fully conscious of it or not. It is also an album about loops, both behavioral and circumstantial. It is a meta-commentary on how I choose to interact or not interact with my own art. To get into more specifics, there are four or five characters that take place in the world of nightstand lullaby and all of them act as different coping mechanisms stemming from the same incident. The incident itself is kept vague and shrouded in mystery so as not to distract from the fact that the universe of the music is a character drama.
The ‘protagonist’ of this story is The Victim. They are trapped in an infinite hell of their own creation, eager for suicide and absolution through nonexistance. The Preservationist is her direct foil, trying to ‘rescue’ The Victim through a series of paranormal mechanisms that she doesn’t want to follow through with. The Agitator is a seemingly unknown actor caught in the crossfire, forced to reconcile with the fact that they are in a situation they can’t get out of due in part to their own neuroses. The [INDEPENDENT THIRD PARTY] exists long after any of this should have been over, coldly analyzing the wreckage of an incident they can never hope to understand.
Nobody knows what happens at the end of dilation. I don’t even know. I’m scared to find out for myself. I do not know if Schrödinger's cat lives or dies. It is an incomplete allegorical piece that will only resolve when I can finally move on from having been a musician at the young age I was.
I do not know when that will happen.