Thank you, this comment is very meaningful to me. I believe, with a set of songs that are so old now and finally being released, I'm also trying to reckon with and self-criticize my old "self," as an artist, person, and my relationship to the world and others, etc. So a lot of the words I use are things I'd throw at myself too, as I can be quite susceptible to my own emotions and how much those can hinder my perspective of the bigger picture. Keep fighting, comrade

This comment actually had me thinking quite a bit, so I wanted to give it a meaningful reply. I want to pin for those who come here in the future. I’ve been sort of “learning” what this album means to me as I go and I'd like to lend that insight for those interested. The majority of these songs, lyrically and musically, were written about 4 years ago in 2020. I was very different then, so I feel as if the visual components are at odds with the lyrical (the more direct and political vs. the more allegorical and whimsical), and this has become its own intent of wanting to lend some permanence to what I wrote in the past even if I don't necessarily agree with who I was now. So this album, at one place of wanting to address the current conditions of political matters, is also a reckoning with myself and this sort of naivety I had of the world. It’s like a dialectic with myself and me criticizing who I was and trying to be "upfront,” not in the social media sense, the common platform language of making some grand emotional gesture to promote the work, but more like actually openly combatting and criticizing myself through my own art, for better or for worse. Many of the phrases contained here are things I would throw at my old self. Anyhow, thanks for listening, watching, and jogging my brain a bit. I definitely do look forward to the challenge of implementing these thoughts more lyrically in the future and see how that develops.

INC is def a huge inspo, but I'd say an even greater inspo is their lineage to Godard, who derived his influence from Bertolt Brecht. I think a lot of the New Wave from France and Japan (I need to explore how that looks in other countries too) still has a lot to teach everyone about political art forms, and those movements interestingly seemed to encapsulate a broad Leftist thought. Also, Masao Adachi's take on the authority contained within landscapes is of interest to me, which I think is even more vindicated today as a politicized antithesis to the more depoliticized aesthetic contained with liminal spaces

I think the vocals are good as is