jillian 🪽🏰🧸🌠

hiiii hi stella and hi katie!!! i dont think we've been introduced :)

this is one of the things ive been up to lately check out the new snazzy look and let me know about your music thoughts also rubyfire77.neocities.org/music/log/20...

I LOVE YOU GUYSSS same to you both ok take care.. 🥺💕 i am trying to be less scared so hopefully i will be here to say hi more often

HI ERIKA ILY

hi everyone :) sorry i know i havent been on in forever im scared of online but im doing ok and i care for yall and hope youre well!!

marmaduke mole limited plush fancy mole with glasses and book

A lovely mole in good, played with condition.

ive decided to start carrying my coolpix again.. i want to be more intentional with my photos and i already have a folding phone and an mp3 player so why not start carrying a digicam too lol

bf surprised me with flowers at work 🥹😭💕💕

Three Songs is, well, three songs played by the daughter of dreampunk David Russo (founder of Dream Catalogue and one half of 2418, better known as Hong Kong Express / HKE and additionally known by scores of other obtuse aliases), who was a little under 3 years old at the time. Silly Choonz has Sofia, now four, collabing with her dad for more coherent music, and even has a feature from Black Banshee, one of Russo's friends. Say what you will about Russo & co. (the consensus seems to be that the guy is a real asshole, and so are many of his buddies), but I think this is a cute, sweet way to encourage your kid's creative side and is also just plain interesting to hear. "Silliness" on Choonz is pretty good! I will genuinely be following Sofia's work. :)

💿🌟3️⃣9️⃣ THREE SONGS (sofia, 2022) //// 💿🌟4️⃣0️⃣ SILLY CHOONZ (lucid x sweet sofia, 2023)

It's widely held that Pleasant Specter OST is not the soundtrack to a scrapped Dreamcast game, as its distributors claim. Outside of the Bandcamp and Dream Catalogue pages for Pleasant Specter and the equally-dubious Commercial Work 1993-2004 compilation, there's no trace of a Pleasant Specter or a SpecterSoft or a Yamato Kobayashi, at least as a musician and composer. The story of Pleasant Specter, then, is most likely fake. But isn't that sort of the point? Vaporwave exists as an intermediate between a past imagined in the future and a future imagined in the past, as a realm of ambiguous desires and meanings — things that might have existed, might not have, and the shifting, aching nostalgias we assign to them. "Vapor" as in the intangible, impermanent, almost-but-not-quite invisible. (We still don't know who actually created Pleasant Specter or Commercial Works, after all, though I've seen CVLTVRE implicated by way of synths sleuthing.) And even with the awareness that it probably isn't real, part of you sort of hopes it is, right? Or, rather, at least feels the ghostly, abstract realness of its apocryphal shape, reminiscent of a real(?) story we might've heard? The memory we cannot quite recall, the sample we cannot quite place, the time that can never be brought back that we yet still grasp for, turn over in our minds until the details blur. The feeling we keep chasing. That, I think, is the heart of vaporwave: a pleasant specter. Exactly this. And what a pleasant one this is, too.

💿🌟3️⃣8️⃣ PLEASANT SPECTER OST 🎶 快い亡霊 OST (yamato kobayashi, 2014) rateyourmusic.com/music-review...

I was so tuned out to this album that while listening I had a split second of "oh I'm bored, I should put on some music" before I remembered I was already listening to music. (Does it make me sound less like a douche to mention that I like jazz and classical despite my blind spots and also that I felt guilty and lame about finding this so boring?) I don't think this is a bad album — just not my speed, I guess? I think I was expecting progressive big band to mean progressive as in virtuosic, perhaps maximalist, maybe highly melodic, instead of progressive as in "incorporates elements of Western classical music." Ah, well. The quest to decode my taste in jazz and classical music advances.

💿🌟3️⃣7️⃣ DARING MIND (jihye lee orchestra, 2021)

I first heard "Degenerar" back in 2014 when I spent all my free computer time at school trawling SoundCloud, back when they would feature indie tracks every now and then. (This is also how I found Heartsrevolution's "KISS," Uchu Nekoko and LovelySummerChan's cover of "Divine Hammer," Black Letters's "Roam," and probably more I can't think of right now.) While nothing else on Alkaloides reaches the high of "Degenerar," the self-titled doesn't disappoint. Alkaloides is a competent rock outfit no matter what style they're trying on in this somewhat eclectic album. The often-bittersweet, dream pop-inflected guitar work is the key. It's no surprise that they seem to be well-liked in and iconic to the Ecuadorian alternative world.

💿🌟3️⃣6️⃣ ALKALOIDES (alkaloides, 2014)

I remember almost nothing about this movie. Most generic movie I've seen in a long time. If this is gonna be copaganda anyway (in the classical sense of manufacturing consent for extralegal police behavior, not just portraying cops in a positive light) can Chuck Norris actually do literally anything with the crazy scary ass police robot minitank we see for like 1 minute total please.

🎬🌟1️⃣5️⃣ CODE OF SILENCE (dir. andrew davis, 1985)

No joke, I had way more thoughts about this film than I thought I would. I've been chipping away at a Letterbox review draft for like a week plus that I think I'm just gonna turn into an article. So stay tuned for that I guess?? lol

🎬🌟1️⃣4️⃣ JUNIOR (dir. ivan reitman, 1994)

i feel like it could be interesting given how good age of calamity was but id be lying if i said my immediate reaction wasnt similar LOL

its so frustrating. zelda has always been, thematically and ludically, about iterating, changing over time even as you maintain that central essence, but here we are

ok look im gonna play age of imprisonment because i need to be up to date on all zelda lore and it could be good. but can we please move on from the botw/totk era. Please 😭

2026 is way too far out. i need the new tomodachi life NOW

💿🌟3️⃣5️⃣ MUSIC FOR AWKWARD DATES (strxwberrymilk, 2021)

Another 2 am Lyft home from a Valentine's night out shazam find (though I can't remember which track it was off Zatto that popped up in the driver's playlist). Good, mellow stuff that really enhances a late-night mood. "Tangerine" is my favorite song here.

💿🌟3️⃣4️⃣ ZATTO (nariaki obukuro, 2025)

it melts my heart so much when he smiles like this AND when he winks so this photo makes me so emotional.. i love him i love my ;) little guy..

3.24.25

shrek rave flyer

inside the club

cowfish in tank

shrek rave with my boyfriend this weekend ^^

Some cool stuff on here, intersecting EBM and trance (outside the synthpop trappings of futurepop) in a toxic, passionate, gothic boys' love package. "Fester Love" is my favorite. I was surprised by the overt queerness in "New Vogue Children," where Kaya simultaneously calls for the unborn children he conceived in sodomy, hideous yet ugly, both to rise up and destroy the straight and ignorant, and to take their eternal rest against his chest, having had their wings broken or plucked — destroyed by society, or destined to never be born. I use a vague word like queer here purposely to evoke that twilight zone that seems to exists in Japanese culture between what would be defined in the West as male homosexuality and transfemininity, an area that Kaya seems to play within. Not unheard of within vkei, but still pleasantly surprising.

💿🌟3️⃣3️⃣ NEW VOGUE CHILDREN (schwarz stein, 2003)

Effervescent and glittering layers of digital sound, clean-blue cool to the touch. A delicate roboticism in the vocal turning here, a slight disconnection from the real; ethereality. Crystalline voices. Uncanny but in a sort of angelic way, in a poetic loneliness kind of way, watching over / deepening an electronic realm flecked with piano and colour bass and glitch pop. Like a late-night walk in the snow, frozen and fresh and nearly silent before the footsteps.

💿🌟3️⃣2️⃣ VISION3 ~SONAR~ (adomiori, 2022) rateyourmusic.com/music-review...

Goes fucking crazy hard!!! The part where LVL1 chants "Red line, red line!" in "Rave Generator" and then those old school hoovers hit hard gives me goosebumps, man. The flow of this EP is clearly carefully crafted and the result is a tight, killer DJ set.

💿🌟3️⃣1️⃣ HARDCORE WORLD (lvl1, 2024)

Mellow, playful, nostalgic Vocaloid piano rock. Nothing special but still a pleasant and sentimental listen for an oldhead like me all the same. "Kuninaru" is particularly nice.

💿🌟3️⃣0️⃣ YORUTSUMUGI 🎶 よるつむぎ (mimi, 2023)

A little strange how little this evokes PlayStation 1 era atmospheric dnb despite being atmospheric dnb inspired by the PS1. I think it's the modern touches (the footwork is the big marker of this, I think) and the incongruous flavor of the samples used. ("Return to Menu" reminds me of PS1 horror, but that's a whole different vibe.) Either way, doesn't really click for me, but not bad. Funny to see this kind of release from business casual, which usually distributes and promotes music from the vapor sphere. This particular instance but be explained by the fact that Strawberry Station usually makes future funk and has been distributed through business casual before. That said, doesn't PS1 dnb nostalgia also point backwards to an idealized future past that many of its artists did not experience? Perhaps it's not so overt and exaggerated, and it's certainly not as fraught with consumerist and potential fascistic undertones as classical vapor genres are, but it does interest me that there is an overlap here, and I can't help but wonder if we'll see more vapor artists make this jump.

💿🌟2️⃣9️⃣ STRAWBY COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT EUROPE (strawberry station, 2024)

What a lucky find. Blown away by the bilingual rap virtuosity and bubblegum bass production chops on display here. "FVN!" may be the hit, but it's not the only banger on here, yknow? I was so excited to see a "FVN!" remix by Danny L Harle and then I was not at all impressed. Very sad moment for me lol

💿🌟2️⃣8️⃣ PLAY (lvl1, 2023)

Even in the midst of a euro-trance renaissance, I'm not sure anyone is doing it like DJ HEARTSTRING right now. You Are the Sun, I Am the Sky is (unsurprisingly) addictively hypnotic and delightfully underscored by a subtle kind of happy hardcore love story feel. "Last Time Under Purple Skies" is my favorite :)

💿🌟2️⃣7️⃣ YOU ARE THE SUN, I AM THE SKY (dj heartstring, 2025