FAIRE 002 Pink Noise - Mia of Talltower this one might be a little difficult for me to write about coherently? there is a lot of rage imbued into this album, much of which is a legacy of trauma and fear stemming respectively from my coming-out at age 21 and the mental chaos and self-doubt which preceded it. feeling this sense of terror at the idea that the love of these people who are supposed to care for you no matter what may turn out after all to be conditional and the numbness which accompanies being forced to watch that quasi-neurosis come true. constantly convincing yourself that that something bad you think is going to happen as a result of your baring your soul to the world is mere paranoia; that you're just overthinking things, but being repeatedly proven tragically correct only to let those same oppressors back into your heart weeks later, just to do it all over again. the realization that this has been reinforcing itself within you since you were a child. of course, on the flip side, there is also a plethora of beauty here. the authentic life is a magnificent one, and if those oceans and mountains must be traversed to get there, then so be it(?) i don't know. i'm still indignant about it, you know? it really shouldn't have to be that way, so often, for so many of us. anyway, that rage makes for some really bangin music. stuff like fs_22b.mp3 and Lukeys mashup.mp3 feat. caddablast cong in the \05 folder are some of the angriest, hardest-hitting tunes i've made; clips like 171_3.mp3 are some of my most sublime. and despite how invalidating the actual thing turned out to be, there were some really special moments after. for lack of a better activity (i think this coincided with the downtime accompanying learning how to drive), i would spend whole nights holed up in my room voice training while playing nemuru mayu on my 20-inch crt with my fuckass black-mauve lip gloss on from dusk til dawn and honestly i was pretty happy just making myself happy; those memories are very very special. i remember strolling through azeem floors 4 and 6(?) waiting for my scheduled test. so, yukinori tokoro's work definitely was a heavy influence on not only pink noise but all of my subsequent work. i think nemuru mayu is a beautiful game, it's very important to me. i regard it as a thematic parallel to pink noise in the same way osamu sato's lsd was to supermassive. i think this is really evident in some clips like the third "ten thousand hundred million gold coins" (weird name, the kanji one) excerpt and especially in 183 0.mp3 and 183 1.mp3, which capture an almost impressively faithful impression of its soundtrack's compositional hallmarks. yoshitaka amano's gorgeous 1001 nights was also a major influence. speaking of supermassive, i think it's a good point of comparison to draw from: supermassive really was a more lighthearted and joyously explorative work despite its subject matter and i have a similar anecdote pertaining to it—i have a vivid recollection dating from around (probably slightly before) that time in which i made a brief ritual of playing space channel 5 pt 2, controller in hand, and dancing along to it like i was in it. i guess that should be embarrassing given my age but i dont really think so, i think its sweet. i wore a damn literal towel as a skirt because i didnt have any (that part is embarrassing) because i really identified with this character ulala and wanted to be a part of this world so bad. the character uchuu umareru from supermassive is based on her. --- on to the actual story of pink noise: in October 1022, in the week leading up to the annual All Saints' Gala, the lives of a royal family presiding over majestic Talltower changes forever after a sequence of events leads the Princess Mia into possession of profane electronics, discovered stuck halfway into a solid wall, in actuality transposed into their era from December, 2000. She is ultimately sentenced to a thousand years' time-dilated solitary confinement to be served the night of the event, with now only this mysterious program termed the Edutainment to keep her company, a music of foreign parlance destined to become unexplainable archaeological artefact and the clue of a name—Gard Gardrielix—as to where they came from. But something or someone else was displaced along with it, imbued into the data, who will ultimately be forced to abandon Mia at the tail-end of her sentence in order to re-emerge into the date of her departure having developed an unfathomable longing; a grief that will have altered her forever. She cannot allow grief to continue to happen. Later, Mia's own torture is ended back in the 11th century. She will not forget either. This will not be the only time.