What's on your mind?
Nothing much
JUst a little meditation on the web of today 💯

~ ♡ FEEL MY EXHAUSTION TOGETHER ♡ ~

(And maybe revisit me
To see how even farther gone we are
Or hopefully, the great improvements made since ?)

Anything I missed?
Let me know in the comments below!

• Meta wasn't originally planned to be my 4th mainline LP; I had imagined it being a 2023 release set right next to Eco, making them loose companion pieces to one another, but my frustration with Everything The Internet Has Become grew so intense that I could not bear to hold back on this project any longer. I needed to vent. The straw that broke the camel's back was witnessing the exploitation covered by DarkViperAU in his "Why React Content Harms Everyone" series. Non-transformative "react content" isn't even a top concern of mine per se — after all, there's so much online bullshit to choose from — but I was genuinely taken aback by seeing just how brazen "reactors" had become, when it seemed like not too long ago we'd already established that doing any of this was unacceptable. I thought things were bad on YouTube by the mid-2010s, but nothing could have prepared me for Twitch in the 2020s.

• The album title "Meta" is meant to convey a triple meaning: "Meta" as in Metatextual, "Meta" as in The Metagame, and "Meta" as in the cartoonishly evil tech corporation best known for Facebook.

• By sheer amount of layers, Meta's album cover is the most complex of any mainline Roxy Radclyffe release to date, clocking in at 84 layers total. If it ever gets dethroned, I will try to remember to update this fact accordingly.

• TRACK 2's opening speech is taken from the video "How to Pronounce Horse_ebooks", which I do not feel like explaining the incredibly convoluted context of, but it was definitely interesting to be around for, and I thought that little monologue would make for striking sample material purely on its own merits.

• TRACK 4 prominently samples one of my favorite Scotch BX tracks, "nufluke". At the time though, I don't think I had actually listened to it in full yet, oddly enough. Even just hearing part of it immediately inspired me.

• The TikTok text-to-speech voice heard at the beginning of TRACK 7 was generated with a particularly janky third-party website, hence the crustiness. I was not willing to fiddle with the actual TikTok app just for this purpose. Also, it's really funny how one of the "Radclyffe Brand Goals 2023" listed there is "Double The Content", because 2023 would end up being one of my least prolific years to date, resulting in less than half the ""content"". It's almost like a really drawn-out meta joke! That would be a lot more interesting than the real reason behind my relative absence that year, which is just that I did not find as much time to make music because I was trying to focus more on structural organization, in the hopes of making future work easier, which it did. All part of the plan.

• TRACK 9 marks my first time publicly touching on the subject of callout culture, which I was deathly afraid of doing even in this relatively tame form, so quaint in comparison to my ultra-blunt deconstruction of it that'd appear just a couple years later in the EP One Hates One, Two Hates Two, Three Makes Forever. They grow up so fast. Even this track already mostly had the right idea though; my main gripe with it is just that I don't even accept the premise of "undeniably irredeemable shit" as an Acceptable Use Case for callout culture anymore. Who gets to decide what is "irredeemable"? Who gets to decide which kinds of "literal criminals" are The Actually Bad Ones? What does "accountability" even look like? You will never get a coherent answer to any of these questions within the framework of mob justice, and that is precisely the problem. I'm not saying there should literally never be any kind of social consequence for any severe wrongdoing, but by vindictively putting someone on blast to The Entire World and lacking any focus on harm reduction or rehabilitation, you're accomplishing little more than creating a social media equivalent of the sex offender registry, another broadly-accepted institution that may not be the end-all-be-all solution you probably think it is.

• The harsh noise wall heard near the beginning of TRACK 11 is actually taken from track 16 of the RINGEX PLASTER album "25.1: The Wall".

Also, this track was originally going to be called "Fagtionz", but I still hadn't gotten over the time I nearly lost a friend over the original title of d's first track, so I chickened out.

• I'd say TRACK 12 is the closest this album ever got to sounding remotely like "shitty James Ferraro ripoff nonsense", as one reviewer so eloquently put it. And even then, the similarity begins & ends with Text-To-Speech Poetry Commenting On Dystopian Phenomena. It's also a 1-minute interlude. Music listeners are really funny sometimes.

• The drone layer in TRACK 14 is taken from track 2 of the RINGEX PLASTER EP "10.2: mn-af (dragt)", because I loved that soundscape so much that I wanted it to appear in a more prominent mainline role.

• TRACK 15 isn't actually silent, it's just extremely quiet. I don't remember what the actual contents of it are off the top of my head. I encourage you to do your own research.