im just a little low res sphere online {not to be underestimated}
song collection about growing
& shedding last remains of instilled faith
& unfolding irrelevance
dont think everything is as it seems for entirety
allow me my chances to explain
& develop voice {literally & figuratively}

this all seemed like a funner idea 9 months ago
but everything must be set in stone

• The album title "d" began as a thoughtless placeholder, the singular arbitrary key I happened to press on my keyboard whilst creating the first official album draft for the Roxy Radclyffe Bandcamp page, just so I'd be allowed to start customizing said page. While in this state, the title read "d (draft)", which gave me the idea to actually title the final album "d (draft)" as a sort of meta joke, and in that state it would be displayed to me as "d (draft) (draft)", which I thought was pretty funny. But a close friend of mine thankfully convinced me that a plain "d" would be much more striking, and I wholeheartedly agree for numerous reasons. I don't think the meta joke would have translated very well anyway; after all, part of it is reliant on something only I would have access to.

• d's album cover was born of a random email I received from a designer named Tower Hufham, who offered to make me some cover art free of charge. I described the image I had in mind for this album, got a couple variations of it, then tried editing one of those designs to give an "example" of what I really wanted, only to realize "oh shit, I just accidentally finalized the actual album cover myself". Awkward! I worried Tower might feel insulted by this, because it's not every day that you Finish A Freelance Artist's Work For Them, and this could easily be misread as an elaborate way of deeming them Inadequate, but thankfully they seemed to understand, although I paid them a tip regardless because I felt like a dick.

Here's what Tower's unedited designs looked like:

• TRACK 1 was originally straight-up titled "Tranny", which also would have been reflected by the opening text-to-speech portion, repeating "I am such a powerful little tranny", all as a proud act of reclamation. This was only changed after I shared a screenshot of the album draft on my private Twitter account at the time, and was immediately questioned on it by a friend of mine, who would go on to insist that "you can't reclaim a fucking slur" and proceed to block me without hesitation. Choosing "Tyranny" as the replacement title was both a cheeky act of doing the absolute bare minimum, and a comment on how unjust I felt the outrage was. This whole situation really warped my perception of how controversial queer slur reclamation actually is; I have yet to meet a single other trans person who would take such great offense to what I was doing here. The friend in question would rekindle our connection some months later, and we never spoke of this incident again. The phenomenon of Roxy Pissing People Off Without Even Trying has been present in my mainline discography from the start.

Also, Section 2 of the track itself samples the same guitar loop heard in the final section of the KINREK album "the following vol. III: lydydal".

• TRACK 2 in its final form was inspired by the failure of its preceding forms, initially attempting a more conventional take on the Glitch Pop genre, but ultimately getting nowhere with that, resulting in the nonsense you hear now. This track also touches on the idea of Glitch Pop supposedly being a "fake" genre to begin with, very loosely symbolizing my disillusion with Christianity. I say "very loosely" because 1. Glitch Pop is a directly observable Thing, unlike God, and 2. I no longer even agree with the sentiment of Glitch Pop not being a ""real"" genre, whereas my belief that organized religion is a disease remains intact.

• Almost all of TRACK 3's lyrics — save for the text-to-speech intro & the "Orange you glad I Didn't say Dysphoria" hook — were entirely improvised, partly drawn from pure stream-of-consciousness, and partly drawn from me aimlessly scrolling through a Discord text channel of mine known as #eastre (named after my favorite Autechre track), in which I stored tens of thousands of future titles & title fragments that took 5 years to be completely organized (from 2019 to 2024). The mention of Dirk Strider falls under the stream-of-consciousness category, and somehow occurred before I'd even gotten far enough into Homestuck to know which character that name belonged to.

Also, I have a few scrapped versions of this track's cover art:

• TRACK 4 was originally set at a higher tempo, and my vocals were simply stretched out later to account for the change.

Thematically, it touches on sexual escapades involving the very same friend who temporarily blocked me over the title of TRACK 1, and the conflicting feelings I had about these exchanges at the time, which in hindsight I believe was largely the result of repression rather than anything we were doing wrong. Indeed, I already had an online sex life prior to the age of 18, solely with partners of my age bracket, and not an ounce of grooming or otherwise foul play was involved. Whether or not you prefer to acknowledge it, this is an entirely plausible outcome.
If it's not entirely clear what I'm getting at here: when we pretend teenage sexuality doesn't exist — out of what I can only assume is a simple inability to engage in uncomfortable conversations — we are only perpetuating the conditions that allow grooming to take place. From where I'm standing, it's pretty clear that these little horny text exchanges I had back then were Good For Me, Actually, considering the alternatives were essentially either 1. continue wallowing in uneducated isolation, or 2. Get Taken Advantage Of By An Adult. As with any sexual activity, some degree of risk is invariably present, but ideally I believe this should be mitigated through more robust education explaining online safety & illustrating what a healthy sexual relationship looks like, as opposed to Suppressing Any And All Libido Until The Moment You Turn 18. I care about this because I know what it was like to feel that looming pressure, to feel shame for a standard aspect of growing up... My memory of that didn't just conveniently vanish the moment I became an adult, y'know? It was painful! I don't wish that on anyone.

• Firstly, I believe TRACK 5's title was copied & pasted directly from a YouTube comment, or a channel bio. Either way, I don't remember the context at all.

Secondly, the line "Might crack a smile if I crack a cum joke" was originally supposed to be "Might crack a smile if I crack a precum joke", which makes perfect sense with the context of having been written "pre-me coming out to [my dad]", and would have made the joke stronger. I was just so fucking paranoid that people would think it was Weird for a 17-year-old to make use of the word "precum", because I guess that's Oddly Specific compared to simply "cum"?? Just one bit of completely needless self-censoring neurosis that got embedded in me from reading way too many Twitter arguments. It's sad. We'll expand on the subject of my sexual repression in this era later.

Lastly, this track is also the only time you'll ever catch me doing the whole Multiple Minutes Of Literal Absolute Silence Followed By A "Hidden" Ending thing, only because I had sufficient thematic reasons to do so. Normally I'm very annoyed by this maneuver, because so many times I have been fooled into thinking an album ends with a 10+-minute epic, only to be met with a completely normal song, silence, and an easter egg that rarely adds anything to the experience. I swear, you can't trust any long songs from the CD era...

• The nonsensical ramblings I read out during Section 3 of TRACK 6 were generated by an old LLM using TalkToTransformer, something I already dabbled in as far back as 2019, long before the use of ""AI"" in art had become one of the defining cultural issues of our time. Even now though, I do not apologize. These models created a very specific kind of gibberish that I deemed fitting for a multitude of purposes, and I see nothing inherently wrong with this. Like, if I wanted to have manually-written gibberish, then I would've just done that. I had a thematic reason for it being automated here. You need to evaluate these things on a case-by-case basis, lest you fall into binary thinking. The fact that there's a nonzero chance of someone categorizing me as ontologically evil for this is fucking bonkers. There is a world of difference between Engagement-Baiting 'Slop' Churned Out By A Faceless Content Farm and Work Of Art Which Happens To Contain One Generative Element For Conceptual Reasons, but for as long as these wildly varying applications are placed under the same woefully vague umbrella of ""AI"", no one will care to acknowledge this nuance. Yet another potent example of the futility of online discourse.

• TRACK 7 prominently interpolates "A Walk to the Gallows" by Grabbitz, and samples a banjo cover of "Rust" by No, Really, as well as "Lunacy" by Swans.

• I first attempted to write the lyrics of TRACK 8 before I actually turned 18, and thanks to some feedback from a close friend, I quickly realized I was not yet cut out for this, and should really just stick to the damn concept instead of trying to write the second disc in advance.

I also have very mixed feelings about this track's messaging in hindsight. I do appreciate the track description's clarification that the "issue" being described here is not the mere existence of open sexual expression online, but I'm not sure if that nuance really comes through in the lyrics at all, or if the actual "issue" being spoken of here (suggestive humor in otherwise "SFW" furry spaces) was even that big of a deal to begin with. Like, sure, I'd imagine it does invite trouble when a young teenager outwardly brands themselves as a "femboy bottom" or whatever — though even then, it'd be incredibly backwards to say it's Their Fault if something bad happened to them — but can we really draw a causal relationship between widespread suggestive humor and That? Feels like a pretty reactionary position to me. Frankly, I'm much more concerned by the dismissive way such teenagers can be treated by fandom adults — which this track description does thankfully touch on — and how difficult it is as a post-internet pubescent minor to explore your sexuality in a way that doesn't result in either getting shunned, groomed, or left with a totally warped perception of how any of this works. At the end of the day, it all comes back to poor sex education. I wish my 18-year-old self had better understood the systemic factors at play here, and wasn't so eager to delineate herself as One Of The Good Horny Teenagers.
So no, past Roxy, it does not require "poison" to "look forward to such age"; that was a natural result of frivolous online arguments leading you to internalize the idea that it was Weird and Dangerous for you to feel horny until you were legally 'allowed' to. I was not a Perfectly Sexless Being until the moment I became an "adult", and it's ridiculous to expect that of everyone, not to mention a recipe for reckless behavior once we're suddenly shoved into that age bracket, as if we haven't spent the past several years being conditioned to avoid Adulthood like the plague. I don't know exactly how common this kind of rhetoric is on social media nowadays, but speaking purely from experience with coming of age in the early 2020s: it is fucking insane how much emphasis I saw placed on Expressing Yourself In The Correct Ways, rather than a more structural analysis of the behavioral patterns that constitute grooming and how to recognize them. Like, post one too many dick jokes and ERRMMMM YOU ARE LITERALLY BEGGING TO BE PREYED ON BY TALKING ABOUT S*X LIKE THAT. How was this anything other than preemptive victim-blaming? And that coupled with the offline dread of knowing that if I dared casually take a naked photograph of myself before I was "supposed" to — even with zero third-party involvement, for my own eyes only, ensuring no one could have possibly been Exploiting me — I might've then ran the risk of being charged for the production of CSEM, as if that legal framework made any goddamn sense being applied to a lone curious teenager (or in at least one instance, an active victim of grooming!) rather than the people actually doing the exploiting. Oh, and also you're (theoretically) not allowed to look at porn because your precious innocent eyes will crumble at the visualization of a sexual fantasy. So like, what the fuck was I to do in that position as a sheltered minor in the middle of nowhere? Why wouldn't I eagerly await turning 18? This digital abstinence shit didn't help me in the slightest, and I can't imagine I'm alone in that experience.

• TRACK 9 samples the very same rendition of Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" that's used in the C'est la key album "Superflat".

• The three repetitions of TRACK 10's final line ("Now let's never do this again") were actually just me giving my future self options for whichever take sounded the best, and I ended up using all of them instead just one.

In terms of messaging, this track gives me mixed feelings as well. Sonically, I still think it's one of the most stunning things I've ever produced, but I must say, it is pretty strange for such a triumphant soundscape to be paired with lyrics that essentially boil down to "I am just going to stop being emotionally vulnerable in public so I don't feel embarrassment anymore!", which is just.. such comically backwards logic. The problem was shame, not vulnerability, silly! Granted, that's not the only thing being said here; there is genuine triumph displayed in how I survived the rough first year of my gender transition, and I do still often find myself saying "we have survived worse" as a mantra to keep on living. But regardless, ending this album with "Now let's never do this again" was incredibly misguided of me, and I'm very glad I didn't end up sticking to this principle, as evidenced by.. well, a majority of the mainline projects I've released since then. It's hard to imagine a Roxy Radclyffe that didn't continue spilling its guts on a whim.