


description
in which i aurally chronicle:
- spending 4 weeks completely disconnected from the regions of the internet most detrimental to my mental health, and learning along the way what adjustments need to be made to my regular habits going forward
- visiting my girlfriend 3 times so far, marking my most substantial escape from the confines of my immediate area to date
together these two "discs" — which i recognize if manufactured would actually take up at least a 6-disc box set, but this is digital so fuck you i compartmentalize my tracklists however i want — share a broader theme of appreciating physicality, something that's unfortunately easy to forget with a lifestyle like mine
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a (likely incomplete) list of people & projects whose artistic DNA had some noticeable influence on this album's creation, or at least crossed my mind during it:
Animal Collective, Birchville Cat Motel, Bull of Heaven, claire rousay, David Sylvian, Gabi Losoncy, Graham Lambkin, id m theft able, Jason Lescalleet, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Jürg Frey, Julia Holter, Keith Rowe, Michael Pisaro, more eaze, Natural Snow Buildings, Sachiko M, Sentimental Witches, Sergey Pakhomov, sonnov, Taku Unami, Vanessa Rossetto, Yan Jun, ❤️💔✨

fun facts
• i'm hoping this album will help people realize that Ambient Noise Wall is secretly the furriest genre of music. you could hardly ask for a genre more Symbolic, Sensory, and Autistic!
• neglecting mx. connect broke the record for longest mainline Roxy Radclyffe LP to date. again. immediately after GET STICKBLOOD had already done so. that's how you know shit's getting real. the gloves are off. we are long past the point where i felt any need to 'prove' that I Am Also Capable Of Making Standard-Length Albums Composed Entirely Of """Actual Songs""" If I So Desire.
• on that note, the runtime here was originally going to be less than half of what it ended up being. not only were the ANW intermissions — which already account for 2 hours — a fairly late addition, but even the 'main' tracks were planned to be 11, 13, 17, 25, and 41 minutes respectively on a per-disc basis. in fact, following the first visit with my girlfriend, there was even a fully completed version of disc II with those track durations, but i was so excited about all the material i recorded during our subsequent visits that i realized each of those tracks would need to be twice as long, and thus the first disc would later follow suit. so if you ever noticed how all the 'main' tracks of disc II seem to have two distinct 'sections' split around the halfway mark, that's why. most of the time, the new material was placed in the second half, but for track 12 & track 16, that structure was inverted.
• originally this album was titled "neglecting ms. connect", since admittedly that was a smoother rhyme with the word "disconnect", but i opted for a gender-neutral honorific instead, to better convey that technology contains multitudes. so i reserved the gendered honorifics for the individual disc titles, where things aren't so ambiguous; it was indisputably Good for me to 'reject' the most antagonistic of websites, and to 'inspect' what in-person love is like.
• as i took the photo used in this album's cover art, i was only intending for it to be a test, a proof of concept, a placeholder of sorts, but it turned out so beautifully that i was instantly set on keeping it.
• my initial vision for the cover art would've depicted roxy (the fursona, not to be confused with the radclyffe who invented her) kneeling nude on a wooden floor with two walls and no roof, like an unfinished cabin in the woods, seen from an isometric view. elements of this imagery were still retained in the final version, and i was even going to keep the kneeling pose, but Sydney On Mars came up with the walking pose, and i agreed that it looked nicer here.
• it has taken me multiple days post-release to actually finalize the credits for this album because i kept forgetting certain instrument appearances. there's so fucking much dude. i really set myself up for failure with all this granular detail!
• this is undoubtedly my least "brickwalled" album to date, and not because i've walked back on my strong stance against the overvaluation of "dynamic range" among certain kinds of music listeners; rather, the particular sounds & styles i'm playing with here genuinely just happened to benefit from the additional headroom, and thus i adjusted my mastering chain accordingly. at the end of the day, all i care about is whatever best achieves the desired effect of any given project. oftentimes that entails "brickwalling", and occasionally it does not.
• the only purely synthetic DAW-produced sounds i allowed to be part of this album were sine waves & clicks, the latter of which served as the basis for every ambient noise wall. there was also almost no sampling involved, except when creating the drones heard in the "interwall" tracks, and adding that one bit of text-to-speech in track 9 to correct a mistake. oh, and the first bit of noise heard in track 18, which was produced by mangling Excerpt A of "Like a Wall in Which an Insect Lives and Gnaws" by Bull of Heaven.
• track 1 of this album is not actually the first time i've interpolated "A Half-Grown Boy in Sea Clothes" by Bull of Heaven; that melody can also be heard in the RINGEX PLASTER EP "17.2: First Day of Harvest".
• in certain parts of track 5, you can overhear me humming melodies i'd previously written for my & audry's band Mutterline.
• after finishing track 6, i realized the drone layer felt particularly befitting of my alias Herd of Worship, and created an extended drone-only mix to appear on a future release there.
• the droning ambience beginning around 21 minutes into track 7 is my personal favorite sound in the album. i'm really proud of just how closely it recaptures the magic of Bull of Heaven's earliest works; in particular, the ending passage of "Candles Green, Heads and Skulls" comes to mind.
• the back-and-forth calling of each other's names in track 10's second section was specifically modeled after the track "John and Yoko" from the John Lennon & Yoko Ono album "Wedding Album". originally, i wanted Friendly Clip Art's side of the exchange to be a real-time recording just like mine, but i was never able to convince it to actually sit down and say "Roxy" at me in various intonations for 11 minutes straight (which is fair enough!), so i had to opt for the next best thing and use some old recordings i had laying around of it calling my name just for the fun of it, looped & glitched to evoke the image of a digital partner, as a last hurrah for the online-only era of our relationship.
• the spacebar tapping heard in heard in track 16 comes from Friendly Clip Art playing Geometry Dash, specifically attempting (and eventually beating) the level "Cataclysm".
also, while she was recording the speech heard in the second half, i had no idea what it would be about until checking the recording myself, and was genuinely taken aback by how dark it got.
• track 18 begins with Friendly Clip Art referencing the first spoken line of dialog in YIIK: A Postmodern RPG.