Hi! Thanks for finding me! This is my review of TECHDOG by Patricia Taxxon. As you can maybe guess, it’s my fourth favorite album of 2023… but I couldn’t really think of a way to give it a proper review. This is mostly because it is the longest album I’ve ever heard by a fair margin, clocking in at twelve hours, thirty-eight minutes, and thirty-seven seconds in length by my count. It’s also a pretty personal album in a way I haven’t really seen done in music before, as it doesn’t initially seem particularly personal until hours and hours into its runtime. You might not get a lot out of this if you haven’t heard the whole thing first. Sorry. Anyway, instead of a normal review, I will instead be giving a sort of stream of consciousness as I go through the album for the second time. (Maybe it’s bad form to only have heard an album once before you decide it’s on your top ten, but given the length I don’t think it’s all that ridiculous.) If you use RYM, the website I post my music reviews on in addition to this site, a lot, then you know of the trope of the very long pretentious album review of Very Serious Albums. These are less common now because RYM mods are stricter about what is allowed on the review page, but they still show up from time to time. Back in the day, though, you could write pretty much anything as long as it was at least tangentially connected to the album at hand. I’ve always kind of had a strange relationship with these types of reviews, because most of them are pretty bad, but some are among the best reviews I’ve seen on the site, and almost all of them are at least interesting. So I figured, since I don’t know how to write a normal review of this, I’ll write one of those. Just writing down anything that’s in my head. Other than length, another reason why I want to do that for this is because TECHDOG’s mother, Patricia Taxxon, is someone who is somewhat important to me, for a few reasons, but mostly because she is a semi-visible public figure who is a similar level of beyond the pale of normality to me. Maybe the only public figure. What I mean by this is that she’s a trans woman, extremely autistic, and has a lot of complicated semi-philosophical thoughts about the previous, and also being a huge furry, that I think are both interesting and applicable to many other parts of society beyond just the queerer side of queer behavior. I will probably will not be getting into what I mean about this here (I’m saving that for something I’ll write in the future when I have a more finalized statement I’d like to make on the matter,) but the point I have is that Taxxon has a special place in my brain in terms of artists I’m a fan of. I definitely wouldn’t say she’s my favorite or anything like that, but she is certainly unique. (And up there.) So, maybe my thoughts about this album, a strangely personal work by a strangely personal critter, will reveal something about me too that you might find interesting? Unsure. I guess we’ll find out. Don’t feel like you have to read all of this. I’m not sure how interesting it will be. If you, though, I thank you sincerely. Hopefully you get something out of it. Even if that something is just to listen to TECHDOG yourself. Originally, I was going to listen to the entire project in one go, and catalog my thought process slowly deteriorating over the course of that process. But then I realized there is no way I will ever have a chunk of twelve and a half hours of free time while I’m still at school unless I just don’t sleep for a night, and I’m not looking to do that, so instead, I will be looking through each of these volumes on one day, and then move on to the next one the next day. Slightly less interesting maybe, but a. This is what I’m gonna have to do, and b. The last one of these is still four and a half hours on its own, so there’ll definitely be something interesting there. Writing all of this intro has taken me to track 9 of TECHDOG 1’s eleven tracks. I kind of expected this was going to happen; the first volume is only 25 minutes long. Not much time to talk about either the actual music or anything I’m thinking about in relation to it. It is cool though! Taxxon is one of the best IDM producers at making drum noises that tickles the autism in my brain just right, and this is a very good example of that. All the tracks here are about two to three minutes long, so there’s not a lot of room for evolution, but it’s still a very fun listen with a good amount of stuff going on. Track 7 has inexplicable cut-up vocals from NF. Apparently there’s one song on every volume that has NF vocals on it? I’m not sure why she decided to do this, but it does pay off in a surprisingly interesting way at the end, so that’s something. That’s about it, I think. This one doesn’t really make me think of anything particularly interesting. The next volume hopefully will, because it’s more the length of a proper album, rather than an EP. I’m kind of expecting this to get more interesting as the album progresses, similar to the album itself. Although the opening parts of the album are probably more interesting than this. The lead synth on track 11 is irritating at first. The more this one develops, though, the more it’s making me think of what’s to come. I feel strangely emotional about it. This is going to be quite the ride. Feeling a sense of childlike wonder is weird when you never had a childhood. Time for volume 2. This one has lyrics. Well, one lyric, at the very start of the album. Back to me Back to old habits These songs are 4 to 5 minutes long. A bit more to work with there. More time to actual progression. Honestly it’s kindof admirable she’s able to do as much with volume 1 as she is considering how short the tracks are and how idm does not lend itself to such short lengths. But here is more normal. Which is probably still a good thing because volume 1 is still my least favorite volume even if it’s pretty impressive in a sense. There’s not a lot to say about the first four volumes once I mention that it’s idm and the drums are nice and it’s kind of childlike and innocent in some intangible way. They don’t change in sound that much, just kind of longer versions of each other. A gradual evolution in that way but not so much sonically. Like, the songs evolve and introduce new elements, but the sound across projects stays the same until we get into number 5. Which is fine in the big picture, because one through four are only about a third of the project. It’s homestuckian in that sense. I’m just throwing shit at the wall here can you tell? Track 2 here is very nice though. Some sort of strange propulsive idm-house. With weird bubble blowing noises and strange staticy bursts. There should be more stuff like this, it’s not really like Immunity, which is the more commonly cited example of idm-house. But that’s not nearly as kinetic as this is. IDM’s kineticism is something that lends it a lot of why I like the genre so much, particularly in its more frenetic outcroppings, drill and bassy stuff, your Drukqses and Hard Normal Daddys. The sense of motion is very good for stimming: even if I’m not actually moving, it still feels like it’s getting the nervous energy out of me in a way that standard dance music doesn’t always. Normal dance music, understandably, has normal beats most of the time, because that’s easier to dance to. But it isn’t easier to stim to. I’ve mentioned a few times I think already that this is good autism music but just to elaborate on it, here’s this paragraph. Good stimming is in flux and kind of unpredictable, which is something you can’t get from dance music that’s actually supposed to be danceable, unless you either have a routine planned out already or you are some sort of dancing god. I really do think that we should probably be calling it “braindance” instead of “IDM,” because, although braindance is also kind of a stupid word, it really is your brain that’s dancing instead of your body if you’re doing it right, and IDM is a stupid term anyway. Some of these songs either elaborate on tracks from volume 1 or are elaborated on in future volumes that I remember from my first listen, or maybe both. It gives a kind of strangeness to the music, weird deja vu. Caught in an endless loop of self-reflection maybe? Like I said, this is a very self-reflective album, although it isn’t really apparent until later. So I’m not going to talk about it until later. Track 6: NF vocals spotted I listened to Grandeur of Hair earlier today because my girlfriend wanted to show it to me. It is a crushingly loud noise rock album, so loud as to be almost psychedelic in the way that early Animal Collective releases like Hollinndagain are. Other than it ruining my ears for a solid half hour afterward, it made me feel something intense and visceral about music again, which I haven’t for a while, just out of sheer loudness. Music like that inspires carnal reactions out of you, which is maybe the highest compliment you can give to music in general. I’m spending so much of my time thinking about music and not feeling it, I realized. Made me want to go into making music again, which I’ve been putting off for a while in order to focus more on writing. But right now, I’m writing… about music. I’m not sure how I feel about that. What do I get out of writing about music? Not much, except maybe in rare instances. It’s complicated, because I do get some joy out of writing about it, but then sometimes it feels like an obligation keeping me from bigger things. But what’s really keeping me from bigger things is college; working hard so the future can be better; remaining hopeful through hours and hours of extra work. So maybe I’m angry at the wrong thing. But then I should be making the most of my free time so maybe not? Unsure. After this, though. I can work on more interesting things. I mean, I say that every year, but this year I’m feeling it more. I have a much more solid idea of what I want to do and I don’t think I’m gonna abandon it like the thing I spent most of last year working on. It’ll be fun. I guess I’m saying this because listening to this really makes me think about Taxxon’s musicianship and artistry and other big fancy words like that, and then that makes me think “oh, why am I not doing that?” If not in music, then at least in something. But I can start. I recognize that I’m sort of making this about myself, but. So is Patricia, and she’s allowed to do that, so I think I am too. Plus, like I said, now that I’ve established the initial parameters of the IDM going on here, there’s not a ton to say until volume 5 at the earlier, when things take a turn for the strange. I was going to tell a story about another inspiration for this besides the “tradition of pretentious RYM reviews” I mentioned earlier, but now I’m out of time. Reminder to do that for volume 3 Some of these noises make my ears hurt, as is to be expected with any album that does this much textural sound fuckery. It gets better as the album continues, which is funny, because the album gets more noisy, not less. I guess when it’s all noise the noises stand out less and therefore hurt less. This last track has some interesting droning synth work amidst the clippy drums. A slight taste of what’s to come. Why am I trying so hard at school instead of working on art? Well, that’s a funny story. You, see I was 17 years old and I was in the kitchen while in the family roommy brother had just thrown an Xbox at my dad and oh we’re out of time It’s been over a week. Time to do volume 3. School is so busy for us that it means there’s not much time to do much of anything else sometimes. I think we talked about this last volume though so that’s all we’re gonna say. The opening track of this one is interesting on relisten for reasons that I can’t really get into because it would spoil the climax of the album. Fucked up that this album actually does have a climax. Patricia mentioned the idea it had for this album initially on a Tumblr post once being based on a very long movie idea it had as a child where the plot would slowly fade away into nothingness, which is very intriguing, and youd think that this wouldnt have a xlimax but it does anyhow. Which is impressive. I’ll probably talk about that in 7 though. These songs are all in the 6-7 minute mark, which is really as short as IDM songs get under normal circumstances. So really this is where things start getting really good. Track 3 is the first song here to actually have vocals beyond just one phrase chopped and looped into eternity. I mean, the vocals here are also just two phrases looped into eternity, but it’s in a way where it actually sounds like singing and not like a mantra. There’s a lot of things you could compare the arc of this album to, probably. The one you would think immediately is a drug trip, even though that’s really stupid and would only be done by someone who had never tripped before. The first four volumes do sort of match this arc, slowly increasing in euphoria until the end of volume 4, but after that it falls apart. What I’m trying to say here is that this volume, through the vocals and also the longer buildups, feels much happier than the first two. Lots of joy and self-acceptance radiate through these tracks, even if just through weird squelchy percussion and short, happy vocal melodies. It’s nice to hear, even if the later stuff kind of subverts it majorly. At some point I’ve gotta stop talking abut the later sections in the sections dedicated to the earlier sections. It’s kind of hard with something like this, especially since 1-4 are all sort of variations on each other. Track 4 has the NF vocals on this. It’s not really chopped, just a looped phrase. Something new. Also signifies a couple of softer, calmer songs to prevent things from getting too treacly. as Phife Dawg once said, “too much candy is no good so now I’m closin the shop” IDM stuff with spacy synths is always cool. That’s what track 4 is (sans NF) and track 5 also (which has no NF to sans) Track 5 is also a fucked up ambient dance banger which is another one of my favorite types of IDM songs. Props. Anyway, enough about me. How are you doing? There should be a box down here you can submit your answer to. And then maybe another box where various responses will show up. Should be interesting maybe. Let me know your thoughts about my words so far, if you’ve heard this album or any of Taxxon’s other work, anything about the 2023 list as a whole, anything about the other albums on it, or just anything at all about how your life is going. Just please know if you do submit it’s going to be public here, so be wary. Put boxes here Some of this stuff still does hurt my ears though, good as it is. Track 6 especially. This is a problem for most of the white TECHDOGs. So another element of this that will change when we move on to the black ones is that I’ll have one less thing to complain about. I wonder if Patricia likes Squarepusher. He’s got a very interesting take on the genre of IDM that is pretty much completely unique to him as far as I’m aware. Very jazzy stuff. Need to listen to more though. Always more music you need to listen to there’s so much it’s kind of crazy. I’m sort of glad Patricia put out something that was only 40 minutes long after this because I could not be dealing with this music at once very often without losing my mind. I kind of want to make a movie based on the idea that Patricia had that i mentioned earlier. If i do that and you are reading this patricia i am sorry but i can’t imagine you’ll mind too much. If you do mind and want to be the one to make the movie please email me and i’ll stop though. Track 7 on this is really wild. A lot of chaotic shit going on between melodic and discordant synths, weird time signature percussion, and probably a billion other details I’m not noticing. Track 8 has that strange deja vu again. I think it is a repeating motif then. Interesting. Very hopeful. Track 9 sounds to be a flip of Windows system noises mixed into a weird ambient sequence. Interesting. At this point I’m just reduced to making small remarks on each individual track but the point I’m trying to make here is that this volume is where Taxxon really starts hitting her stride with the sound design and progressions on this album. I’ll just leave it at that The last track is spacy. If i was in space, maybe i’d tell you what i’ve been doing with the last section of all of these. Let’s do that? S o like i said, my brother had thrown an xbox at my dad, which was the culmination of the past year of horrible shit like this my family had been put through due to the pandemic trapping us all in the house together. My brother went to 5 different psych wards in a one year period during this time. And that was because every time he got home he’s do something like this and make my parents send him back again/ i can’t really blame him for that though, because my parents were horrible and they fucked me up too. Just. he always responsed with anger and i always just kind of kept it to myself because i was too scared. You can tell it was there fault because how my dad responded to this xbox thing was uh. Bad. it missed my dad for the record. He was fine. But i was in the kitchen because i . i dont remember why actually . but i told him to stop yelling at my brother and treating him like this because i thought it was why he was being so mean, and im pretty sure i was right. And he threatened to not pay for my college tuition if i spoke to him like that again/ so i had to find a school that was generous with financial aid in case he followed through on that. And so i went here, which is nice with financial aid but very strenuous in many other ways. And even now, i am working my ass off to get into grad school so i can hop ship to canada i n case they decided to start killing trans people here after the next election. (also bc my gf is from there) so that’s what’s up with that. More to come later Welcome back. It’s been a while. Midterms really caught up with me but now i get to relax and listen to more techdog wooooo. Volume 4! Hour and a half, 8 minute tracks. You know the drill by now. Last of th e whites so after this things should get more interesting. Until then, it’s rant time. A lot has happened since the last one, even though nothing has happened. When you’re writing 20 pages of essays in one week, you are only able to write them and be stressed about all of the work that you have to do. And through stress, you learn things about yourself. I’m a different person now than I was last time you saw me. I wear a new mask. I became aware that I was wearing a mask in the first place. When I was younger I got to be more open about what I liked. I did some very embarrassing things. When the Wii U came out I was in fourth grafe and i made posters for all of the launch titles and hung thm up in my classroom and i cant believe nobody bullied me about that. Maybe they just knew at that point i was a freak. At some point i stopped being a freak because… im not sure why actually. I was made fun of a little for stimming in class ubt not all that much. But it was time to be serious or some shit once i hit puberty. So i had to be “real”. Nobody understands that fake things can be more real than real ones. I completely forgot it was even possible to play pretend and do all these wonderful things and exist beyond my body because you’re supposed to be ok wit j jst being human once you grow up. Or maybe thats just what i was told bc i was too weird. Too autistic. It’s hard to re activate that impulse in me when everyone im surrounded by is a loser. But i at least know now that theres something else once i graduate. Once i enter my pure mode )more on that at #@) ,. How DID I DISCOVER THIS YOU MAY ASJ.>>?? Well. oh i can’t talk about that yet.? Okay. Ill safve it for number 5 Something else I did when was kid was that I played flash games on notdoppler dor com. Was a very cool website that is sadly no longer with us because flash is dead. Shame. Patty samples notdoppler’s intro jingle on track 3 of this before going on space odyssey with it. It’s very cool and nice to remember things like this because I’ve completely forgotten so much of the play I did as a kid. Hey isnt this what THE ALUMb is about too? Oh. i should have reaized that on first listen but truth be told i didnt even realize it was the notdoppler intro until someone told me after the fact lol. I saw dune part 2 today/ im not sure how i felt about the story but visually the movie is astounding. It’s really nice to see something that feels legitimately aline. And It’s part of something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, which is the fiction. And the realness of fiction but you cant’ really do that on the level im talking about right now so ignore that for now. I mean, I wouldnt want to live in the world of dune it seems pretty miserable bUT its cool to imagine worlds so alien from what we have now. Especially when you are lik eme. You’ve probably figured out by now that my life has kind of sucked. My parents traumatized me and im masking constantly anf dont have anyone i feel like rlly understands me. And a lot of that is because of grown so strange from the trauma but even before that IT FELT lik3 my friends didnt really understand me. The ones i knew in real lif e at least. If you’re reading this and you know me online i love you <3 And other worlds give me the power to think. What if that didnt happen to me. What i f i had good parents and friends who understood me and i didnt have to sacrifice myself to the mask to achieve that? What if i could be me and be loved for it? And, because being hurt does things to you that are kind of strange, what if magic was real? Although, to be honest, I’ve kind of always wanted magic to be real, even before the trauma. You can take this in two ways: either i was traumatized via masking before the pandemic and before what I consider my actual trauma, or im just a really really weird thing and have always been klike this. I’m not sure which is more comforting. Maybe the second one. It feels good to think about myself as always having been not of this world. Even if it’s not true. It can become true. This is part of why i like deltarune so much, magic is real anD characters are allowed to be weirdos and gay and shit and theyre loved for it. Although i guess deltarune’s story has a lot of hurt in it too. But it’s heading towards healing and that’s nice. Plsu, again, magic is real. Big important. Im on track 5 now because i got distracted by that rant but track 4 is really beautiful. Ill be there waiting Ill be there waiting Ill be there waiting It’s very comforting to know you can always go back once you remember how.uhhhh the line is kind of blurring hear. I feel like i should hold off on going into this until 5 but i also kind of already . did that by talking about childhood repression. But that’s my thing not the albums thing. Its unrelated until it isn’t. Number 5 you get the whole enchilada of childhood trauma. Both from me and what i think this album is saying about it. Be prepared. Track 5 is also very pretty. People who don’t like Patty’s voice are assholes and don’t understand how wonderful being transgender is To love sound again To find that long last nickel i spent to love sound again To tell all the dogs back home where i’ve eebn I think that’s how it goes. You can be a dog if you want to. That’s what i mean about creating fiction. That’s what I mean by uh , (“playing pretend:”. When youre a kid, you can pretend to do things that are impossible and people will take you at face value. Why not do that as an adult? Why not believe it yourself? Why not? You can. If you want. I don’t want to be a dog though I prefer other animals. If you don’t believe me, last semester I was at recess with a bunch of second graders in my education class and one of them was sitting on a rock on all fours and when i asked him what he was doing all he said in response was “I’m a snapping turtle!” It made me very happy to hear that. Movies like dune are good at creating fiction, but longer things are better. Like deltarune (even thoug h it isnt finished yet) or tv shows. TV shows in particular the world is so vast if it runs long enough. If youre totally removed from reality then you can have an entire society yhat only exists on the screen eventually nad its the most beautiful thing in the world. I want to be in one. I’ve always wanted to be in one now that i think about it. Oh god, what is wrong with me. Has it always been like this? When I was a kid did I want out because this world hurts too much? Or was it really all just because of trauma? I don’t know anymore. I odnt know if it matters. What i do know that there aerie place s that do not exist that are better than here and id like to be in them instead. And id also like to be able to shapeshift At this point i paused after track 6 because i was trying to figure out where the vocals were sampled from. It’s from Rusted Root’s “Send Me On My Way”. The original sample is almost incomprehensible because he says it too fast but according to patty its supposed to be You know what they say about the young This volume is way way better than I remember it being. It’s like a very long warm hug from a past life and god knows i need that right now One line from the song is “I would like to hold my little hand”. And that’s kind of what this album is. All of that childhood energy is still in there somewhere and you can harness that and direct it at something. How know s what you can accomplish with that power? One of these days I wont ever have tgo be real again. Me being real will be thepretend thing and pretending will be real. It’s gonna be so cool. And we can party until the end of the world. I;ll be in the new group of crazy people ill find and then i can do the thing ive always wanted to do. Maybe’ it’ve always meant to do it? Like i was meant for it? I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell which came first. If i was changed to be like this or if i was always this and just didnt realize it until the hurt made me. Or maybe both. I keep saying this though. And i can’t even complete the picture yet because I wanted to save it for the sad parts! How sad ! Although to be fair its not like you can even tell tgis is the “happy part” of a narrative arc until you get past this happy part on first listen. 5 is a clue but its not really obvious until 7. Its a really fascinating album god. Thank you patty for making this. I f i didnt thank you before. Where the fuck is the NF feature on this one This is kind of getting too personal methinks. I’m not sure if i’ll publish this esp if i get really into thr details in volume 5 and beyond. Although i kind of want to to prove t o myself that i can be open about this. It’s a big big world out there This document is already longer than what i have for the othe r 9 albums so far and im not even a third of the way doen lol Track 10 is so beautiful. So so happy. I’m so glad I know the people that I know that are okay with me being like this. It makes everything worth it. Hopefully I’ll know more later. Just a little bit longer to go and then things can be better. No more parents, just people who are much cooler and I love much more. I don’t really feel like doing a traumadump to end this one’s track 11 but i already did one earlier today on this document so i think it’s fair for me to not doing it. Thanks for reading if you still are. Next time we’ll tackle the black albums. The happiness can’t last forever. But it’s still there. It doesn't go away. It still hurts a lot sometimes though. TECHDOG 5 opens with the evilest foghorn in the universe. The first track is barely even an IDM song, just a lengthy droning tone accompanied by weird squelchy noises, bubbling out of some demonic swamp. This is where techdog really starts to get interesting for me from a musical perspective. Dark ambient IDM is not something I’ve really ever seen attempted before and it’s a lovely atmosphere, eve n more offputting and alien thn most of the really weird idm ive heard. It’s also almost two ours long. Quite the exciting journey. How are you? Today’s been bus for me. I did a dentist appt and an interview for an internship over the summer. I fee a good deal more stable wthan i did when i was writing 4, which is good bc im not sure if i would have liked this otherwise. Although, 5 strike me as less painful dn more dissocore. Which i think makes sense actually. Explaining now since i said i would”: techdog have 3 different color phases ; 1-4 (white) 5 & 6 (black) 7 (blue). They all mean different things. 1-4 is representative of the child phase, 5 &6 the repression, and 7 what comes after. So though it may seen that 5 & 6 should be more paoinful disso is probably a better way to describe it. Although 6 is pretty loud but you know you listen to loud noise for 2 hours and then it becomes nothing to you. More on that later. My girlfriend is sad all the time. I wish I knew more about how to help. It feels like we just need physical pesence but thats not something we can gie each other for another year and a half which is kind of tragic. Olnline relationships suck. Having trauma sucks,. It all sucks. Im bitterr about it. Im worried the world might end, rathe r for trans people or for everyone before i get to the happy part. So i guess this is the part where i say the thing. Its prob fine to say it here patty did a full video on this sort of thing but its just weird to me to have so much emotional weight being put into a kin. I dont rllty wanna say who though. Not brave enough . but it just. It would be nice to be something else entirely. It’s funny because when i was a kid i always wanted to be magic or different in some way. And now i have to live with that. I think it is more of an “ive always been like this and lacked th e words to describe it” situation rather than a trauma thing. Feels good to know some ridiculous destiny is in store for me. Strange coinicdences happen to me sometime s so maybe something will come of that. I can be anything i want and you can too! Even if tis a magic animal. U can do it i believe i n you you have my permission and the permission of all the weirdos. Id like to make a little haven for myself and my other strange friends. But it might not happen bc mostof those friends are american, gf is canadian, if trump wins re election i have an easy way out and im not sure i wont to risk it and leave my gf behind. Maybe things will clear up later and we can enter in glorious triumph. Once were together in some form itll be easier for us to move between the two anyway. Idid i say this all already? Track 2 feels like the swamp from trak 1 hs a monster in it thats slowly emerging ffrrom the goop. I think the sign of good idm is whether u can vvisuallyize a plot for the track despite the idea of an lyriciless abstract electronic piece being completely ridiculous. Auechre are very goo ad at making visual idm and i know patty like them a lot so id imagine this is where it comes from. Although this is a little different bc there is an actual narrative of sorts? Its pretty abstract though especially in volume 5 and 6, which are the only volumes besides the very-short 1 to have no lyrics whatsoever. So maybe the swamp monster is in pattys mind and its representative of the repressing masking urge or whatever. You can interpret as you please. Unless patty says you cant idk ask it first Track 3 has a heartbeat motif going on so it fits with that. Gets stronger over time too. Its powerful and powering up some sort of grief trauma mechagodzilla thing. Should watch more gozilla movies. Maybe one of them i s a metaphor for grie f ro something. I was watching these godzilla animations on youtube and they were oddly soothing. It should probably be mentioned park of the kinnie thing is just because i was under so much stress bc of midterms that any moment spent not working on themw as just me watching slightly older than baby sensory cartoon. I think ill tell you who it is later actually idfl.k Track 4 kind of feels like a previous track but more evik. Idr which though. How many times am i going to have to listen to this behemoth before i pick up all its mysteries. This is the longest album ive ever listened to by a fairly considerable margin so Evil boxy boo! (link to thing) There arent any autechre albums that rlly do dark ambient like this at least according to rym. Ive only hard up to confield ubt were going through them with gf and other friend. We’ll see together. If i ever go thu patty’s discog thats gonna take a billion years olol. Only heard this and foley artit and bicycle so far ut we do wana explore more. Pix and bit visiting narcissia flowers of robert mapplethrope agnes and hilda etc. lotg to like based on select songs ive sampled Track 5 on this is probably the track that i most frequently return to out of all the tracks on any volume of this. It’s also the NF song on this volume. GO figure. I like the way it grinds though. It feels almost a little too energetic for this volume but it does contain some weird freaky breathing on it so it passes the test in my imo It makes me want to move things with my mind. But lots of things do that so maybe that isn’t very interesting At this point I’m starting to feel the effects of the lengthenings of the volumes pretty acutely. I run out of things to say about how im feeling emotionally within3 tracks or so and then i just wait 10 minuet for the next song to start and then cina do the thing and talk to them. 7 is kind of going to be brutal its like over 2 twice as long as this one is And this one is already really long Time to read about magic i guess Track 6’s background vocals sound vaguely like moth er on the other side of the wall which i dont like bc it makes me nervous. Similaelty theres an adlib on born under punches by talking heads right befor ethe “no thanks you dont need to mention it” part that sounds like my dad saying “hey there” and it always scares me It does feel kind of strangely uplifting though even as its sort of crawling in meatspace like a weird deformed flesh monstrosity. But maybe the monstrosity can heal? Idk Track 7 is also pretty warm. Makes me think. Sometimes i like being a little dissoed and removed from my life because it lets me think more interestingly. Contemplatinvely. I don’t like to be that way forever though. My brother is an asshole. Im sick of living with this people (he came down to give me shit about something stupid while i was writing this) 7 kinda has sheet metal vibes and i dont like it though. Makes the ears hurt A lot of these are kind of vacuum tube core. Don’t ask me how to explain what that means you just have to listen to ti yourself. Track 8 is solely vacuum tubes Track 9 is very strange. This volume is more ambient than it is IDM. reducing itself into bigger and biggernothing. Very strange and empty. Dont have much to say anymore . just. One thing per song i guess. I try The piano at the end of 9 is nice 10 is nice I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about my life for this track 11. I think that might be over now. Im just kind of staring into the void looking at wikipedia. Until next time. Its gonna get loud Volume 6! Is very loud. Feral. Clawing. Intense. I’m not sure what else to say it’s only been a day now that i’m divested from my work fully over break i can do these much faster but it means theres less thoughts to get in out my head on to the paper. This is very cool textures though. Somehow overwhelmingly loud without hurting your eats which is nice bc its overt wo hours of it! Track 2 feels like a moe nomal idm track that just happenes to have a tasty layer of noise over it Track 3 feels like my ears are getting cleaned by a n evil q-tip Track 4 is very autechre except more evil than what autechre very does normally. Or at least more in your face. Like kind of vi scoise pose from confield but with more weird machinery afoot to bounce the balls around Oh wow Im on track 10 now. I got dissoed really bad by this. It’s good at invoking that feeling of numbness to pain one experience after repressing. We’ve been subconsciously repressing some stuff recently too, as we learned last night. But now we know which means we can fight it. Is this what they mean by “knowledge is power?” Hopefully it will get better every day. And we can move closer to eachieveing our goals. Our plans. Our wishes. “Whenp you walk through a doorway, the door will be open.” A new afge. Track 11 disintegrates. Past this is emptiness. I had not much to say about 6 but 7 may bring much more. If only because its about twice the length of the sixth volume lol. Breaking with tradition to see what this is all about Ladies and gentlemen we are Floating in space Techodg 7. The last one. Here we are. 4 and a half hours of my life. To something im not even sure if ill post. But i think i will. Because uh. The reason why i dont wanna post it is stupid i should face my fears! Silly me Techdog 6 was very loud so naturally this one is very quiet. The first track is entirely just wind noises and it’s 14 minutes long. This album also breaks the trend of the first 6 where every track is about the same length and that length increases ny two minutes with everyone volume. The first song follows it but then things start getting longer and longer and longer. Eventually we break 25 minutes with track 6, about the length of the entire first volume. We end at 41 minutes, which is close to the 48 minutes that volume 2 reaches. It gets big. After 5 and esp 6, you have (patty has?) pretty much repressed all there is to repress and so now we just have nothing. Although i guess this song isnt all wind and shit theres also some occassional sprinkles of sound around it. We dabble in reductionism here which is a very cool genre of music that I need to listen to more of. It’s sort of the opposite of the strange sensations of volume 6. Whereas 6 has total noise that makes you disso out, this volume is (almost) total nothingness, and you say you pay close attention to every sound that’s out there instead. A dichotomy o f dichotomies. I’m on track 1 still and i’ve already almost written more than i did for the entire 6th volume. So this should be interesting. Or not. The nothing gets kind of aggressive b y the end of this. I suppose nothing often is. Please turn your audio player to track 2, This one is maybe even more nothing than the first one. It’s about a minute klonger and rather than having a very quiet consistent noise its more just silence interrupted by strange wind. I’m not sure if there’s meaning to the change but it continues the spooky atmosphere the dominates the first hour or so of this record. I wonder if it’s kind of scary if you don’t know what’s goig on. I suppose it was the first time i heard it. There’s a return to more constant noise about halfway in. Isn’t it so interesting, having a choice between noise and no noise in music? You think usually that its just a choice of what snoises to play in your song at what time. Not so.’ Are we like a machine? Desperately rebuilding ourselves after we have been torn apart> Able to reconstruct ourselves even after certain kinds of fatal damage, even if it’s not wexactly what we once were? Does that even make any sense? Honestly a lot of this album just makes me hear my tinnitus lol. It is thankfully not very bad atm and will hopefully not getworse because i’m more cautious about these things now but oh well. It’s easier to hear your ear when you have headphones on but nothing is really happening in those headphones. A reminder that we are all broken!!! LOLOLOLOL!!!! Although i’m broken in ways that are probably more relevant to the album experience than just having tinnitus. Please change to track 3. tHIS ONE has some sounds on it that sound like musical sounds but they’re still just slow tones from an electric piano or something. It is interesting to se e the music slowly piece itself back to together in a way similar to how the person pieces oneself back together after the sort of trauma described. This is by far my favrite volume of the experience if you can’t tell. This one also has some of those ambient synths that ambient artists love to use. Thety can be comforting but only when there’s enough of them. A lot of the songs in Twin PEaks season 3 shows what happens when there aren’t enough of them. It’s weird and eerie and not quite real. Like this song. Tjis one is 18 minutes btw. Should mention. Track 4. Also 18 minutes. This one has some little twinklies. I think I am running out of things to say a bit while we stay in this ultra-minimalist mode. Which continues until about track 6 i think. This is the only track on this album to be shorter than its predecessor by the way. Only bt 10 seconds but still/. Track 5 now. 22 minutes. This one is another psakrly one although the sparkles take the lead instead of the background. There’s still some pretty interesting darker squorks in the back though. Around 15 minutes something resembling an actual melody appears which is a new development. And then some piano at 20 minutes! Very pretty and yet still quite somber Track 6. 25 minutes. This one is much less formed than 5 by necessity. It’s just 25 minutesof static and occasional voicemail messages from Patty. For those counting, this is the first time she’s said anything on this since track 10 of volume 4, a solid 5 hours ago or so at this point. The static literally does not change at all for the entirety of the track. Song? What do you even call something like this. And I guess the high pitched beeping noise before every message. That changes. The point here is that Patricia is talking to her old self and it is very sad. I don’t think i can really do it justice with words so for once im not going to despite the rambly nature of this whole piece. I would say listen to it yourself but listen to the entire album yourself. That way it’ll hit right. Honestly maybe should you have listened before even reading this. But it’s too late for that now if you haven’t started already. Reconnecting with your past after something like this is important. This is what’s interesting about this album to me. Trauma warps you into strange new forms that you might even like and then you have to know trauma did that even if you like it. Have I said this here already? Maybe. I definitely have said that trauma is a curse that changes your past before, to borrow the words of the petscop guy,. So in that past moment maybe you weren’t a dog ubt then you see yourself as a dog anyway. And that becomes something good . It’s very interesting. And cool. Itr happened to me! It could happen to you. Maybe it already has. (Not literally a dog. I’m not a dog. Like i said i prefer other animals.) This one is also really fucking unsettling. The first time around the vagueness of the messages and Patty’s delivery of them compared with the completely unchanging musical background kept me on edge the entire time even when thre is quite literally strectchs of eight minutes of sond where absolutely nothing new happens. The ending does finall y reveal the significance of the volumes 5 and 6 and also 7 so you get a little clarity as a reward but yeah it’s … intense.is there much else to say? thank you falettinme be mice elf agin… Ok one change the static gets louder in the last minute or so. God this song fucks me up even if it feels weird calling this a song. It’s not really music. Not saying that to knock it it’s just. There’s no musicality. Noise is funny like that and so is reductionism. Track 7. 27 minutes. This one is even more twin peaks evil ambient than the last on e i said that about was. Makes sense. It is very strange to have something that is this beautiful and ethereal also be this sad. I like things that can see both sides. Life is often like this. Even as more things happen in the album the album continues to be about the same amount ogf glacialness because the more involved songs are also longer, which means that those new ideas are still being played out for about the same amount of time. I’m on track 7and track 7 is like. Not quite the halfway point of this. The halfway point i believe is almost to the very end of track 7. The last four songs are all quite long, legntyh rides. This one eventually fades away from spooky ambient inro more intense waves of synths. It is really impressive that this is so good at being both beautiful and unsettling. Track 8. 29 minutes. This one returns to wind again. After about 7 minutes sounds start happening. It’s cool to see variations on the earlier parts of this volume/ I’m not sure I have much to see left. Let’s see how ewe feel when we get to track 10. This brings a little back of the idm stylins but its still very much ambient. Which is fun and interesting to see that applied in such a way. I wonder if late period autechre sounds like this. Track 9. 31 minutes. This one opens with what I’m fairly sure is a Minecraft enchantment table sound sample. Cool. That and notdoppler are rlly nice reminders of what this mythical lost childhood actually looks like. I’ve been thinking recently about how I am an extraordinarily 2010s child. It’s pretty intrinsic to my character. That’s what I was talking about earlier yknow. My girlfriend showed my friendship is magic bc she was into it when she was a teenager and now i ended up kinning twilight lol. Idk why i was so scared to say that earlier it’s dumb. Im really glad ive had this spring break its given me the time i actually need to rest and face some dumb fears ive had. But now that im into fim and also undertale/deltarune and homestuck im really fucking 2010s it kind of hurts. Im never gonna be into fnaf though thank god. None of this i s really relevant to the album i was just thinking about it. I keep opening all these paragraphs with “this one”. Nort so god a writer when im not filtering myself haha. Butr this has the twin peaks ambient evils too. It’s funny that now these things are taking 10 minutes to even rlly start instead of 2 or 3. Rlly lets you marinate in the sauce for a while. The disso sauce. I’ve always been fond of this track. It has some very nice placid piano work. Amongst ambient synths of all sorts and also occasional deep beeps. Even if it takes 20 of the 31 minutes to actually start playing a full piano melody. It take can some long time for us to reform ourselves after something like this. But it can still happen. And once we get there it is truly beautiful. I hope that I can fully be there eventually. Just a little over a year until I graduate. Who knows after that? At 26 minutes the piano is joined by some gorgeous synth counterpoint. This is one of my favorite moments on the whole album. It feels like a wonderful little garden you stumble upon and I want to take everyone I love to it. Track 10. Also 31 minutes but like ten seconds longer. Here is the big deviation. The return of the IDM sound. The climax of the whole project (kind of.) It’s a slow buildup of course, but the warhorn-esque synths here are so damn hot. The first 20 minutes of this are a reallty incredible IDM track, one of patricia’s best. Finally emerging from the nothingness. Incredibly hyperkinetic and excited until…. Then patty starts singing. This is again something I can’t really do justice I don’t think. It’s emotional, it’s powerful, it’s a jam, it uses the fucking NF vocal samples to glorious effect, and it’s a really incredible climax. If it counts as that. I hope you’ve been listening along so i dont have to do my job lol Patty’s voice reminds me of someone I used to know and I think that’s why I like it so much. She’s very good at doing what she wants to do with it I think. I’ve heard some people say this last part is kind of like her 2018 work which continues to make me tempted to listen to all 60 of her albums or whatever the fucjk. I thought frank zappa was evil for making 60 albums in a period of 25ish years and patty did it in 8. Lord help us Granted idk if theyre as good as zappas (1979-1984 excluded those mostly suck lol) The part where she’s fucking QUOTING NF is so cool god. How did she make nf sound good. This is maybe the most impressive part of techdog lol . good enough that i broke my mask of formality to make like a tweet esque language abouit it. Do you understand what i mean by that? Track 11. 41 minutes. I suppose now would probably be a good time to write a wrapup of this album but I’m not really sure what there is to say. It covers a lot of ground, is good at that ground, and means alot to me and i imagine many people or animals that have been trauma and lost the ability to take off their mask as a result. It’s also a pretty bold album sonically. Goes beyond standard IDM into dark ambient idm, noise idm, and then into some bold reductionist shit. This song is even kind of onkyo-y for fucks sake, the first like 4 minutes of this is just one steady tone. Oh god. Patricia Taxxon got me into onkyo. My lifeis over. Fucuuuuuuck (dramatic) The one thing that bothers me though is what this song is supposed to mean in terms of techdog’s grander narrative. Track 10 is a pretty optimistic place to end this, but then the album keeps going. I guess it’s like what patty said about that movie idea i mentioned 1000s of words ago. Life keeps going. Life is still hard. But you can learn and get better? This song does feel like a very long protracted ascension to heaven. Perhaps the onkyo is even a flatlining machine symbolizing death or whatever. The death of the first life onto the second life. Not to be confused with Second Life or the actual afterlife if it exists. Being turned into something else entirely. At the end of the song patricia says something that kind of implies that you could die having became your mask and lost it again but then you could keep going anyway. And that is where the true life begins, in a sense? I think. I tend to come up with optimistic explanations for things that are kind of open ended so i might be entirely lwenrogn. Here. but i hope not. I like believing that the world will turn out alright even if it doesnt seem like it in the moment. Idk how id keep going otherwise. It’s a good motto to live by. Once again it takes 10 minutes to reall y get beyond this onkyo into the song proper. I’m not sure why i like that so much. It’s good to feel something that feels this real though. If it was smaller it wouldn’t be as impressive. I’m glad this hasnt become a challenge album like everywhere at the end of time did due to its length. This is almost twice as long so maybe thats too much even for challengeheads. Or maybe it just hasnt gotten above water yet. Hopefully the first one. I dont need discourse about this. This kinda feels inspired by ye old Ambient 1: music for airports tbh. Its got that kind of ethereal vocal synth thang going on. Which is cool for a finale. Back to the basics of ambient. By 30 minutes we really start feeling that ascension vibe. Is this a shitty way to end this series? Myabe. Im not sure how interesting this is as a whole it was just sort of an experiment. Thats what life is all about. Trying new things. Thanks for reading this whole thing if you did. JUst under 10k words. Why am i not correcting my typos in this? Well i got the idea to slowly make it less and less grammatically correct and leave my typos intact ad time when t on but by the time i got to 4 i realized that if i wanted it to degrade further i would have had to just intentionally make typos and i elt that would go against the spirit of it. So now we’re stuck with this as a half measure.Which is unfortuntet oh well. Thanks for reading again. Love u It’s a pretty violent ascension into heaven. But i guess that’s what happens for us. The last thing she says is “Stop. Try again.” And that’s the last thing I’m saying too.