Ten years. Where has the time gone?

At this exact moment in 2011, I released this track on Newgrounds, pushing me in the direction to pursue music in a more serious manner. While I dabbled in various genres, my main inspiration to get into music was Drum & Bass dating as far back as 2003, though I never expected to do it seriously. Astral Hypnosis was the culmination of hundreds upon thousands of hours to create something in that genre that I could truly feel proud of. While by no means perfect, I knew where I was going. Since then I bounced across multiple genres, released two EPs, and then faded away without as much of a notice.

Plenty of things happened along the way, my mental health was all over the place, and I almost dropped music altogether. Thanks to some good friends I kept at it and pushed forward, looking back to try and find that passion again while trying to reinvent myself for the ever-evolving EDM genre. I started a side project, PRSNA, as a way to tell my story through narrative and music, but I ended up suffering from the same mental struggles and ambitious thinking that lead to my initial burnout. 2020 really pushed everyone to their limits and it gave me the perfect moment to reset.

I needed to take a step back and find myself again, taking a trip down memory lane and shuffling through folders to find old projects as I listened to them through Newgrounds, remembering the feeling I had when learning a new technique or coming up with a melody that really stuck with me. I wasn't as critical of myself before, I didn't really care what was going on with my music because it was a learning process and mistakes happened; somewhere along that path I reached a point where I felt comfortable enough in my ability that I could create a sound that I could call my own and lost that sense of wonder and exploration I had before.

By the time I reached the project file for Astral Hypnosis, it all started to click for me. The drop after the distorted break with those lush pads and driving bassline, the reverb-heavy drums really accentuating that spacey feel, I had already found the sound I was chasing, but it was never replicated until next year with Fate of the Netsphere. Epic soundscapes and complex layers to create those truly ethereal feelings were what I lived for, yet I could never replicate that sound on a whim. That realization pushed me to try and get going on the right track again, coming up with a plan to revisit a lot of the tracks I truly fell in love with, whether it was that main lead, or the drum pattern, or solid background work. This song is the start of that push. Some tracks may end up changed more than others, some may stay relatively the same, it all depends on where the mood takes me, however, I'm not going to let perfection, judgment, or overthinking bring me down from speaking through the music.

Maybe an EP or album will appear in the future. Who knows?