Cleaning House & accidentally Announcing 3 (4.. 5?) albums
I've been making music and trying to release it online for a very long time.
A few nights ago I drafted a whole post chronicling my journey over the years, hemming and hawing about every scheme I tried to get my music to people who might like it, and I wrote at length about how I always ended up finding more ways to hide the music than show it.
So instead of trying to catch you up, I'm gonna use this post to document in real time the status of my body of work right now. That way I avoid the spiral into self-critique and maybe get something done, or better-yet help someone else who finds their online environment hostile and confusing.
Cleaning House
I can tell I'm ready in every way to make something new, something ambitious. Before I feel I can get my hands dirty on one of the new concepts I have established, I want to make my entire backlog available all over the internet, in every corner you might find music. My game OST work really helped me get over being shy about my work so this whole process is really about putting the music I have made on all the shelves I felt it wasn't cut out to sit on. Each project I have released so far is at various stages of "potential exposure" and I just want to maximize surface area at this point.
I am calling this work "Cleaning House". I'm doing house-keeping for my digital presence...
A Note about social media
Why don't I just link to my new music on social media?
Good question!
I have no social media accounts anymore! I got really into digital privacy as I developed my homelab. Once I hosted my own services and learned why self-hosting is good, my social accounts felt adverse to my new values regarding digital sovereignty. I also got actual headaches from the "pseudo-social wasteland" that corporate social media has created, and I liked that term so much I named the original iteration of this blog after it. This blog is the new (and probably final) one.
I have embraced the small web for good, so if you want to see anything I do outside the music stuff, it will be here, or on the various other sections of arkoe.net I have planned, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Ok, now I'm gonna sort this shit out in the open to determine what needs to be done before my slate is completely clean and I'm ready to commit myself to one of the new projects.
Behold! Music!
Pre 2017
The only existing songs I released before 2017 are on Newgrounds.
These releases are mostly my dance music from 2010 & 2011 when I was like 14 years old. I love them dearly and I'm glad I forgot about my Newgrounds account for so long that the destructive phase of my artist's journey completely missed those delete buttons.
Unfortunately, the most manic-depressive, insecure, teenage version of myself did find everything else from the DJ Killswitch era. RIP ghosts of my past, you live on as lessons!
Depression Pop (2017)
After 2013 I was making music as Todd Forest. Luckily the big beat tape I released in 2017 is still alive on youtube and I did put it back up on stores in like 2024 after I took it down at some point (noticing a trend here). Oh you thought I stopped being manic-depressive and insecure at 20? No hopefully that will be 30. Oh wait I am 30. We can circle back when I'm 40.
Listening to Depression Pop makes me immensely proud of myself for being able to capture a moment of feeling and go through the very difficult process of exposing that feeling, regardless of my insecurities. The music was recorded from 2013-2015 and in 2017 I finally compiled it as a kind of sampler of my style. I'm proud of little me when I hear it. If you asked me what I thought of it when I finished recording it in 2015, I would have told you it is garbage and I should give up. 11 years later I am a much better roommate inside my mind.
Aizuri-e EP (201X?)
Some old friends will remember the Aizuri-e EP I released as Todd Forest at some point in the 2010s. I have no idea where any of that stuff went. Pour one out for my emo vaporwave phase. I did have a really cool haircut back then.
2018-2021: College dayz
I started working with K1N in college as a production duo. We shared a passion for electronic music and pushed each other to make more cool stuff for years and I am eternally grateful. I learned so much from him and even switched to Ableton from FL Studio at this time. The singles I recorded during this time were the first Okinoth songs. The oldest Okinoth music is all lo-fi house demos that never saw the light of day, but Blacklight, Covet, Thrift, Hierophant and the like were songs where I tried to push my limits as a producer and sound designer. This time also led to my first contract with Snoozy Kazoo, which later led to me becoming their resident sound nerd and I'm still there lending my ears to the gang.
If you wanna hear some balls to the wall EDM check out K1N
If you wanna play some balls to the wall indie games check out Snoozy Kazoo
Oh yeah, we also recorded a little song called Kaleidoscopic for this random guy idkbret (he's like a brother to me), that won't be important later...
2021, Memory Island
Okay so... this is an album announcement in the 2021 section. I never thought I would finish this album but I am actually almost done with it. This took 6 years.
My mom died in July 2021, and the music I wrote about that has been insanely hard to push through. I shelved it for years and poked at it from time to time, but I am releasing it 6.11.2027, which will be my moms 57th birthday. I'll make the album it's own post when that time comes, but yeah this one was a journey. It is not a happy joyous dancy vibe, but that is not what is important. What is important is letting the tradewind carry the moment, or following the heartbeat hidden in the mist
or to stand on the hillsides they covered in tar and make out the landscapes that hide in the dark
Yeah yeah yeah stuff like that. Wow, how poetic, who wrote those cool lines?
2023: idkbret
This guy Bret was so back and we revived his project as a duo. Yeah it is still just his name in the name, but jakebret sounds so ass. bretjake is worse because my name is second.
I don't know if I would have any desire left to be a musician outside of work hours without Bret. I was kind of a wreck tbh, Memory Island was stuck and work was way more difficult considering the emotional state I was in. I was grieving super hard after losing my mom and he would drive 2 hours to spend time with me, and those sparse visits became routine when he asked if we could make music again. This time it wasn't like, vocalist commissions a producer, it was like, what if the band was vocalist and producer. From 2023 until the present day we exorcised some creative demons in the studio and wound up with eclectic hip-hop-poptronica scattered all over the fuckin walls. I ended up getting out of the producer chair, getting on the mic again regularly, and being in 10 music videos, and getting on stage? me????
So in 2022 I was really struggling to make music, even for games, which always had been easier for me on account of being waaaaaay less personal. Other than game music I had only made 3 Okinoth tracks for my streamer friend SnoozeVT and it was like pulling teeth. I'm grateful for how patient he was with how long the music took to make. I was on the verge of hanging the hat for real, and then...
5 Singles thru 2023 & 24, Star Tropics, (EP, 6.2024), performed live for the first time ever, and even an upcoming 2xLP (18 songs) coming to stores 10.16.26 called
LITHA & The Midnight Sound (2025-2026)
Another album announcement? Jesus Christ? 2xLP? 18 songs?
This was the journey that made the Memory Island journey remotely possible. This was the level 40 monster I had to slay to fight the level 60 monster. This is both of us at our most honest, most vulnerable, and honestly just the most open. We had so much fun making this music that there's a 5th 'side' called L+TMS_side-E of outtakes that are also really cool even though they were cut from the main release! We world built, wrote, produced, & recorded everything from the perspective of another world. We made our own lore and got so invested we were damn near weeping about their failings and losses.
Check out Star Tropics and follow idkbret here before our big album drops next month.
Making this album led me to truth in myself I needed to find before I made anything else. Anything alone...
rightThisSecond
...you can listen to my final dance album for a while. blackRabbit will come out everywhere in December, but I put it on Newgrounds on a whim and it got frontpaged, and that spurred on this whole fucking death spiral where I try to understand my own body of work and accidentally announce two albums and one double album (that now has a bonus album?) and bro honestly I'm just letting it happen. I need very little encouragement to make music, but to post it? Yeah I need a push. The couple thousand views on blackRabbit was the tiniest gust of wind to knock this whole thing over. Old web, small web, I wanna share my shit where people like me are! Instagram sucks!
blackRabbit is my baby child. It is like an apology to younger me for deleting his songs when I felt weak and stupid. I was self-destructive and I took it out on my own art and my own dreams, and this beautiful dream of making music is a waking dream now. The dream is way too strong for me to topple with weak ass attacks on myself. It is fast, corny, emo-ish dance music for the terminally online because that is exactly what I was and highest key, I still am that at the core. I checked back in after 15 years and uploaded 40 minutes of an evolved version of my sound, a sound that had gone out and got a job and felt loss and grief and been helped back up by friends. The sound has collaborated and evaluated and re-sampled, been ctrl-Z'ed and ctrl-S'ed and been exported and lost and recovered. The sound has been on 4 computers and 6 hard drives and left google for nextcloud. The sound is Me dawg its a fucking metaphor
This is the worlds strangest advertisement
This is a log book of where I've been since everyone asks when I show up at the function "where you been" I've been ctrl-Z'ing myself I've been screaming in my room and trying to find the right hole to pipe the noise into and hear somebody scream back. Next time they say "where you been" I will say blog dot ark O E dot com has the answer you seek traveler
I been doing art bro. I'm doin me bro.
The state of the world is... just kidding we're not doing that right now.
I'm a fucking musician, I try to make pretty music, so my blog is ugly, my life is ugly, everything is ugly except the furies and muses and all that. I read an I Spy book on the toilet and think "how can I make music that is like this". I look up at a tree and see the sky peaking down and ask "how can I make music like this". This garbled rambling is the translation. If you read this you saw my personality come through, my humor come back, and my gratefulness shine through as I made my way through the full story and that my friends, is the magic. The magic is real don't leave it in your drafts
I need a cigarette, Love you!, Bye!
-- edit I forgot to mention Starry Docks, and EP by me and K1N, and I needed to include it here post-script because that stuff aged so well imo. Check out SHE.