Episode 4: “ablaze” with azuretone

This week, Aoife interviews Azure about “Ablaze” from ENCORE. or, an incomplete and contradictory history of jaylen hotdogfingers, her trials and tribulations. “It was like you were getting this sound out of a guitar, but you weren’t actually, like, playing it?” azure says, explaining the iconic soundscape of their song. “It’s kind of hellish in a way!”

azure is an imperceptible, incorporeal being who makes music when they have nothing better to do. You can check it out at azuret.bandcamp.com if you would like to.

This episode of idol board was edited by Jennifer Cat, hosted by Aoife, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by SigilCrafter Aya, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen. Find all episodes and transcripts of idol board at fourth-strike.com/podcast and follow @idolboard on Twitter for updates. Get all episodes plus bonuses by supporting Fourth Strike on Patreon.

Listen to “ablaze” by the garages on Blandcamp:

Episode Transcript

[musical intro plays]

ANNOUNCER:

You’re listening to a Fourth Strike production.

[The end of the intro followed by the first verse of ‘ablaze’ plays, fading out]

AOIFE:

Hello and welcome to idol board! I’m Aoife, and I use she/her pronouns. In this podcast, I will be interviewing members of the garages about their songs, the creation process, and possible inspirations. My guest for this episode is garages band member azure. Thanks for coming on azure! Can you tell us your pronouns, your soulscream, and what song you’ll be talking about with us today?

AZURE:

Hi, I’m azure. Uh, my pronouns are they/them, I’m going to be talking about ‘ablaze’ today, and my soulscream is [knocks heavily on desk five times in a row]

AOIFE:

That’s a good one!

AZURE:

Thank you!

AOIFE:

So, first off, when and why did you join the garages?

AZURE:

I got into blaseball, like, as soon as season 3 ended. My- my friend had turned me on to it and… I had wanted to join the garages because I recently watched theh uh, Dorktown Mariners documentary and I also kinda generally vibe with the name and the theme and then I found out “Oh, you people actually make music. Well, time to get in on that.” I was going to jump in when ‘in the feedback’ happened, but I was a bit too late for that, so I ended up jumping in on ‘ENCORE’.

AOIFE:

So, what’s your musical background before the garages?

AZURE:

Before the garages, I was making music for about… I’d say three years at that point. Maybe more. Before I got into blaseball- again this was, like, around season three- I had just released an album in May? [aside, playfully] It’s called ‘Midnight Daydream’ and you can pick it up at azuret.bandcamp.com wink wink. That album mostly consists of, like, dance, ambient, bitpop, indiepop, stuff, mostly, like, instrumentals.

[an excerpt from ‘Waves’ off of azure’s ‘Midnight Daydream’ plays, then fades out]

AZURE:

So considering my musical background isn’t all that, the garages, which is mostly like a punk rock kind of thing, was a big jump for me. But yeah, that’s my musical background really, um, dance producer trying to do punk rock. [chuckles]

AOIFE:

Yeah, so how do you think the original- like, your original music style of electronic music- how do you think that affects the music that you currently make for the garages? Like, how are you influenced by your past?

AZURE:

That- that’s an interesting question because the garages songs I have out, there’s a lot of moments on those tracks where you can kind of tell… that I’m trying to get away with the fact that I can’t really play any instruments?

[Aoife laughs]

AZURE:

Like- like here on ‘ablaze’ which is mostly synth based-

[the first half of the intro to ‘ablaze’ plays, then fades out]

AZURE:

There’s also the whole dance music aspect which does also kind of tie in to the influences that went into this song as well, which we will talk about later.

AOIFE:

Yeah, so how did this song, ‘ablaze’, how did this start?

AZURE:

‘ablaze’ was a demo that I had lying around for a while that I didn’t know what to do with. It was definitely too harsh for any of my solo stuff… but it was also too interesting for me to just let go like that, you know?

AOIFE:

Yeah.

AZURE:

So I picked it up, I developed it a little, and then the spoken word idea just came from me not being confident enough in my singing abilities and just saying “You know what, I’ll do this instead”… which I guess panned out well and that’s kind of how that song came to be the way it is really, is just me getting away with a bunch of stuff I can’t do. [chuckles]

AOIFE:

Yeah, so, what were your inspirations for this piece?

AZURE:

So, this song was inspired by a lot of new wave and industrial. I was listening to a lot of Throbbing Gristle at the time. They were this industrial band based in the UK, one of the earliest as far as I can tell. Their music felt kind of… tortuous? In a way? But that was kind of the main thing. I kind of took that philosophy and kind of took the, uh, narrative topic of the song into context and this song kind of became this thing where it wasn’t necessarily that I was subjecting you to something? But rather it’s like you’re going through this with me, type of thing. Speaking of inspirations, a lot of people said it was- said that this song was kind of Slint-y which was really funny to me because I’d never listened to Slint… I should listen to Slint.

AOIFE:

Hm. That’s interesting. Yeah, I would have thought that you’d had some inspiration there! Yeah, so, is this song about any particular event in blaseball history, or is it just a general vibe?

AZURE:

Uh, yes! This is actually a song about a very specific day in blaseball history. So this song is about Ruby Tuesday, season 7, day 32, this is a game with the Tigers against the Moist Talkers, and three of them die. I do have a couple Tigers friends and they were, like, visibly distraught by all of this.

AOIFE:

Yeah, so can you explain Ruby Tuesday, like, for us and, like, what in detail happened there?

AZURE:

Ruby Tuesday, once again, season 7 day 32, It- it was a game where three people were incinerated due to instability, and that kind of ties in with earlier how Jaylen Hotdogfingers, um, beans players, makes them unstable, and so we didn’t know what that did for a while and that was when we found out what it did, which was it makes players more prone to incineration. This song kind of puts you into the position of someone who’s there at the time it happened. So that was kind of my goal with capturing this… horrifying thing.

AOIFE:

So, with making the song,what challenges were there along the way, and how did you work past them?

AZURE:

The most challenging… part for me… was probably writing the lyrics. I’ve never written lyrics to a song before. Well- I guess technically I have, but they were barely lyrics. It was more just, like, vocal accompaniment. But if I wanted to go through with the spoken word thing I had to do, like, full on writing for that. And I was too nervous to ask people if they wanted to- if they wanted to help me with that? Because this song was so last minute. It was the last song added to ‘ENCORE’ by the way, so I was just stuck there, I had Notepad ++ open and I was like “Well, I guess I’m on my own. Guess I’ll start writing.”

It took me like 3 days to write that whole thing out. I kept going back to lines and saying “Oh my god this is so dumb, why am I writing this” and I had to embrace the fact that this is blaseball; this is inherently kind of dumb. You should really be, like, rolling with this. Which I guess there is something to be said about how it conflicts with the eerie vibe of the track, to be kind of dumb? And maybe the lyrics aren’t that dumb in the first place, you know? Who- Who knows!

AOIFE:

Yeah! So, how did you get those iconic background sounds that played throughout the piece? And what effects did you use on the song and for the vocals?

AZURE:

Okay, first of all, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but ‘iconic’ is kind of pushing it.

AOIFE:

[Aoife laughs]

AZURE:

So- so, those guitar sounds in the background, this is another instance of me getting- me trying to get away with not being able to play guitar well at all. What I did was I took out a drum stick that I just had, and I just kind of slid it- slid it across the guitar strings and it actually sounded pretty cool… in context. It was like you were getting this sound out of a guitar, but you weren’t actually, like, playing it? It’s kind of hellish in a way!

[The second half of the intro to ‘ablaze’ plays, and fades out]

AZURE:

Like, yeah, it’s not exactly the sound that you would think would come out of a guitar. I kind- I kind of like it actually. It really does kind of contribute to, like, the, um, atmosphere of the song. I don’t think it would be the same without it. And the vocals, those are, like, soaked in effects, like, I was still, like, nervous back when I wrote it and I wanted to hide my voice as much as I could while still making them, like, barely distinguishable? So what I did was I distorted them and threw them in some delay.

[The first verse of ‘ablaze’ plays briefly, then fades out]

AZURE:

It actually kind of worked out in the favor of the track? Because again, kind of like the guitar and how it doesn’t quite sound like a guitar, there is- there is almost like an inhuman quality to this- to the voice, that I like a lot.

AOIFE:

Yeah, it fits with the overall, like, vibe, of, as you said earlier, hellish

AZURE:

Yeah. Yeah it’s kind of stoic too? Like… if I was, like, screaming on that track, I don’t think it would have worked out quite as well. The rest of the track has, like, this really brooding vibe. And, like, something even a little more obvious probably would have been counter that. So yeah. I don’t regret my decisions.

AOIFE:

Yeah, I think it really worked out in the favor of the song, definitely. So, what’s your favorite part of ‘ablaze’? Like what are you most proud of?

AZURE:

I honestly don’t know what my favorite part of this song is. In terms of, like, structurally, probably just, like, the end bits. With the, uh, climax and then the song dying out at the end.

[The final part of the outro of ‘ablaze’ plays briefly, then fades out]

AZURE:

I like that because, like, you can tell what’s going on. Just by the instrumentals, you don’t really need lyrics to tell it to you for you.

AOIFE:

Yeah, definitely. So, what has the community reaction been like for you, for this song?

AZURE:

God, when I was watching the ‘ENCORE’ stream on youtube, I had arrived, like, just in time for that song to start playing and it was, like, kind of surreal in a way. I genuinely felt like I was dreaming. [sighs] Like, it was so surreal just to have an audience, you know? Because before, really I was making music for… me, a couple of friends, maybe a few people who would stumble upon it from bandcamp or something? But that was really about it. That was really all the- those were like all the comments I got. But now with the garages, it’s like “oh my god I have an audience. This is really scary. I didn’t know that this was, like, a big thing.” There was some guy, I forget- forget their name, they were making, like, a comic about it. And I was like “Dude, with my song, really? You could have picked any other song, but you- but you picked this one?” And it’s like wow. People like things.

You know, blaseball is kind of all about the fandom, we love and appreciate each other here, we- we just try and support each other however we can, and if that’s by making- making a comic about your song then… You know [chuckles] It- It’s- It’s- It’s still weird though! I’ve never had an audience before!

AOIFE:

Definitely! Like someone did an animation music video for uh-

AZURE:

‘unfair deal’? Yeah!

AOIFE:

Yes! Yeah, that’s the video I saw! And it was, like, crazy how people have latched on to the garages, and that was incredible, it was really well done too. So, lastly, other than your own music, what’s an underrated garages song that you would like to plug?

AZURE:

I would like to give a quick shout out to my main person tegan eden. Yeah, a lot of their tracks are good, and I don’t see them getting talked about, that often. Um, ‘talking to the parasite’ is really good, ‘into the shadows’ is very good-

[The first verse of ‘taking to the parasite’ by tegan eden plays, then fades into the end of the second verse of ‘into the shadows’ by tegan edan, then fades out]

AZURE:

That song kind of, like, thrives on it’s restraint and I love it a lot. There’s- and hon- honestly every- every song on ‘ENCORE’ is good, actually. ‘ENCORE’ is, like, one of those albums that you remove one track… Like, just take any track out of ‘ENCORE’ and it doesn’t feel complete anymore. Every track is necessary, you- you form this cohesive whole. It- it- it’s good, it’s- it’s a good thing we made and I’m glad to be a part of that. But yeah, listen to ‘into the shadows’ and ‘talking to the parasite’ and also other tegan egan tracks.

AOIFE:

Well, thank you so much for joining us on idol board, a podcast where we interview members of the garages, an anarcho-syndicalist blaseball band, from the fictional location of Seattle. We make songs about being gay, the apocalypse, and fighting the gods. And you can find our music at blandcamp.com, with an L, spotify, or on youtube.

We’ll see you next week! Now, here’s ‘ablaze’ by azuretone of the garages.

AZURE:

Let’s go!

[‘ablaze’ plays in its entirety]

ANNOUNCER:

Idol board is directed by Tangereen Velveteen, edited by Jennifer Cat, Nerdy Sims, and zach.ry, hosted by Aoife, transcribed by Sigilcrafter Aya, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen.

[outro music plays]

ANNOUNCER:

That was a Fourth Strike production.