🔊 Stream this on other platforms like YouTube and Spotify: distrokid.com/hyperfollow/moule/wheres-rocky

👕 Where's Rocky? Merch: www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/161759002

🎥 Where's Rocky? Cover Art Timelapse: invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=GO_hFvv5p18

This track was created on June 6, 2024 and finished two days later. My aim was to create something that's futuristic but creepy, as I've fallen in love with creepy ambient music recently.

Playing around in Logic Pro, I ended up reversing part of my track "Many Moves Ahead" and stretching it out, lowering its pitch, which created this really pleasing-sounding (pleasing to me, anyway) electronic noise. I added a reversed sample from another recent release, "FOXR Sleep Mode", and following some slight edits and listening to this track over and over again, ended up producing this. The SilverVerb plugin works like a treat, too, giving this track a sense of vastness symbolising the sheer amount of Rocky Clones and their uncanniness.

Creating this track was also my attempt at challenging the inner perfectionist in my head who demands a "maximalist" approach to sound design where there needs to be lots of fields, plugins, complicated automation and mastering, etc, and who believes that me using distorted samples of my past releases is somehow "cheating", when really I find this sort of reversed and reverbed sound very appealing and unlocks a lot of musical possibilities.

I’ve had so much fun designing this track’s cover artwork! I use Assembly, a graphic design app for iOS, and imported the design of Rocky I made for the promotional material for my track “The Singularity”. I also imported Melody from Hoodie Rave, and The Trash Panda from Webpunks, as originally Rocky’s clones were going to be seen from a slight angle, and Melody’s hoodie would be re-textured to be Rocky’s hoodie and I could easily re-colour The Trash Panda to be Rocky. However, I opted for the front-facing Rocky, which gave me more ease of designing when I imported assets from the other MOULE WORLD characters' emojis I’d eventually use to design the Rocky Clones.

So I clone the original Rocky 10 times and make slight edits to him, then I clone the 10 clones and make even more noticeable changes to him, eventually having 5 rows of 10 clones, each row showing the changes even more drastic than the previous rows and even starting to resemble other MOULE WORLD characters. I originally intended to have 100 clones of Rocky featuring some downright horrific, Lovecraftian-style monster versions of Rocky, but capped it at 50 since each clone gradually involved spending more and more time altering them, and I had spent 9 hours designing this artwork. Plus, organising them at the end to fit in the cover artwork would’ve been very tricky.

Some fun facts about this cover artworks:

• I deliberately gave the Rocky clones grotesque features such as disjoined hands and fingers, parodying how some text-to-image models can’t get them right.

• Similarly, I added an extra Y in “ROCKY” to the title in the cover artwork parodying how some text-to-image models misspell words or mutate the letters slightly, as I did with the second E in “WHERE’S”. I edited the MOULE logo to parody that as well.

• One of the clones I designed is a reference to Loab, a creepy AI-generated character that comes from the latent spaces of text-to-image models when using “negative prompts”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loab

It's my 195th finished track and 123rd release. I hope you enjoy it! Let me know what you think on the Fediverse by tagging me @MOULE@moule.world, or get in contact via email!

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