Hatchet Shrimp - Beet Boxes
Channel: Look I Made A Thing
Date: 2024-01-22

This is a song that I've been making on and off for over three years. I started it after the George Floyd protests in Seattle back in 2020. By this point the police had already: sprayed mace on a child; covered their badge numbers to avoid reporting (saying it was done as a sign of mourning); tear-gassed a crowd after a police officer attempted to take someone's pink umbrella and the protester had yanked it back; continued to use tear gas and flash bangs in spite of a 30-day ban on tear gas that went into effect two days earlier; hit Aubreanna Inda, a kneeling protester, in the chest with a flash-bang, causing cardiac arrest, and allegedly threw flash-bangs in a volunteer medical tent while she was being examined/evacuated. 

This song wasn't a protest song. I was just so incredibly angry at the police and my city's government that I tried to make a dance song to calm down. I got an Antlion Modmic for playing games with friends and decided I'd beatbox the drums into it, process it with effects, then see what other crazy vocals I could add. I even gave it a silly title, "beet boxes", as a play on words. The chanting section wasn't really chanting, it was me experimenting with doing a yoi-bass vocally. I thought I'd do something like "ee, yoh, yah" and then shape it with formant filters and octave-shifters. But I wasn't very good at hiding how I was feeling. The yoi-bass became distortion, then harmonics feeding into more distortion, then more, until it sounded like a chant of wordless rage. The sort of vocal fry throat-singing part became a deranged siren. The breaths meant as ear-candy adopted a running/hyperventilating sound. I made the angriest fuckin' dance song. 

I've been sitting on it for a few years because I didn't feel right releasing it near the time of the protests. I didn't want to take away from anyone's message and it wasn't intended to be a statement, just getting out how I felt. But any time I've felt angry or frustrated at systemic injustice, I'd mix the song to try to calm down and just make it angrier somehow. So at this point, enjoy my mad-at-the-cops/fuck government inaction anthem. Maybe it'll help you, idk. 

This was recorded onto a fresh B-side of a Maxell XLII 90 type 2 high-bias cassette tape via RCA line-in. The deck is a recently-serviced Onkyo TA-630 DM with new belts, and the tape was played back and recorded in Reaper from the deck's headphone out into a Focusrite Clarett+ 4Pre audio interface (24-bit, 96khz). A limiter is on the master (DMG Audio Limitless) with 24-bit dithering and noise-shaping at 119%. No other processing. Reaper render is also 24-bit, 96khz normalized to a True Peak of -0.5db (because I realized I could go ever-so-slightly louder but didn't want to fuss with the limiter again).