About:

Susie’s music can be found under several aliases, whether that’s HTCAT, The Goodbye Method, or Rooms Without Doors. But what’s clear from her collected body of ambient, drone, and multi-genre work is an adept sense of production and ear for environmental cohesion. A deep feel for space, whether in the liminal offshoots inspired by internet backrooms or in the ordinary beauty of plundered home recordings.

This is a transcript of our interview, in which we talk about their music journey, the Furry fandom, body horror, and the sex-appeal of Garfield.

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I guess that kind of leads into my first question, which came first, the music career or the Furry awakening?

The Furry awakening would’ve been in middle school, so, I didn’t start posting music until high school so furry definitely.

What drew you to cat?

The last few pets I’ve had were all cats, so I know first-hand that that is a species I relate to most. That’s just the personality that I think I likely embody.

Howso?

Cats can be very lazy. I’m not a feisty one.

I guess in the archetypes of cats maybe there’s a triangle we can make, where like, orange cat for craziness, alley cat for fighting, and Garfield for lazy.

Okay speaking of Garfield, I was really really big into Garfield in my teen years. So that, that may be quite a bit of where I draw the connection from cats.

Is that kind of like your awakening?

Um, Garfield was one of my awakenings. Actually no, Garfield was my Furry awakening, I just realized.

What is it that drew you about Garfield.

At the time I was reading a lot of comics. That was one of them. Like the Sunday funnies, whatever. I got pretty attached to that one.

What made me a furry though was actually a particular book called Garfield’s Nine Lives. At the very end of the book, at his ninth life, he steps out of a spaceship to reveal he’s the size of humans, and he’s a Furry. And that was unexpected, but something in that really triggered my brain. Something really awoke in me with that one as it applies to specifically Furries.

Davis, Jim. Garfield, his 9 lives. Ballantine Books. 1984. https://archive.org/details/garfieldhis9live00davi/page/n129/mode/2up

So what brought you into the fandom officially then?

I don’t remember when I read that book, but I remember it was in 2018 that I decided to just look up the word Furry and see what would pull up. I had heard about Furries before I knew what they were, and I guess one night I was just looking up pictures and I just started— something happened and I just became very very interested.

Like the artwork. A lot of the very colorful, green dog characters really sparked something in me that I hadn’t really been feeling before. After that I started drawing myself. And then next stop was watching popufurs, fursuit youtubers that explained a lot of what the fandom was about. Up to that point I didn’t really know there was something called the Furry fandom.

Did the community draw you in at that point?

Yeah, I think at that point I became very interested in the fact that there was an entire social sphere around this. People my age were in there too. From there I ended up meeting— I had at least one friend in the fandom at that time I was very close with.

Even if I struggled to make one on one friends, I did feel like I had something to hold on to at the time. Like a joyful sense of identity and community I could attach to, even if it was a strictly online thing. This was something that had no connections with nobody IRL.

It was kind of like an offline vs. online split for you.

Yeah. So as much as I was attracted to this joy I had found in this online community, it actually ended up separating me more from my real-life physical community and my family. Because it sort of became this obsession that I couldn’t really share with anyone without risking revealing this entire secret Furry night life on the internet.

Did it feel like there were parts of you you couldn’t fully express to your family then?

Yeah definitely. And there were things they had actually known. I think they found out very quickly that I was into Furries. But they weren’t aware to the extent the amount of time I had been spending in that online social sphere. It wasn’t even the fact that I was a Furry I had to hide, it was the secrecy that compounded onto itself for a while.

So is this when you’re also starting to make music then?

It was around that same time. …Growing up I had done cello in middle school. I was already very very into music as it is, but the first time I picked up a DAW was in the same year that I was in this particular Furry social sphere. And one of the things that inspired me to make digital music was this furry youtuber named Verplex. He was doing remixes of videos by other popular furry youtubers, and the DAW he was using was FL Studio. So at some point I got access to FL Studio myself and started producing my own works. It took maybe a year before I actually started posting any of that music.

What drew you to digital music?

I didn’t think of myself as a very skilled musician in terms of instruments. I didn’t really have means of properly recording, let alone knowing how to play more advanced stuff. So digital music kind of opened up that world of infinite possibility. I could just pull up synths, play with random settings as needed, place them down in a grid and weird things would just happen. Cool music would just happen.

So it felt kind of more accessible to you?

Yeah, it was a lot more accessible. That and I also had an interest in listening to electronic music. So those two things did line up.

What albums were on repeat for you at this time?

I don’t think there were a lot of electronic albums I can specifically remember, but in terms of bands, Animal Collective I was really into. Gorillaz was another huge one that influenced my work, especially my art. Gorillaz really influenced my art style at the time.

That kind of makes sense, because that’s like a digital fronted band. In a sense they’re kind of the prototype of a sona-fronted project.

Yeah. I was really fascinated by that at the time.

Were you a lore person for the Gorillaz?

Yeah. The idea of this entire fictional story revolving around this really good music, and the really expansive world building, very imaginative worldbuilding, was a major inspiration to me and my earliest OC works.

So you start learning your DAW. You have a couple first projects… let’s do the one’s before your first official release. How would you say you were creating and sharing these within community.

At the time in middle school I was only sharing my artwork. My music I kept to myself, except for that one friend who was also into it.

What drove you then to get the confidence to post this on the internet then? Did you start on SoundCloud or Bandcamp? It looks like Bandcamp was your first time wise.

Soundcloud was actually where I originally started posting. I think at that point it was just a matter of— I felt my music had gotten coherent enough, and I thought good enough to begin sharing publicly. My first song on the internet was called 1ntro.

That’s a perfect name for your first song.

It wasn’t even good. That’s been deleted. Mainly to save space on my SoundCloud account.

After that is when I started to post the series of songs called Tests. Because at the time I was using the demo version of FL Studio, meaning I couldn’t save my project files. I had to export the song when I was done, close the project and lose it forever. So each song kind of had to be made one by one. So I was slowly building up my music skills over the course of a year. Just experimenting with making these songs individually.

I ended up creating fifty of them over the course of a year, which point I decided that was enough. I compiled all of those into one long playlist on SoundCloud, and then from there I went into an era of silence as I was working on a new album. Rather than doing things individually, I wanted to have one cohesive project. Even though I was still stuck with the demo version of FL Studio and making songs one by one.

…Around the end of 2020, at that point Covid had hit, I was at home a lot of the time, which gave me significantly more free time to be making these songs. And it was the start of 2021 that I began Rooms Without Doors.

First album for Rooms Without Doors is January 22nd, 2021.

So you got a better workstation then.

The thing with Audacity is you can’t write music in it. It’s specifically for recording and audio editing. But since this is a plunderphonics project it didn’t really matter since I was strictly manipulating audio in other songs.

That’s kind of interesting then because the limitations of Audacity is following along with how you create these albums.

It was actually a very opening experience though, allowing me to make a lot of sounds and projects that I hadn’t before.

I have Playground next. Very quickly, it was January 22nd and then February 5th.

I think within two months I had already released four albums using this Audacity audio manipulating technique. Each one, after making the music or while I was making it, had its own theme. And while there wasn’t much of a meaning to them, it was an exploration of narrative and aesthetic in terms of how I packaged an album and sent it out there.

So you’re thinking about the project as a whole. Compared to Tests, you’re now thinking in terms of whole albums.

Yeah. Each album ended up with its own narrative, or at least world that it existed in. I shouldn’t be watching this is about the idea of this room where nothing else exists outside of it except this bed and this TV, and it embodies this dreamlike quality where I’m just too tired to awake from immobility and the TV isn’t even showing anything specific, it exists in the background. Then Playground was inspired by a Tumblr post about somebody’s very odd dream where they wake up from a nap during kindergarten and they look outside and the world is foggy and full of giant monstrous creatures. Agoraphobia was inspired by early pre-release builds of the game Portal. And in 1,000 miles turn left is a road trip album that’s about sitting in the backseat of a car, falling asleep, and the very dreamy nature of that experience.

What a lot of these get into, as you mention, is dreamlike warps of reality. But there’s also a lot of childlike elements to these. Falling asleep in the back of the car, playground, being stuck in a room with a TV and a bed. How would you say that the idea of childhood, memory, and nostalgia play with your work.

I think Rooms Without Doors, especially in the early days, kind of had an obsession with childhood. I guess it could be somewhat inspired by that feeling of missing out on my teenage years, where I was so consumed by my identity and the experience on the internet that I didn’t really end up having the kinds of friendships and experiences that I thought most people my age would be experiencing during that time of their life. So it probably draws a lot on the nostalgia I had for being much younger and that bliss and ignorance that comes before that void of middle school.

Where did the name Rooms Without Doors come from?

It comes from that first album where the concept was literally a room without any doors. It was a very literal name, and then I simply rolled with that on all the proceeding albums. I still get comments sometimes about “I see a door in this picture and you’re lying to me,” and it kind of pisses me off a bit. It annoys me a bit.

What inspired it to be a sideproject?

I was not expecting it to last very long. In fact, I was actually releasing it on the HTCAT Bandcamp page once I created that during high school. But I got really addicted to it and as I was rolling out more and more of these plunderphonics, ambient noise wall projects as Rooms Without Doors, down the line I created its own Bandcamp page where it’s now separated from HTCAT entirely.

I still consider it a side project, as HTCAT is the music where I put in the most effort. It is the music that is also just the most accessible and traditional, if you can call it that. Whereas Rooms Without Doors is where I let myself just be completely experimental. I make whatever I want, whenever I want, on a whim. I think Rooms Without Doors essentially serves as my sketchbook of ideas.

There’s a lot of interesting experiments in your Rooms Without Doors work. One I was curious about was your MVI series, could you explain what that is?

Around that time I became very very interested in obscure YouTube videos. Many of which could be found through websites like Petit Tube, and you get pulled up these videos of random home recordings and videos people have posted to the internet without any context. It provides this interesting look at the scale and diversity of the Earth and its population.

I thought many of these videos served as interesting sounds, like sample material of all these raw recordings of reality from all over the globe from the past two decades. The concept behind this album [MVI 9999 “Broadcast Yourself] was to just use all these raw recordings clashing against each other in what I call this amalgamation of memories on life support.

…How I found almost all of these samples for this particular album is I would look up on YouTube MVI random 4-digit number, and that’s how I would find all of these various videos people have posted. There’s almost this, like, invasive quality to watching and sampling these videos. Because I’m not even sure how many of these people are aware these videos are public. Some of them seem like they were either to share with family members or finding a space to store all of their video footage. Because a lot of these videos— they’re either incredibly mundane or really confusing. None of these are videos uploaded for entertainment value. They’re clearly of a home video nature.

It’s very documentary like.

Yeah. I think the MVI series is definitely a statement on the realization of the amount of lives being lived on this world. How real all of them are and the fact that the internet allows us to witness all of these lives and just how overwhelming all of that is.

Do you think the internet gave you a safe space to be yourself? Or— you also frame it as kind of robbing you of your life. I guess is it a binary one or the other or for you it’s somewhere in the middle? What do you feel the internet has done for you?

I grew up in a religious family, and I think that being able to have this private life on the internet allowed me to explore all sorts of things, better or worse, that would’ve been uninteresting or taboo to these people in my life. So it simultaneously did give me a safe space, and at the same time, because it was strictly virtual, it drew me more apart from my family. It was definitely a double edged sword, I think.

I think it is a unique Gen Z phenomenon of being, as people say, raised on the internet. For many people, we live our lives through social media and online entertainment. And it’s one that I think a lot of us are working to understand and navigate, because previous generations did not have this structure of reality we have now. And likewise, I think that really does influence my work as this wild west of reality.

So to bring us back on track to the timeline, around this time you start Bottle Collection Tapes. The first two that are put on the label are prerecorded albums, but they’re both released December 11, 2022. What drew you to create your own label?

At the time, because I was so invested in the vaporwave scene, the works that I was creating were generally too outside of the genre to be accepted by any labels that produced physicals. So I created Bottle Collection Tapes as a space where I could provide physicals for artists who were often outside the scope of all these popular labels targeted towards specific genres. I was very interested in the music that fell between genres, kind of fell between the cracks, and giving it a space where I could share my appreciation for physical media of these albums.

And it’s mainly cassettes and CDs.

Yeah. I currently can’t afford vinyl, as much of a dream that is. Perhaps one day I could.

How do you source cassettes?

Three of the earliest releases, those being Scrap Noise, Stevie Allard, and 007, I ordered blank cassettes and then I printed the labels and dubbed the cassettes myself. But that quickly proved to be a very resource and time-consuming way to go about it, so I no longer do that. These days I order them through professional manufacturers.

So at that point you’re the distributer?

Yeah, so at that point I’m the distributer. Although I do design most of the releases as well. I want to provide, when I can to artists, the opportunity to design themselves, because I know I myself like being very specific about how my albums and packages look.

Yeah you do your own album covers, right?

A lot of the times, yes. But I also find a lot of joy in taking other people’s work and trying to, what’s the word—

Package it?

Yeah. I like designing packages for these albums in a way that hopefully accentuates what the artist is already going for.

Where did the name Bottle Collection come from?

That was another mundane one. At the time I was collecting empty bottles of things I was drinking. I had a hard time picking a name for a label so I kind of just went with the first thing I saw and then made that the name. As many bands have done in history.

If it works, it works. Okay, the next album I have, to go back to Rooms Without Doors, is Late Night Road Fantasy in 2024. What I find interesting about this album is that you made a post on Bluesky where you describe it as a Furry album, thematically speaking. Why is this one the first time that you decide to make a Furry related album?

I think it is Furry thematically in that sense of, even though I’m always with my family during these times, and even though I know a lot of them did want to get along with me well, I was too absorbed in this online Furry world to really know what to talk to them about, I guess.

It’s Furry in the sense that I think, as a Furry and as a Queer I found it difficult to know how to socialize with most people. I didn’t really know— I understood very little about the interests of normies, so to say. And again, that like, physical isolation is embodied in the album. But I still think the album is hopeful though because to me it’s about those moments of beauty that I hope were mutual in these moments on these road trips, where we’re sitting in this diner at 1 a.m. while it rains outside, where we’re the only customers in there and the staff is very excited to have us because nobody else shows up during those shifts.

Were you a big road trip family?

Yeah. Flying is expensive, so when we traveled we were often going by car.

…With a road trip, there’s not a lot you really even do except, since I was not the one driving these road trips, there’s not much to do except sit in the back seat and listen to music and falling asleep, or eating at restaurants is one of my favorite activities, especially during these trips. It’s a very liminal experience as you travel between two places as you’re kind of free from obligation. Free from the obligations when you stay at home.

The next album I have is Dream Pools. So what was going into that album?

That’s actually an album I spent a very very long time on. Many attempts to make a poolrooms inspired album. As during the pandemic I became very fascinated with liminal spaces. The idea of the poolrooms, otherwise known as the dream pools, to me felt like my personal paradise. This very sensual, blissful, infinite place. And I really wanted to make a musical ode to that.

It’s a very wet album. Not wet in the sound production sense, but wet in like, it feels very humid.

I have always been very very fascinated with pools. I just really enjoy the feeling itself of swimming and being afloat in the water. It’s very much a space where [ideas] reveal themselves to me the way many people describe taking a shower. Again, very nostalgic. So that childhood theme really comes into play again.

So Dream Pools very much represents that kind of blissful freedom I really crave from these liminal space obsessions at the time.

It’s kind of interesting that a cat fursona would love water.

Heres the thing, I actually hate being wet. That’s one thing I share in common with cats.

Like if I’m completely submerged in water I get used to it. But if it’s raining outside I will refuse to go outside. Part of that might be because I grew up in Colorado where the rain was very very cold. It was very unpleasant to get rained on. And I also may have autistic sensory issues that play into it as well.

But you like pools still, like being in water.

Yeah. I think that it’s interesting, with the album Dream Pools, I was presenting this not just as a space that exists but as a space that is ran by people. I think I even suggested that they have restaurants in this place. It’s almost like a giant waterpark that is being maintained.

There are a lot of voices running in the background, which is different to a lot of backrooms inspired stuff which is usually empty. But you do have a lot of background people in all of your work.

Yeah. That’s kind of interesting. …When Underwater Computing did a physical release of the album, they used a tagline saying like “Tickets now available,” and then that threw me off because I hadn’t thought about the place as something you had to pay to go into. I kind of thought about it as this place that anybody could come. So pairing that with the ideas I had of this place being maintained by people and restaurants and other amenities within, it became this capitalized space that I didn’t really intend. I think it’s fun to look back on it now as an album about heaven and paradise itself being taken over and capitalized upon. This space that I intended for the whole world to be free in is now being gated by money.

The next albums I have— actually let’s do one at a time. So first we have Black Box. Which compared to a lot of your earlier albums, this is a lot louder and denser, if that makes sense. What was motivating you for this one?

It’s very interesting to me because this album deliberately went against a lot of the production techniques and rules that I had been following at the time. It is blaring and distorted. There are songs where the beat is completely out of rhythm. There are songs where it cuts in and out of pure harsh silence. The intention was not even to make an album that sounded pleasant or good. The intention was to purely embody the emotions I was feeling at the time. And I think I succeeded at that very well.

Comparatively, Houses (with things that’ve died) Is very quiet.

I mean that one is loud to me. Mainly because I think the majority of that album takes space in the bass frequencies. Like with headphones it’s very loud and enveloping. But if you listen to the album through a phone speaker— I tried to show the first song to somebody once and neither of us could even hear it at full volume.

What’s interesting with this is that it’s your first album that has Queer in its tags. And I think you mentioned on Bluesky that while it isn’t a Furry album it is a Queer album. Could you elaborate on that?

The release of this album coincided around the same time as Trump’s inauguration. So this album really embodies this anxiety and vision of the future falling apart, as we have clearly seen it happen over the past year and a half under the new administration. I tagged it as Queer because myself, as a Queer, am a target of this current government. This album is very much about the dread of knowing the world as you know it is going to get worse and fall apart.

This might just be a me thing, because I feel that a lot, but there is a point in the album, especially with that last track— I don’t know, I feel like there’s something like the clouds breaking away in that last track that lifts me out when I listen to this one.

Yeah. I think that’s a very accurate way to describe it because I think even one of the images I used at the time was a daylight version of the album cover I had edited together. Because as much as this album is about the destruction of America, in a sense it finds its hope in the possibility that this collapse will break the capitalist illusion and complacency that we’re all pulled into. It’s a hope that, even in the face of all this, we could just become human beings again and work as community to survive this ordeal. As I’ve seen you post about on your page, throughout much of history, Queer people and other minorities were heavily oppressed. But we still found amazing ways to thrive underneath that regardless. So to me, that is the hope that resides in the album.

Another interesting note, I actually consider Houses the finale of a trilogy. That being A GHOST HUNTS [FOXES IN WINTER TIME ON A FROZEN SEA], Black Box, and Houses. I don’t know why it’s a trilogy, because there’s no intentional correlation, or can I find a tangible connection between them. It’s mainly a very intuitive realization.

It’s just like an artistic era for you.

Yeah. Whereas one narrative I can find within it— whereas A Ghost Hunts and Black Box embody a lot of self-hatred and shame, Houses kind of snaps me out of it in the midst of this terrifying political climate. Like I begin to look away from blaming myself and looking more at the fact that there are people around me that are going to need my help in these times.

It’s a moment where you realize that you are connected to a bigger community around you.

Yeah. And I think this does mark a shift in Rooms Without Doors, looking away from myself and more towards the world again and how it works, how it functions.

That kind of makes sense because after Houses the next two albums are 2021-2024 and a collaboration album. So it does feel that Houses, now that you point it out, is the end of an era and something begins there. Almost like an intermission, if that makes sense.

When it comes to eras for Rooms Without Doors, I would consider the first era to be I shouldn’t be Watching this through Farenheit. i hope truth finds you [and heals you] is kind of an intermission album, as that was a much older album I had made. It was originally called Space Invaders, but I had never uploaded it because the files were too big to upload to Bandcamp at the time. So that one was a very late release. Then stendhal syndrome going forward begins a second era. I guess you could be right that Houses ends that second era and then a third era, that division is blurry to me.

…roadkill is a split between me and HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY!. He’s a buddy of mine I met through the vaporwave label World End Collapse. Which that was a label doing pretty much the exact same thing I was trying to do with Bottle Collection Tapes. A physical label geared towards the weird side of vaporwave. I ended up releasing Late Night Road Fantasy through that label. since then I’ve done many more releases through them, including A Ghost Hunts, and Black Box. 

roadkill what we did is we gave each other samples to work with, and then we made something out of them. It was this trade of—

An artistic experiment, it sounds like.

Yeah. I think one of the songs on roadkill, that being beach leak, became the basis for another album called private conservation.

Another one of the samples on this album I used across My Friend With Autism. And then beach leak became the name of this dariacore style collaboration with HIAFR!

To bounce back to HTCAT, around the same time as this era it looks like there’s an unfinished album called I Hope You Write. Can you go into that album a bit? The one thing I find significant about the album is that I believe on some of these tracks it’s your voice, and maybe that’s the first time. Is that right?

This was the first time I sang on my songs, at least legibly. I Hope You Write is the product of— in like late 2022 and then going through 2023 I had gone through a very intense, emotional trauma and restructuring of my world view. And in the wake of that— this album was originally going to be about a lot of the blame I put on myself that I didn’t need to be blaming, and in the midst of this unrequited crush I was having, and a lot of these intense emotions I was obsessing with. I almost held on to them for the sole sake of making this album about them, that being I Hope You Write a Song About Me Someday. But as it dragged out, I was unable to complete the work. I had just become exhausted on it. So this album is what remains of it. And by releasing that, it allowed me partly to let go of a lot of those feelings and move on with my life.

Which to tie back into Black Box. Black Box was another album that when I released it, I was very worried that a lot of the intense emotions I was putting into it would reignite or come back whenever I looked back at the album. Like I was actually considering deleting the album shortly after I had posted it. But due to a lot of the unexpected positive feedback from a lot of youtube commenters and friends, I kept it up. And I’m glad I did because that album, by posting it and solidifying this state of mind, actually helped me move on from it.  Like that was the first time I had the power of creating art and music and this cycle of processing and healing from very intense times.

It can be a packaged statement that you let go of.

Yeah. So I Hope You Write is one of those, even in its unfinished state. I do plan to return to making music as The Goodbye Method, because The Goodbye Method is one where I started actually recording music. Playing drums, playing guitar, as this [separate] thing from HTCAT which is still largely an electronic and even dance oriented project.

So to go back to Rooms Without Doors, the next album, kind of start of the new era if you want to call it that, is Balloon. Which is a very narrative heavy album. Do you want to talk about that?

That was very directly inspired by the works of Mal, an artist specializing in these megalithic, shape shifting inflatable creatures. And I was very infatuated with the convergence of horror and enticement I felt from it. There was a particular piece of this character waking up to these strange beasts hovering over them in bed, and then they proceed to be transformed into one of them. And this depiction of this violation and theft of identity and body, it stuck with me, it resonated with me a lot. This album is an ode to both this particular work and then by extension my fascination with transformation.

I think, I’ll be honest, my interest in transformation actually predates my knowledge of Furries.

Mal. Bedtime. 2020. https://squeaky.monster/portfolio/bedtime

Post by @squeaky.monster — Bluesky

I think that’s pretty true for a lot of people.

I think my interest in Furries was in some ways an abstraction of this interest in transformation and this desire to abandon the human form.

Do you have a transformation awakening?

Like many people it was children’s cartoons. The Ninjago episode where one of them is turning into a snake very slowly, oddly enough the Magic School Bus episode where they turn into snowflakes, all sorts of bizarre things like that that culminate into this interest.

You mentioned with Black Box something that stuck with you there was a dream about body horror. So it does sort of feel like a subconscious thing with you.

Yeah. I think Balloon is about realizing the connection between horror and kink. Balloon deliberately explores both reactions to this fantasy experience.

…with the CD release of Balloon on the back I ended up writing this entire short story detailing out the specifics of what imagine to be happening over the course of the album.

Cards on the table, this is my favorite album because it is so experiential. And you do things with sounds that I’m really fascinated by, especially with how rubbery those drums are. I don’t know how you do a lot of those sounds to be honest.

Some of the samples on this album range from literally sampling balloon noises or stomach noises and things like that. There’s even some Furry asmr in there. I’m not sure either how I got that sound from tracks themselves. One of the samples is Boys by Patricia Taxxon. That one already has that rubbery sound built into the album. That’s a fantastic album, by the way. One of my favorite releases.

Truth or truth, would you like to be randomly balloon TF’d in the middle of the night?

Um—

I don’t know if the experience of this album is quite the joyful experience as it may seem for many other artists. This is a little scary.

As long as I don’t die. As long as I get to return, I’m all for it. The ending destruction of the album is where it completely deviates from any of my desires, to be clear.

Did you do inflation because you were inspired by this specific artist or is it a sphere you identify with in the Furry fandom?

As a derivation of transformation I got very into inflation specifically. This artist’s work was already very tangent to my obsessions with transformation and the like. So even though this album narratively is based on the work of this artist, I am also projecting many of my own interests and thoughts into it as well.

There’s two more albums I want to get into, the first one is My Friend With Autism. How you’re able to get narrative out of instrumental albums is really fascinating. With this album, the titles really create a story. Do you care to go into that?

I think My Friend With Autism is the most explicit embodiment of my own personal narrative of feeling outcast as an autistic person and finding it very difficult to know how to speak to other people in any way. And then that being severely compounded by internet addiction during my middle school and high school years. It is a very depressing album to me, and a very personal one. Honestly perhaps my most emotional, personal album to date.

Care to elaborate?

I think I might not get into the specifics. I feel like the mystery of the album hopefully lends to that.

Sorry to go back, but I forgot to ask, Balloon is the first album that you tagged as Furry. Not including the dual album with HIAFR!. Was there any hesitancy to tagging an album as Furry to you?

I think dialing back a bit, the second album in the MVI series is called MVI 5777 “Broke the Phone at Anthrocon 2013.” And with that one there could have been some plausible deniability that it was just aesthetic, even though anybody who knew me on social media at the time— I was always reposting Furry art, I was drawing Furry art, it was no secret. Although that was the first album I explicitly included Furries in the work, followed by Black Box. Which the cat guy on the cover, his name is Degnan. The dog girl on the back of the [CD &] YouTube upload, her name is Merrill. Those were characters I was using as exploration of my sexuality and shame I was experiencing. And they’re also both from a backrooms comic that’s been developing in the back of my mind about this group of explorers wandering around the backrooms where it’s— there are no monsters or other immediate threats, and it becomes more of a psychological exploration of characters.

…And then Balloon, there was no hesitancy to tagging it as Furry. Like I said, at that point I was very open to the world about being a Furry. There was a hesitancy though to posting what is basically a transformation fetish album. Like it goes without saying it can be a bit embarrassing, and I actually did also consider deleting that one. But again, like with Black Box, the response to that one was overwhelmingly positive and I kept it up.

And again, that’s another experience where I was no longer— it helped me move on from being worried about revealing such things when it’s kind of presented as an art project for either interpretation.

That’s how you’ve got to do things. You just got to put all your weirdness into albums and boom, it’s art now.

A lot of your albums it seems— you talk a lot about shame going into the album and then clarity— not peace of mind but ability to move on afterwards. Does that make sense? Do you think that, over your time as an artist you— maybe not learned to let go of your shame but to be open about it?

Yeah, definitely. I think some of that can go hand in hand with finding— part of it is growing up and having more autonomy allowing me to be more open about these things and finding communities I could feel safe and welcome in— where I could be a lot more open about many things helped. There was a point where in middle school I was very interested in following the popufurs and the fursuiters and the surface level of the fandom, at least to most outsiders. And I moved on to a lot more of the niche, community oriented— discord furry art servers is where I ended up finding a lot of my connections.

The final album I wanted to talk about was the newest, well apparently not the newest one, I just saw yesterday you had a new album coming out. We love to see it, you’re very prolific, in a good way. But the last one you did was I THINK YOU KNOW WHAT IS REAL!, which kind of, good transition from our talk about shame and community. What I find interesting about this album is that you made a post on Bluesky where you said it was a failed vehicle for your intent, and I’m just curious why you think that?

That was funny to see, love to see it though.

That, or the track called Shame, which is literally a person talking about how shame doesn’t work. It only drives people to live in secret about it rather than change. That was not even a video about sexuality, that was a video about AI. Which is a very very good video I’d recommend to anyone who is struggling to know how to deal with the AI epidemic. 

In the description you do talk a lot about how fantasy and reality blend in spheres of community and sexuality. Is this a theme that maybe we’ll see more from you in the future? Talking to you, it’s really been illuminating to see how much these albums are very thoughtful explorations about feeling and reality.

I definitely thought about returning to the subject, either as a direct sequel to the album or maybe some form some day that I don’t know yet what it will take. But it is a subject that I am not finished with yet. I think the subject may be better explored in some of the stories that I’m writing about or plan to write about. So the backroom’s comic absolutely being one of those. I have another multimedia one planned about a character who rediscovers her own past through various internet posts and computer files. Which that one is going to be an un-fiction project. There’s definitely some obvious Petscop influence in it.

The story is intended to be a commentary on the complete disconnect between the origins of objects. Whereas we kind of treat objects as these things that exist of their own volition, or don’t even think about the objects at all— whereas in reality there is an entire history of hands and people and lives behind every human made object we see. But since that is such a broad scope of exploration I wanted to narrow in on the food industry in particular. And even more specifically the meat industry. And sure, it’s vegan propaganda.

We’re approaching the 2 hour mark and I wanted to give you some rapid fire questions.

Are you Team Paws or Team Maws?

Now that’s a tricky one these days. I used to be Team Paws but now I’ve moved onto Team Maws. I’ve grown up.

Furry Crushes?

Pina from Beastars. Jax from Amazing Digital Circus, who I absolutely hate and I absolutely love.

Isn’t that how it goes?

Yeah. …I’m trying to come up with a third.

Is Garfield a Furry crush for you?

Um, yeah. Okay, Garfield. Yes

Nice, we respect it here. If we’ve learned anything from this interview, no shame.

Favorite Deltarune character?

I’ve grown very attached to Susie, if it’s not very obvious. I don’t really relate to the character, despite having borrowed the name. But like, she actually was a transgender awakening for me. She’s the reason I’m trans… And likewise, as I started to see people’s perspectives on Deltarune, I became more and more interested in what she actually is and what she represents, and I think it’s beautiful.

Final question. What Furry art is inspiring you now?

HYDROPLANED INTO A FALSE REALITY!. He’s doing honestly some of the most incredible stuff I’ve heard this year. …eyes up feline is my number one recommendation, that one is crazy. character actor is the other one I’ve really been loving.

I’ve recently become obsessed with This is the Glasshouse’s 867. It’s like a Furry Canadian version of Black Country, New Road in my eyes. Bałtyk and their albums Grapefruit and Self-help, I’ve really been enjoying those. Okay one more, this is just a single art piece, but have you seen Soundkillaz Razor Sharp V.S. Ruff Rydas? I love this video. I’ve been watching this 500 times over in the past few days. As I’ve said, animation is my favorite artform. …I have a friend who actually is currently doing animations online. Shoutout to Don Dunno. I’ve considered working with her to do the Sword animation. She’s a friend of mine from high school.

Is there anything I missed that you want to mention?

To tease my next album, which may already be released by the time this interview comes out, Late Night Air Terminal, which is a sequel to Late Night Road Fantasy, except this time it’s a Towers inspired Drone album and an ode to airports.

Thank you so much for your time, this has been a great conversation.

Thank you too as well.

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