[READ TIMELINE PT. 1 FIRST]
In my last post I laid out The Tsubi Club Approach To Making Stuff as I currently understand it. With all of that established, I feel a little more prepared to meaningfully break down everything we’ve done in these first five years. I personally am hoping to find something enlightening by writing this, maybe you will too by reading it.
Here is that chart again:
I’ll include links to every release as I list them so that maybe this post can serve as some kind of archive as well.
From 2017-2020 I was working as a music producer under the name biskwiq, putting out remixes on soundcloud and making beats for friends I met online. At the tail end of that era, I felt motivated to try my hand at something a bit more elaborate.
The early iterations of tsubi club started in 2020 as a loosely defined “multimedia project”. My initial intention was to use my background as a musician to explore other mediums and creative spaces I took interest in. While in covid lockdown for the better part of that year, that exploration mutated into something a bit more existential.
OCT 2021
burbank house release
Ambition v. everything else, a debut about itself. Both the song and the video focus on a leap of faith, which is all tsubi club was at that time. I had never storyboarded, acted in, or edited a music video before this. I had never even written lyrics or sang on a song for that matter.
My years as a producer were fruitful enough for me to have a $10k budget to put towards my own artist project, and I bet all my chips on this music video.
I put together a team of friend-recommended filmmakers and artists I cold DM’d on twitter (full credits are in the youtube description), and did my best to passionately lead something I was entirely too inexperienced for. Early germs of the current tsubi club collaborative approach started to form out of that inexperience.
I remember being repeatedly astounded by the expertise everyone had in their respective fields, and being pleasantly surprised by how much everyone wanted to give something their all as much as I did. When it was all said and done, I took that with me most.
NOV 2021:
re:burbank.house release
burbank_house :GROUNDWORKS production begins
After burbank house came out, I released a remix I made of the song alongside the stem files so that other producers could remix it. As a remixer myself, that was always something I appreciated other artists doing, and an open-source, copyright-free policy aligned with my intention to blur the line between ends and means. I was riding such a high on the multi-disciplinary process of making the music video that I wanted to extend that opportunity to get involved to visual artists as well.
After some ideating, we decided the most interesting thing to try would be a collaboratively produced physical artbook. It would be independently funded by the streaming revenue I’d made, and profits were to be distributed evenly amongst everyone who contributes. I made a post inviting visual artists of any medium to join in on what we ended up calling burbank_house :GROUNDWORKS. Even though we had just released our first ever project, over 200 artists submitted their portfolios, which to this day is still the most motivating thing that has happened to me. I could not believe how eager other people were to be a part of something like this, and it occurred to me for the first time that there was something powerful in the approach we were taking.
This was also the first time I’d make the mistake of underestimating how much time large-scale projects can take, but more on that later. The problem immediately in front of me at the time was that I didn’t really have an idea of what this book was going to be outside of the concept. I basically had a discord filled with 100 artists and no idea how to direct them, so I kind of didn’t.
My best plan of action was to split all the artists into teams assigned with different sections of the book. In each team there were editors, layout designers, and what we called “element artists”. Within that structure, I basically just encouraged everyone to make what they wanted. We had team meetings to ideate on individual pages and how best to combine every members’ art, and book-wide meetings to collectively explore how to uniquely apply our collective efforts. Despite how directionless it all felt, something cohesive started to take shape.
My eyes were opened. If our intention was to showcase the combination of our efforts, it could look like anything. We didn’t have to compromise the process for the sake of cohesion or how it was packaged, it felt exactly like what I was after.
APR 2022:
tsubi.club production begins
When it became more apparent that tsubi club’s identity was inseparable from the individual identity of everyone involved, I wanted to come up with a way to highlight every voice in the choir. That was the inception of this website.
We were faced with the challenge of making it as easy to find any single contributor to the book as it was to find tsubi club itself. Our goal (even now after 4 years of working on this website) is to create a user-updated, interactive database showcasing every artist who contributes to tsubi club.
At the time this post will go out it’s functionally a storefront/home base to download stems/a venue for me to be long-winded like I am right now, but as I said there is a pattern here of underestimating how long it takes to make stuff. The plan is to launch the :NETWORK alongside :GROUNDWORKS, and I’ll probably speak more on all of that when we finally put the book out. The line of merch we’re launching alongside this first version of the website is going to be funding some plans for when all of that happens, so please do consider supporting if you have the funds!
JUL 2022:
- live in concert audiovisual v1 debut (included in scythe1 usb)
- laced up video production begins
This was a very overachieving and arguably delusional moment in my life. I was working on the artbook, the website, developing the first tsubi club live performances, and finishing a song I was convinced at the time would be a timely follow up to burbank house.
There were over 100 people and counting simultaneously working on what we had set in motion. There was a lot going on. It was exciting. At that time it felt like this was all going to be so big, like we started rolling a snowball that would endlessly grow and never stop.
That feeling informed our first venture into live performance, which aimed to put on the kind of show that’s built for a much bigger stage than where we were actually playing. There was an overwhelming urge to message that what we were doing was working, that we cracked some kind of code. That feeling also informed the pre-planning process of laced up, which I had announced would be our second music video in April of that year before even starting video production (I don’t have a valid explanation for why I did that other than like reckless optimism).
We started storyboarding the second I got back from tour. Our artistic intention was to further explore everything I was getting at in burbank house, but our material goal was sheer grandiosity. We wanted to prove to ourselves that this was the real deal, that our approach could independently produce something equally as impressive as what institutions like major labels or movie studios could do. I think it all got a little wrapped up in ego, but it was pure at heart.
The actual process of creating laced up from beginning to end should probably be its own blog post (this one is already really long as it is). In short, I had no idea what we had signed ourselves up for. Without elaborating any further, I would just consider this point in the timeline to be the rising action before a difficult battle with burnout that ultimately broke “what tsubi club is” in two.
JAN 2023
goop fest gauntlet [rhythm game experiment]
In the midst of everything I was doing, I stopped making music. I had been managing three collaborations at once for months, and didn’t feel like I was able to take time to be playfully creative. That absence started to wear on me over time, and I was encouraged by several supportive voices in my life that it would be good for me to put effort into something I didn’t have to take very seriously.
So I did. I started making a lot of mashups, just putting acapellas on instrumental loops of other songs. It was low effort and fun and simple and just what I needed.
Around the end of 2022, my friend Shirin hit me up to contribute a 10 minute url set for a charity stream, which was a perfect excuse to put the mashups I had been making to good use. I was playing a lot of guitar hero around then, and had the idea to chart my set in guitar hero to visually accompany my set.
Despite how insignificant this little side venture may seem, it’s an integral part of how trinket came to be. That silly 10 minute guitar hero set is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever worked on. It served as an invaluable creative reset I would eventually touch back on later.
JUL 2024:
laced up release
Like I said earlier, I think it’d probably be best to get into the finer details of what it was like to make laced up in another post. In short, I would liken it to Synecdoche, New York.
What I will speak to here is the impact it had on tsubi club overall. Working on that video became such a constant in our lives that it was hard to imagine it not being there anymore. There was a point in the middle of it all that I started to think it would be the last thing I ever made, like I wouldn’t have anything to give after putting everything I could into this one basket. For a while I was telling people that tsubi club would just be a trilogy, that I would at best have one more thing in me after laced up and then it would be over. That train of thought evaporated all at once when we finally started to roll it out.
We had always talked about doing an irl premier event, but after quietly working on the video for so long we were unsure if anyone would still care to show up. To all of our surprise, the release date announcement was met with overwhelming excitement. Everyone stuck around. We did an irl premier in Los Angeles, and members of the team all flew out to be there for what we had been working towards for years. That was the most cathartic night of my life.
We had released one song and a remix up until that point, and we sold out a screening for a 9 minute music video that was announced two years prior. If that isn’t the most compelling reason to believe in what we were doing I don't know what is. We screened it two times in a row, the second time I was screaming at the top of my lungs the names of who worked on each shot as they appeared. We cried, we cheered, we gave an embarrassingly adrenaline fueled speech afterwards. It was the stuff of dreams. I lied awake in bed that night knowing for certain that the dream of tsubi club is real and worth pursuing for as long as I live.
OCT 2024:
re:laced.up release
The months following laced up’s release felt unfamiliar. We were in the editorial stages of the artbook and the website was kind of on the back burner. I was more excited than I had ever been, but still deeply exhausted after how hard we worked on the home stretch of the music video.
I was also out of disposable income to put toward any Next Big Thing. Part of my initiative to promote what we made was to put out a remix of the song like I had for burbank house. The only problem was I still didn’t have any creative juice in the tank. I had no ideas, no plan of action, I just wanted to play mariokart honestly.
My solution was to dig through all the scrapped ideas and project files I had already tried out in the process of creating laced up. Afterall, there were hundreds. The combination of all those files became re:laced.up, an erratic collage packed with as many discarded ideas as I could reasonably fit into it. I put that process of repurposing my own work in my back pocket for later.
NOV 2024:
THE THIRD EYE release with flclreanimated
It’s this kind of Cooly Cooly new modality!
JAN 2025:
no place like home [rhythm game experiment] production begins
My post-laced up limbo continued into 2025. I thought about that guitar hero project often, something fun and awesome and entirely unconcerned with any sort of greater message. I felt compelled to explore that idea even further.
So I started making mashups again. Making the laced up remix reminded me how fun it was to make electronic music, build-ups and drops and things like that, which bled into these mashups until they were fully produced remixes in their own right. As my folder got larger, it made me want to go bigger with the rhythm game element too.
The electronic direction I had taken with all the music made things difficult to translate into playable guitar hero charts, so I expanded into other rhythm games, which necessitated a lot of outside help (here we go again). I reached out to community members of all the rhythm games I’d ever played or was aware of: beatsaber, rhythm heaven, DDR, taiko, muse dash, spinrhythmxd, etc. The project started to take a very complicated shape.
I had around 45 minutes of music in the form of a dj set, all of which was charted to various rhythm games, and my plan was to somehow set it all up so that I could record myself playing it all the way through in one take like an endurance challenge. I even rearranged my room to look like some kind of rhythm game cockpit. It all kind of took over my life.
It was a lot of work: rehearsing, refining, problem solving how to deal with game latency and hitting all my cues. It started to get a little overwhelming, which started to feel bad because this was all in pursuit of having some care-free fun. I ended up doing a lot of reflecting on my tendencies to turn my creative endeavors into unruly beasts. Despite being really close to the finish line, I stopped working on the rhythm game project altogether. I needed to reset completely.
APR 2025:
cartoonlover25 reset
I flew home for a family wedding that spring, which is good for reflecting on what you’re doing with your life whether you want to or not. I was being asked a lot what I was up to, if I had something new on the horizon, to which my best answer was “we are still working on that book, but right now I’m doing this thing with rhythm games”. Most people looked as lost on my answer as I felt. I felt like I needed to pour time into something I couldn’t possibly regret having to finish later.
While I was home I dug through my parent’s basement and found some old classroom instruments of mine: a recorder, a cheap harmonica, and my first guitar. I started keeping a daily audio journal. I was recording and manipulating these three instruments without any intention to take it any farther than an hour or two session. They were aimless and oftentimes didn’t even follow a metronome. I catalogued what I made everyday on a bandcamp account called cartoonlover25, alongside a two line poem I’d put in the description. It felt really good.
I began to realize I didn’t really need to do any more than that to feel fulfilled. The music was explorative, my head felt clear, I was really in tune with myself and a craft. I naturally started sharing the bandcamp account amongst friends, and it became this fun daily check-in where “the cartoonlover today” would come up in conversation.
I could probably live that way forever, except for two glaring problems: rent is due at the first of every month, and more importantly, I just ordered a palette of 500 hardcover artbooks that are going to sit in the corner of my room until I do something about it.
NOV 2025
trinket production begins
Admittedly, trinket was a financially motivated venture. If you can believe it, fronting money for several large-scale projects while only having 2 songs and a couple remixes out will really put you in the red.
When ordering the artbooks hit my bank account, it became pretty clear I needed to do something. After all, tsubi club as a collaborative effort hinges on my ability to afford whatever we need to make it all happen. The most obvious answer was to put some music out.
The situation felt a lot like when I was tasked with remixing laced up. The project was conceived out of a need to make something, rather than coming from an initial, naturally occurring idea or direction. With re:laced.up, repurposing fragments of forgotten and unused project files worked really well, and with the scrapped rhythm game dj set + all of the cartoonlover ideas, I had plenty of material to work with.
I spent a month trying to find some kind of harmony between the unserious noodlings of the cartoonlover stuff and the harder hitting production style of the rhythm game set. The way I saw it, I was working with two opposite sides of my personal creative spectrum. Somewhere in the middle of the two was a compelling sweet spot.
Finding the sound was the fun part. There was a far more daunting challenge looming ahead of me. I am not an experienced lyricist or singer. I had only ever written two songs before I started working on trinket. The vocal side of the music-making process feels a lot more like a requirement than something I feel I have any sort of meaningful contribution to. I’m not a romantic in the way I feel most people expect someone writing lyrics to be. I have a hard time even registering what other people say in songs because I get so swept up in the instrumental. With burbank house and laced up, I had the benefit of the accompanying visual story to inform what I wrote about. With trinket, I couldn’t afford such a luxury.
The best thing I could think to do was pretend there was a visual world to it all, and develop that until I had enough to extrapolate lyrics from. This is where the diorama concept originated.
It was hard not to think of what I was doing musically like playing with toys. I had a bin of deeply unserious music that I kept taking apart and putting back together arbitrarily until it felt more and more like something cohesive. It was clay and legos and action figures and construction paper. In complete contrast to laced up’s grandiosity, trinket felt characteristically small. Instead of imagining a video or something cinematic for every song, I started thinking of the songs as miniature scenes.
Resident tsubi club smart guy Stu Robinson described the finalized concept of trinket way more eloquently than I can:
trinket is a collage of hundreds of unfocused sonic ideas resampled and repurposed to form new and complete songs. The most analogous visual corollary to this process is 'kitbashing', a medium in which modelmakers use discarded parts of model kits outside of their intended purpose to assemble a wholly original creation. Each song in trinket can be understood as a form of diorama; an assemblage of disparate production experiments given focus in the context of a single composition, structured around a small narrative scenario. For each song in the track list, there is a corresponding diorama. Each diorama can be identified by a selection of thematic objects. trinket is the totality of thematic objects from all 12 dioramas kitbashed together into a comprehensive abstract structure. This comprehensive structure is ultimately spherical (although imperfect), in reference to the Sisyphean and aggregate nature of creative endeavor.
In addition to all of that, there’s a metanarrative coach character featured throughout the album. This came from a motif I used in a lot of the cartoonlover stuff, where I was sampling Danny Devito’s character from the Disney Hercules movie. Having a coach scream encouraging words and affirmations as I worked on the songs unironically helped me to keep my head above water while working on trinket, and despite the fact that this coach guy had nothing to do with any of the dioramas, it felt right to include him in the final product. To avoid Disney erasing me with a space laser for copyright infringement, we reached out to veteran voice actor Daniel Riordan to rerecord all the dialogue.
In late December of 2025, I was asked to join my friend Aries on his UK tour that coming April, which felt like the perfect due date to finish what I’d started. Without that deadline set, I probably would have tinkered with trinket way longer than I did, and I’m glad that I wasn’t able to. It forced me to allow the album to be the mess that it was, which is a lot more honest (and compelling in my opinion) than if I had spent as much time refining it as I had my previous work.
Historically for me, those next four months of finishing the album would have been insanely stressful. This time, for some reason, it wasn’t. I think my former state of mind would have put extreme weight on the fact that this was technically my “debut album”. Something about my experience making all the cartoonlover stuff without expectation or evaluation in conjunction with my coach cheering me on. I can remember countless moments of assessing my work for the day, and rather than deciding whether what I had done was good or not, I just thought “this is what I made, so this is what the song is”.
APR 2026
trinket release
trinket wasn’t something I ever necessarily set out to make, it was just the product of a long period of trying to find what’s best for me and my own lived experience to create. I think its greatest success is that it doesn’t try to make a concise answer to that question, it only highlights the fact that I was trying to figure it out. It’s the most honest thing I’ve ever made in that way.
As a tsubi club release, trinket seemingly exists in complete opposition to everything that came before it. There is no large-scale collaborative element, no mission to prove what can be accomplished independently, and no visual media accompaniment beyond the cover art. Despite being such an outlier, it feels, at least in my opinion, so undeniably tsubi club. Maybe that’s just because I made it and I’m the guy from the thing.
You’ll notice that this blog post starts out being very much about the evolution of tsubi club as a collaborative methodology, and gradually transitions to being a lot more about my personal process and shift into a phase of creating for myself. I think that’s pretty exemplary of how these last five years have gone down. Maybe I lost the plot along the way, maybe I just had to go and do something else for a while to fully understand what I was doing before.
OCT 2026
tsubi.club v1 launch
With the launch of this website comes the next phase of tsubi club. I’m excited to settle into this new home. Please have a thorough look around, a lot of love went into it! Thank you endlessly to Abbie, Nel, Noah, Gavin, Aria, Lucy, Anna, Matthew, Fin, and Olly. Thank you also for reading this, I’m assuming if you made it all the way to the end that you’re pretty committed to the cause. I lost a little steam at the end there but I think I got what I was looking for by writing all this out, I hope you found it to be a decent read. There’s probably a ton of stuff I forgot to mention but this’ll do for now.
Yeah man tsubi club forever here’s to another five years. Please look forward to GROUNDWORKS!
HAGS!
