But! I’m recording vocal demos for my next record and figured sharing would kill two birds with one stone (because I feel like constantly sharing a piece of work in progress applies pressure to actually get said work done…eventually.)

Relapse (previously known as “5am after tdyke pool”)

Recording these vocals for real within the next week or two probably. I have a friend that goes to SAE and has access to some preem studio time/space so will definitely be recording final vocal tracks there…but I atleast have the rest of what I was going for down.

_{This looks like a graveyard to me
This feels like im relapsing
An overdose of suffering
You feel like a relapse to me}

_{What's the perfect dose of empathy?
A line or two
A kiss from you?
You disappear I’m crawling in my skin
I’m repulsive
I’m compulsive
You feel like a}

_{Relapse to me
This looks like a graveyard to me
An overdose of suffering
I feel like Im relapsing}

_{Spirits are consuming me
Down my throat they're slithering
I feel sorrow on my skin
I think I’m relapsing}

Deceased birthday wishes?

Where do they go after

Wireless signals and

Fiber optic cables

After they pass through servers

Do they bring back the dead?

What's heaven’s IP address?

There are some I miss you's

I've been trying to send.

We jay walk across streets to the beat of mourning.

Where you gonna take us? Where you gonna take us, Mr. Car? Where you gonna take us, on the hood of your car?

We jay walk across streets to the beat of mourning.

Where you gonna take us?

To our friends?

I know I’ve been talking about this on and off for a while now, posting a lot of my demos on here in an attempt to get myself going. This spring though, I think the need to work on music for my mental health has become abundantly clear for me.

In my attempt to gather some inspiration I’ve been listening to a lot of HIM (amongst other bands like Luna Sea, Buck Tick, AFI, etc) and it wasn’t until I spent 2 Hours watching HIM live performances this week that I finally figured out what the sound I’m going for is missing! And it makes me so excited to focus and finish the rest of these songs <3

IDK what it is about seeing Ville Valo at performing at the peak of his Vampire Twink aesthetic that I find so inspiring, but it might be indicative of the much larger shift in my emotions and worldview that’s happened within the last 3 years.

*but, back to the topic at hand:

Relapse is the final installment of the Lonely/Wallflower Saga. If you don’t already know; all the music in the .tailz project is set in the same alternate universe called New dystopia. The first saga (Dorian/Ivory) is a trans cyberpunk allegory that follows the Legend of Dorian and Ivory, who long ago persevered against all obstacles in order to self actualize and find the bodies that were meant for them. **You can read the entire Dorian/Ivory story here:

The Lonely/Wallflower saga finds us in present day New Dystopia. It follows the Stories of two trans and lesbian coded characters across the cityscape as they battle their own personal hardships, cross paths, and feel their lives change forever. Lonely is a melancholy recluse who finds herself lost after the death of her closest friend. Wallflower is the chaotic front woman of an underground band (The Strangers) that Lonely stumbles upon after her friend’s funeral. This saga spans across the EPs Lonely, Strangers, Annotations of a Wallflower, and will conclude with Relapse…

I have 9-10 Tracks in mind for it right now. Recently hit up my friend Niko, who is one of the best guitarists i know to clean up the guitar parts on some of these demos I’ve been sitting on. I will be honest I’m really excited with the new recordings and mixes I’ve done this month, especially the mix for 32525 and 5 AM after tdyke pool which are the leading songs on this record for me personally.

*Sequencing and tentative song titles:

That’s all for now I think? I’ve gotten really busy this year between being in school and managing this art studio I work at now and I think not taking time to intentionally work on creative stuff has been detrimental to my health and I’m gonna be real with everything that’s going on right now, we all need our passions and creative outlets more than ever.

Finished the instrument mixes then booking like 10 hours at a studio and laying down vocals, with fresh ideas and a replenished well of inspiration.

If you’ve never seen it —in 1997 the world’s first Hell in a Cell match between the Undertaker and Shawn Michaels is bloody. It is one of the most extreme athletic performances of all time. Shawn Michaels wins but is carried out of the ring like a bloodied corpse, with his signature entrance music playing in the background in a way that would make you think all of this was some sort of dark comedy. It was violent, so violent they had to glitch the video feeds and change it to black and white in an attempt to not get in trouble with the FCC.

But that’s not really the focus of my thoughts here.

I’m giving you a very blunt tldr. Both of my blood siblings are dead. My sister, Jessica, is who this is mostly about. She died at 25. I was 15. Cystic Fibrosis. More importantly; a wrestling fanatic. Most important: she loved one Shawn HBK Michaels. Obsessed.

So as I sat in the living room one night with my girlfriend and watched this toxic twink get wrecked by THE goth wrestler, something felt so comforting about it, but I couldn’t quite figure it out yet. It caused me to keep watching. Soon enough I’d be sitting in the living room asking cherrie to watch more retro WWE matches (which wasn’t a problem because she’s actually been a pro wrestling fan this entire time!) and feeling like I was being transported into world I’d almost forgotten.

The drama, the meta drama, the costuming, the personalities— so much clicked for me again about just why this form of theater and displays of strength became so popular to begin with.

Every time I’d watch a match from the Attitude or Ruthless Aggression eras I would immediately start to wonder how my sister reacted to these very same matches. Everytime I watch a shawn michaels performance I imagine her losing her fucking shit, just like I keep losing my shit now watching these very same matches.

You don’t understand what I mean when I say my sister was obsessed with this man. She loved 2 things: music and wrestling, and she was literally buried with an ipod playing and a Shawn Michaels bandana in her hands.

The further along I get in my transition, the more I see my mother and my sister in myself. My sister a scary amount. I love it. the idea of looking like one of the women in my family is pure gender euphoria, It helps me feel less alien. But it makes me so unbelievably dejected. because I don’t speak to anyone in my family, and I know if my siblings were alive I probably wouldn’t be talking to them either.

My sadness feels stuck in this type of limbo.

I can’t get into the new stuff. The old stuff makes me feel like I’m bonding with ghosts. No amount of storytelling or high stakes action can replace that. In my head I can watch these old matches and write familial fan fiction, where we grew up as sisters, losing our shit to all of these matches. I remember watching her going crazy to that very same entrance music that played when Shawn Michaels was bloodied but victorious.

I can’t feel the same way about matches she’ll never get to see. Because I remember why I stopped watching pro wrestling to begin with, because death shook my world for the very first time.

Maybe that will change. I feel like eventually, I have to find a version of these theatrics that aren’t weighed down by familial baggage right? The other day I stumbled upon what looked like idol girl wrestling from Japan? It’s captivated me in a way no modern western pro wrestling has.

It’s 3:46 am. and I’m watching wrestling videos on my second monitor as I’m writing this. I just needed to talk about to somewhere.

Until next time.

(If you look at the liner notes for a lot of my early work, you can actually find hints of the story progressing from Ep to Ep)

To start off…

• All of the music is, for the most part, set in the same universe. There are currently two separate eras; the first era consists of everything up until Dusk Ep. Mood Swings Ep is a prequel to the second era, which starts at Lonely Ep up to my most recent release, Annotations of a Wallflower.
  

• New Dystopia is the world all of the characters inhabit. It’s an alternate, near-future, cyberpunk reimagining of the Tristate area, mostly New York City and its surrounding suburbs.

• Trans-Liminal Sentience is the belief that everyone deserves to feel aligned with the body their consciousness resides in. It began with people teaching each other how to upload copies of their consciousness into the storage of crudely homemade androids.
  

• TLS BOTS or TBots: stands for Trans-Liminal Sentience Robot. also referred to as .tailz (where the artist name comes from) because of protrusions on the bodies that locals compare to animal tails. Tbots are people that have uploaded their consciousness to robotic bodies that align better with who they are. They are primarily used by beings facing extreme body/mind disconnect, where the way they perceive reality does not match with the body their consciousness originally found itself in.
  

First Era (Dorian & Ivory)

The first half of my discography follows the story of Dorian and Ivory: an urban legend told across the TLS community about the duo that fought against all odds to find the bodies they belong in.

Dorian is a Tbot that woke up in an unidentified, seemingly abandoned warehouse and found themselves uploaded into the wrong body. They don’t understand what’s going on, their memory has been erased, except for one directive:

“Complete Synchronization.

Upload: spotless://ivory.mind”

Spotless Ep, Ntwrk Ep, Dusk Ep, and the surrounding singles (Wilde, Spring ova, etc) are the soundtracks for Dorian’s Journey through the cyber deserts of New Dystopia.

• Cyber Deserts in New Dystopia are what locals call abandoned suburban communities that have become massive server farms. Dorian wakes up in a warehouse in one of these areas.
  

The opening track serves as the soundtrack for the opening montage of Dorian traveling across the cyber deserts and eventually arriving at the city of Gates, home of the Spotless Tower.

• Gates is a city that is known for its technological prowess and advancements, but one that also uses technology against its citizens. The government there believes in rigid, binary, systemic social structures, and in turn is typically hostile towards Tbots.
  

• Spotless Tower is where the Gates government holds the consciousnesses of anyone that believes in Trans-Liminial Sentience.
  

Upon arriving at the city, Dorian is fortunate enough to meet a few other Tbots that help explain the lay of the land. They explain that because of heavy military presence in the city during the day, the best way to save this “Ivory” would be to sneak into Spotless Tower after midnight. What ensues is a covert operation, evading sentry turrets and scaling up this massive, bone-white tower at the edge of Gates’ borders. What they find when they get inside is an eerie yet somehow peaceful sight: rows and rows of solid-state storage, all holding the minds of people captive, just for being different.

Dorian closes their eyes and uses their intuition to guide them to the right server rack. The right prison cell. Their walk slows until they come to a complete stop.

“You”, they whisper. and immediately jack themselves in and extract Ivory.

“You” a soft, slightly relieved voice says from inside Dorian’s mind.

(What happens next is kind of like a Cortana/Master Chief situation; Dorian essentially uploads Ivory into their mind, and the rest of this saga involves them searching across New Dystopia for the right bodies for both of them.)

This is the end of spotless Ep.

-The next releases, KLKwrk EP and the single Wilde, take place as Dorian and Ivory are Traveling between the city of Gates and their final Destination, the City of Dusk.

-NTwrk is the beginning of our Protagonists’ adventures through the cyber deserts. While the heat is unrelenting, they have been having a incredible time meeting new people—Tbots from across New Dystopia—and getting help on their journey. After the fight and melodrama that was Dorian’s mission to Gates and the subsequent freeing of Ivory, it had been refreshing to find communities and people that weren’t hostile as they inched close to their goal. Unfortunately…they will soon find out that not everyone is as friendly as they seem.

-Klkwrk (the titular track on the 2-track Ep) was written and intended to be boss battle music. Dorian and Ivory get given information that ends up being inaccurate and it walks them into an anti-TLS trap. A giant Collector surprises them and engages them in combat while they are on their electric motorcycle.

• Collectors are bounty hunter robots that are operated remotely by anti-TLS agents. Following Ivory’s escape from Spotless Tower, a bounty was placed on Dorian’s head.

The ride and shootout test Dorian’s skills to the max. But with Ivory’s help, they outsmart the collector and making it into a narrow boulder passage, disabling it.

-On Wilde, our duo is riding a little quieter, a little more somber. They realize that someone fed them that information on purpose to harm them, and all of a sudden the severity of the situation starts to sink in. Even if they succeed on their quest, the world at large still wishes they did not exist. It’s a moment of self-reflection but not of rest as even with this set back, nothing will deter them. Dusk awaits.

*The final chapter in the story of Dorian and Ivory.

The opening_theme (twilight) serves as another journey montage that takes us from the end of summer, to just before the beginning of winter:

With winter looming, Dorian and Ivory struggle to push forward in the search for their new bodies. As the nights grow colder and more ominous, melancholy creeps in like a (Bitter)_cold. Perhaps their destination is a myth, another mirage, in the cyber deserts of New Dystopia.

“Maybe my body is nothing but sand and vapor…” they say in dismay.

(On the edge of retreat, a beam of hope appears over the horizon. Our heroes make it to the city of Dusk, and the real search finally begins.)

Dusk is considered a sanctuary for Tbots and believers in TLS as a whole. While the city is considered dangerous and overcrowded for many, for others it serves as the perfect shield. If everyone’s a misfit, then no one really minds that you are too.

Dorian and Ivory received a lot of leads on their journey from supporters that believed in their cause. The biggest lead being directions to a nightclub run by an underground TLS Engineer by the name of Rose.

• A TLS Engineer is someone who helps build and Transition people into their new bodies
  —The nightclub is also named Transition, a kind of hiding-in-plain-sight kind of joke that many paranoid locals close to him do not find as funny as he does.

All seems easy enough, but the collector from months ago has been hiding, stalking and healing in secret, waiting for Dorian and Ivory to make it to Dusk, and is trying to capture as many Tbots with bounties on their heads as possible.

Mere minutes after they make contact with Rose inside, our antagonist collector and a few of his friends barge in and threaten to burn the place down. Unfortunately for them, this year has made our heroes tougher than they seem. Having trekked all this way, there was absolutely nothing that was going to get in the way of their goal.

*A battle ensues. Dorian, Rose, and a who’s who of rugged Tbots from Dusk swarm and outnumber the collectors. Bruised and embarrassed, they flee before they attract more hostile activity.

Everyone takes a minute. An emotional beat.

I feel like sometimes for us in real life, as well as for our heroes and their fellow Tbots in New Dystopia, life comes so fast and from so many angles, there’s never really time for reflection, for digesting emotion.

The next day, after Dorian and Ivory have had their first good nights sleep in a real bed in months, Rose reveals that he has been working through the morning to get their new vessel ready. As Dorian looks around, they realize that there is only one body in front of them.

“I don’t understand?”

“Don’t you?”

“But Ivory—”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? This is for Ivory. She is you. You are Her.”

Dorian’s entire life flashes before their eyes. every thought they’ve ever had, every conversation about their new bodies…they stay silent…wide-eyed, they walk towards their new body…a body they’ve always dreamt of….something that doesn’t feel foreign.

A Body that feels like Home.

A month passes by. Today we find Rose running into the living room of their shared apartment, where we find Dorian trying on a new dress.

“There’s a new club opening three cities over across New Dystopia and I hear the TLS engineer over there can teach me a thing or two PLEASE tell me you’ll come! I know it took you forever to get to Dusk and you’re probably still settling in but—”

Dorian smirks, turns around, and looks Rose in the eyes. There’s a light there. Something you only find in a girl that feels like there’s a future worth experiencing.

“Sure. Where?”

end_theme plays. This concludes the Dorian and Ivory Saga.

This is the kind of stuff I live for honestly. I love trying to see what I can get away with in terms of genre blending.

On the tip of my tongue

Like you have.

Even when I think you're rotten

I know that honey

Never spoils.

Every few months I

Search the window in my hands

For your ghost,

A blank canvas that says more about you

In its silence that you'd care to

Imagine.

I am no angel.

We walked around single-winged

Broken birds mad the other wont fly.

Maybe you're the Angel.

I don’t really know when I’ll finally hunker down and record Vocals for literally every song I have ready for my next record. I feel like my mind is waiting for my heart to experience more grief. or maybe I’m just scared to say the things I want to say out loud.

This one girl I’ve been seeing extremely casually asked me if I have a therapist or something equivalent and honestly music creation usually does it for me. Unfortunately I have been dreading finishing anything.

But honestly. I’ll get it done by the spring. Despite stacking more and more weekly tasks on my plate. Is this going to the the 3rd decade of my life? Increasing work loads and less time for my own creative therapy? I don’t think I could realistically let that happen.

Now I’m just rambling. its 3am! goodnight. I’ll probably post another poem with no context soon.

Your skin

With each finger;

I’ll trace every inch of you

With the tenderness of my palms.

The ink is invisible—

blended together with a

pheromone spice—

I’ll write love letters on your

Surface in the

Only language

I ever want to speak again.

The final flaming obstacle

On the road to metamorphosis

The world will never leave you time

For tenderness.

How can you mislabel soul fire

If you can’t see it?

This isn’t a funeral,

It’s not a void—

It’s no sunken place—

It’s darkness.

It’s hiding.

It’s self defense.

Every time I see sunshine

A knife goes through my chest.

And Apples fall

Too far from their trees

They will find you

They will find me;

Resilient Saplings.

Lovers in the discard pile

Spreading stronger seeds.

I beg myself to shed

The faults that keep me

Human.

I answer back

"On the ground

  Knees shed only

  Skin".

Over summer sunrises

Waterfalls at the center of

Pink and yellow temples

Rose petals caressing

Violet skin

Pheromone heatwaves:

July.

From the branches I held onto

Fearing the jagged rocks waiting

Below the current of the river--

But what good is a flower

Afraid to bloom?

Yesterday the soul said "go."

"Find the world, at river's end.

The souls you seek are rose petals

Caressing your skin.

The fingertips of heartbeat

Settling in."

And am taken to my father’s car

Where Salsa was the

Medicine for pain.

Is our tolerance too high?

I wish hospitals offered IV's

Of Willie Colón

Swooning on his trombone.

I Can't seem to figure out how to embed YouTube videos on here? But its al so on my YouTube page:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=VcDFOARAy4o&si=_Rzoqc_A-TqgWE6r