Interview with fumehood.!

Q: So happy to have you on the blog after featuring you! ❤️ Tell us a little bit about yourself! (Feel free to say as much or as little as you'd like!)

A: Hello Scene Weekly! I'm a musician and visual artist, age 23, originally from the Midwest but currently living in Massachusetts. I go by many names - Tyler, Sabrina, Tokyo - but my band name is "fumehood." (all lowercase, with a period at the end). Living up to the stereotypes about Gen Z, I'm a queer autistic furry, but more than anything, I identify as a scene kid and a raver. No matter how old I get and no matter what year it is, I'm always going to be a dirtbag emo teenager living perpetually in the 2000s, hoarding my shitty old tech and MiniDV cameras and listening to Me and Him Call it Us while scream-crying into my Hello Kitty plushies.

Q: What's your history with making music? What got you started?

A: When I was 5 or 6 my parents stole about a hundred dollars from my piggy bank, probably for drugs. Rather than pay me back, they gifted me an MP3 player (an RCA Opal to be specific). My older sister, may she rest in peace, taught the family how to use Limewire, and within a few years I had amassed a massive collection of pirated songs on there. Taking cues from my older siblings, I was fascinated with the different styles of music that were popular in the late 2000s: the nu metal, the emo and pop punk, the hands-up EDM, and the blog era hip hop. Before my age was even in the double digits, I was busking, freestyling, rap battling with kids at school, doing impressions of Billie Joe Armstrong and Gerard Way over shitty Bluetooth speakers, and eventually joining show choir which I did until I dropped out of high school at age 14. As a teenager, I eventually got into making mashups and simple remixes in Sony Vegas, and learning about underground music through /mu/ and Sputnik. When I was 18, I tried to form an industrial rap duo with another furry I knew as the producer. When that project fell through, I put all of my energy into learning music theory and FL Studio so I could write my own music. Last year, I added a guitar and a ukulele to my collection, and inspired by DIY bands like Your Arms Are My Cocoon and Garden Angel, I fell into my current sound.

Q: What would you say inspires your music the most? And what influences the things you make?

A: I like to write about characters, viscerally pathetic ones. A lot of it is inspired by my mental illnesses. I have schizotypal personality disorder, so paranoia affects me a lot. A song like dead twitter paraphile is a good example because it's extremely literal, being inspired by being in room parties at furry cons and experiencing the sonder of realizing that anyone sitting next to me could be a complete monster behind closed doors. A lot of it is also my way of living with trauma. YCH vs. (you) is a borderline concept album, each song being a different piece of processing the feelings I have as an adult about some of the people who groomed me as a teenager. I touch on subjects like the rejection sensitivity in shoreline or the self-sabotage in frankie funhouse and sixteen complex. Someone on RateYourMusic summed it up by saying the project's about "rolling with the changes" and I like that description a lot.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your creative process? What gives you the most ideas?

A: Do you remember the scene in Ratatouille, where Remy's eating the strawberries and cheese and talking about combining flavors to create something new? That's how I approach making music. I love combining the most bare production conventions of different genres. You can start with a base, a sample from an emo song or a few notes on the guitar or a chord progression on the ukulele, and then you can add anything under it; breakbeats, trap drums, RaveGenerator2 stabs, Serum and Nexus and Synth1 presets. It's almost like making ramen. You start with noodles and broth, then add a little sriracha and enoki mushrooms and green onions and a fried egg on top. I think my Hellogoodbye cover off of YCH vs. (you) is a testament to this. The ukulele on it just uses the pop song chord progression in the key of C but when you mix it with the CDR amen wank drums and the TB-303, you get something that sounds like nothing else. Add some trap hats for flavor and you have a song.

Q: Who is an artist you look up to and why?

A: My favorite artist of all time is the experimental screamo musician Garden Angel. Most people only know her for her more happy hardcore and noise flavored stuff, but there are some real gems in her discography besides My Heffalump Eater. Check out her live set in Joltoen sometime if you want to have your mind blown on just what exactly skramz can be. Besides her, my biggest influences are the Crash Blossoms clique (especially zombAe, Ava Online and stalker.), Mindless Self Indulgence, 4lung, Fire-Toolz, goreshit, 6 Dogs, Lil Peep, gl0wrm, Atari Teenage Riot, Blood on the Dance Floor, Don Salsa, Dylann Angercar, KFC Murder Chicks, Strawberry Hospital, James Ferraro, RXK Nephew, Helen Love, J. Dilla and of course Your Arms Are My Cocoon who I credit with inspiring me to make my own album.

Q: What are some of your most meaningful music, something that meant a lot to you when making it?

A: My most meaningful song ever is shoreline. It's funny because, theory-wise, it's just the pop song chords on a ukulele with some lo-fi breaks over it, but it's about my partners and the lyrics I've had in my head for a long time. I'd say in some respect it was my attempt to make a modern version of To Be With You by Mr. Big. Aside from that, ooo is a pretty meaningful song to me. I think the joke rapping at the end would throw a lot of people off, but it's about my deceased sister and any of the elements of levity are a reflection of my own unhealthy attempts to cope with trauma using detached irony.

Q: Tell us something you're really passionate about, can be related to music or anything else!

A: I care a lot about old stuff. I'm a borderline hoarder. My monitor sits atop a crusty VHS deck and I have two giant CRTs in my bedroom. In a more practical sense, this manifests in an appreciation for archivism and curation. With music, I really appreciate dudes like Lunch77 or Risk Emulator who tirelessly put out and preserve things like sample packs and drumkits for the masses, in a way that makes them accessible to everybody in the future. I'm especially going to gas up the niche archivist community at comfybox.floofey.dog, whose collection of a terabyte's worth of 90s royalty-free sample CDs regularly makes its way into my music. In a more general sense, I spend a lot of time trying to find and back up rare shit. I've been involved with SoulSeek, niche underground archivist communities, and Internet Archive in different capacities over the years because I think they're immeasurably important resources to humanity. My music is inspired a lot by stuff like that. Almost more than any other artist, a song like slide 5 comes about from me smoking weed and reading Nickelodeon Magazine scans off the Wayback Machine. I've been told by people that the Oddity Archive sample at the end of YCH vs. (you) made them cry. I hope I can convert more people into being data hoarders too.

Q: Care to talk some about your latest release 'The Eka's Portal EP'?

A: I honestly feel strange about that release in hindsight. It's 4 of my rawest songs, but also I think I messed up in the mix on them. I could go either way on it. Some days I think it's the best thing in my discography, some days I think less of it. It was intended to be a stop-gap while I finished getting art for YCH vs. (you), and it definitely served that purpose of being just an initial release to put my name on. I don't know! I do really like the little medley I did of Quinn and Sybyr. That was fun.

Q: Where did 'fumehood.' come from as your band name?

A: I'm a skunk furry :3

Q: What really inspired your ambient track vibes? What had you settled into this kind of music?

A: I appreciate simplicity in music a lot. Complexity is nice and it's cool to see the kinds of music that push theory forward or do crazy experimental things with how they compose - but I really think all you need is some underlying sample or melody or riff, plus some drums, and vocals on top. Everything else is just extra flavor. I appreciate hip hop as a genre a lot for this reason. There's a YouTuber named Aiden Kenway who does breakdowns of hip hop beats and reverse engineers how they were made. Watch his video on "Not Like Us". It blew my mind to see how simple it was to make such a scathing and memorable track, and I guess that's really my message to other bedroom pop artists: simplicity works.

Q: Anything you want to share about any upcoming projects?

A: My next album is going to be released soon. It's called "#SaveDerpy, a nxc love story". It's going to be my most varied project, including as much experimental hip hop as it does screamo and bedroom pop. All of the songs are sped up by 150%, pitched up 3 semitones, and the sample rate has also been reduced. I envision it as a nightcore project first and foremost and I don't intend to ever release the songs at regular speed - although with this information you could probably do the math and make your own version if you so insist. It also has some very special features on it, so look out for that!

Q: Do you have any other artist recommendations to send us off with?

A: I reccomend the albums "Roadkill girl the mixtape" by cg, "EVERYTHING!(because anything less is suicide.)" by stalker., "weareallmadeofstardust ep" by weareallmadeofstardust, "Guard Dog Graveyard" by emogen33, and "six pack 2" by Ava Online. Some of those artists I'm friends with, but all of them are very cool and I think carry the spirit of the 2000s scene culture with them in their own way.

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Thank you so much again to fumehood. for the interview! Make sure you check them out on Soundcloud & follow them on social media:

Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/NUHxQUeceG2soKKf6

Bandcamp: https://fumehood.bandcamp.com/

Twitter: https://x.com/fumehoodVEVO

Twitter: https://x.com/skunkboy_tyler