The three sound collages for the “On the Air” EP were born out of two ideas. First, my obsessive love of Pink Floyd, Tom Waits, and any music that uses unorthodox methods of storytelling and instrumentation; and second, because I wanted to try and make “On the Air” feel like it was one completed whole as best as I could. I’m a big fan of large concept albums that follow a narrative through line, or that feel like one complete whole when played from start to finish, so I wanted to try and make my first EP as cohesive as I could. Which, for this project, presented itself as adding several weird little interludes emulating the feeling of turning the dial through different radio stations.

 

Owen and I technically created most of each collage together, although to be perfectly honest, he did 99% of the work for these. We would both look for audio to use on freesound.org, agree on it, and then he would spin it into each collage following my notes. So I’ll try my best to summarize the process for each collage as best I can, although I may update this page in the future when he has time to give me his side of everything.

 

...Tuning In?

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The original Idea for tuning in came from re-recording “Dead Sound” in the summer of 2025. Alongside adding the transition from the verse to the bridge, I felt it would be good to set up the radio transition earlier in the song so it didn’t come completely out of nowhere. On top of that, I wanted to try and capture the eclectic feeling of overwhelm you get from most sections of the internet somewhere on the EP. I had tried once or twice to represent it in a traditional song, but I couldn’t get it to work… so I decided on doing an audio collage instead, because it represented the feeling much better in practice.

 

The collage is split into a couple different short sections. The opening section follows a sparse collage of reversed voices and laughter, followed by the orchestra section, which blasts a twisted rendition of the American national anthem. Next is the crowd section, where you hear someone fire off a gun, followed by screaming; and finally the congregation section, where a priest shouts loudly about “the judgement to come” over some guitars. 

I don’t have a ton of notes on any individual sections of the collage, so I’ll just point out a couple things for each part.

 

The opening section was originally supposed to be extremely quiet—much quieter than what Owen and I ultimately settled on. I wanted the opening part to be almost a whisper, to get the listener to turn their volume up extremely high, only for the orchestra part to come blasting in. Unfortunately, the effect didn’t end up working when we listened through all of the final audio files. Apple’s volume equalizer messed up the effect, and made the transition to “Dead Sound” come off really weirdly, so we had to cut it in favor of the transition to “Dead Sound” working well.

 

The original audio from the orchestra part (like most of the collage audio) was sourced from http://freesound.org, then O’ took it and twisted it into an autotuned rendition of the national anthem. 

 

The gunshot portion wasn’t that interesting to create, although if I’m remembering it correctly, I think O’ may have created the gunshot sound by dropping his keyboard.

 

My favorite part of the collage was the congregation section, because O’ and I went back and forth debating where the

“S A T A N” audio we found on free sound should go for a decent amount of time. It’s also the only section of the collage we played instruments on, as the guitar part was an improvised jam the two of us recorded in about 3 minutes to give the section some texture.

 

 

A Word From Our Sponsor (Power Grease)

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Power Grease is the only track from the EP that I play nothing on, and that I don’t sing on. It’s the brain child of my brother Owen, and our uncle, credited as “Q = MCΔT" on the track as writer and vocalist. I knew in early 2025 that I wanted to put a fake advertisement on the EP, especially to poke fun at all of the ridiculous fitness ads and manosphere content I was getting recommended to me on Youtube. Unfortunately, I’m not a super avid radiohead, so I had very little knowledge of how radio advertisements worked. So I knew that I needed someone else to write it. Luckily, my uncle worked at a radio station when he was a teenager, and ended up putting together the sound effects and script for the ad reads on air! So I asked him if he’d write an ad for the EP, and he gave me an overjoyed yes.

 

He initially wrote two different ads, followed later by a third. Power Grease was the second of the bunch. We ended up recording the first two, with power Grease being the standout of the pair. I remember soon after we started recording that Owen had the idea to have our dad say “Power Grease” through a pitch shifter with the backing music. So, he dragged our dad downstairs in the middle of recording, and had him do vocals on the song. My uncle and I ended up rolling around on the floor in silent laughter as an aggressive mix of 8 string guitar and “POWER GREASE!” echoed loudly through the door during every take. It was possibly the beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. 

 

The entire collage was whipped up mostly by Owen in only two or three hours, with MCΔT asking for something that ‘sounds like nine inch nails’. We were all really happy with the result, and it’s since become an in-joke to reference the ad among my immediate family.

 

“…” (Untitled)

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 “…” (or as I’ll call it here “Untitled”) was created from a need to break up “On the Air” from “The Masquerade” as a way of giving “On the Air” more weight. For whatever reason, when listening back through the un-mixed versions of each song in the order I wanted them, “On the Air” didn’t feel final to me. I still can’t fully put my finger on why, but if I had to guess it has something to do with how both On the Air and The Masquerade are ballads played back to back, so they blended together somewhat. Unfortunately though, narratively “On the Air” is where I wanted to end the EP, and I didn’t have any solid ideas for an alternative, so “Untitled” exists to try and remedy that.

 

The entirety of “Untitled “was recorded in a little over an hour in December of 2025 on the same night that we had finished “The Boy in a Tower”. The melody of the track is an idea I’ve been playing around with for a while on my guitar, but that I don’t think is quite finished yet. Even though I could’ve just recorded it on guitar, I felt like adding a little piano would break up the sound from “The Masquerade” a bit, so even though it took much longer than it should have for me to record (about 30 minutes) it felt right for it to be on piano. The radio garble was all put together by O’ on top of my piano playing to complete the piece.