📓Lost and Found: Vege-ance is Mine
1897 Children's book gets an instrumental album
The Vege-men’s Revenge Album
Interview with Chypho
Playlist by Chypho
Listening Apertif
1 The Vege-men’s Revenge Album
Poppy, a human girl, meets Herr Carrot and Don Tomato, who promise to show her how vegetables grow. She rides via onion-drawn carriage to Vegetable Land. The trio tumble down a hole in the ground and land in the court of the Vegetable King. The Vege-Men fiercely explain to Poppy how unhappy they are with the way humans treat them, and the King demands that she be planted in the ground to learn how to grow like a vegetable. Following a friendly cabbage's advice, she faces her burial with confidence and curiosity. She dreams underground as she sprouts into Poppy-growths. The Vege-Men check on her progress. When she's done growing, they harvest her and put her into a stew, which they eat at a merry banquet. After they finish eating, they all dance in a circle, spinning faster and faster and faster until they all crash through the floor. Dazed, Poppy wakes up in the garden and realizes it was all a dream. Based on the 1897 children's book The Vege-Men's Revenge by Bertha Upton and Florence K. Upton.
2 Interview with Chypho
MG: How did you come to find the book The Vege-Men's Revenge?
C: This is probably something very few people have ever said, but I'd been wanting to make music inspired by vintage art of anthropomorphic vegetables. I just Googled “anthropomorphic vegetables” and found (a bad scan of) the illustration I ended up using for the cover. That led me to the book, which I was immediately enthralled with.
MG: What inspired you to make an album about the children’s book? Do you normally find inspiration in books?
C: I figured I could make a track for every overall scene. There are over 30 illustrations, but I boiled it down to 12 scenes. There are brief events that I didn’t find significant enough to have a whole track dedicated to them, such as the friendly cabbage talking to Poppy in the court of the vegetable king before the Vege-Men march her off to bury her alive. I didn’t want to make a score that matched the speed of reading the book, but I’m interested in doing that for something else in the future. I'd love to do more projects based on old children's books. Being limited to the public domain, wanting to use high-quality scans of the art as album covers, and not wanting to do well-known books makes it a challenge to find more, but I have a couple of good ideas early in development.
Photos via Stella Books
MG: Can you tell me more about the book? What was compelling about it for you?
C: The main reason I found the book so interesting was the watercolor illustration style. I also liked that the story is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. It’s about a young girl who dreams of a strange land where the ruler is angry at her. It was written by Bertha Upton and illustrated by her daughter, Florence K. Upton. They're more well-known for a series of books they did together about a blackface minstrel doll. Those clearly have not aged as gracefully as The Vege-Men's Revenge. Discovering those books almost put me off making the album based on Vege-Men, but I was too inspired to not do it. Thankfully, Vege-Men does not contain any racism.
MG: What was your process like pulling inspiration from the book to make it into an album?
C: I looked at the illustrations from the book while composing the tracks for each specific scene. It’s difficult to explain the composition process because I just played around and it came out, but I knew beforehand the general atmosphere I wanted. Quirky, fun, a little weird. I used Mellotron tape emulation with a stereo effect to make it sound a bit weirder and dirtier and older.
MG: When did you know the album was complete?
C: I knew the album was complete when I had a good track nearly finished up for all twelve scenes and when the energy to compose anything new had been completely sucked out of me.
MG: How long did it take you to record the album?
C: The whole album is MIDI, so I didn’t technically record anything, but I made it in a couple of months and released it soon after I was satisfied. I’m relatively prolific and I can’t stand sitting on a finished project for very long. This has hindered me from landing on Spotify editorial playlists, but my YouTube algorithm success has been wonderful. I kind of go through cycles of having really strong creative inspiration where I put a whole project together relatively quickly and then I don’t make anything significant for a while. I pretty much made Entomongaku in about two weeks. I primarily created Vege-Men in October 2022, but a couple of the tracks had been started beforehand. “Pretty Poppy” evolved out of the clarinet melody, which I wrote at least a month before I found the book. I had done a lot of “The Banquet” already.
MG: What other musical inspirations do you pull from?
C: I think the only specific things I took inspiration from were Plantasia and the EarthBound soundtrack. The Plantasia influence was strongest on “A Burst of Dazzling Light”. I started making that track immediately after listening to Plantasia. The most conscious EarthBound influence was on “A Hole in the Ground”, particularly the alien-sounding synth melody and the overall “creeping around in a weird cartoonish world” feel. There’s definitely a bit of it on “Harvest Song” and “Learning to Grow” too. I think the bridge section or whatever you’d call it on the latter track sounds a lot like Mario menu music, but that was unintentional. All of my music is pretty video-gamey, but I don’t play video games very often anymore. The last game I actually finished was No One Lives Forever, which I played around the same time I was making Vege-Men. That game is a comedic 1960s-themed spy shooter, so that had no influence on the album (that I noticed). I’m a huge fan of the Metroid series which has influenced some of my music. It’s probably one of the things that got me into electronic music when I was younger.
Photos via Stella Books
MG: If you had to describe your genre, what words would you use?
C: I always just tell people I make “fun and atmospheric kinda video-gamey music”. People have compared some of my music to dungeon synth and comfy synth, but I’ve never listened to those genres. I want to make a medieval fantasy-themed album eventually, and I’m deliberately not listening to dungeon synth so it doesn’t influence me because I don’t really want to be part of that movement or whatever you’d call it. I know I’m missing out on some good stuff, but I want the project I make to be more of my own thing without dungeon synth I might’ve listened to creeping in. I am probably going to listen to old fantasy RPG music for inspiration though. I have played around trying to make fantasy-sounding stuff a bit already, but not in anything I’ve released. Anyway, some of my older projects that almost no one has listened to fit broad genre labels more easily. I wouldn’t call most of my music ambient, but Boreal is definitely an ambient album. With that one, I just tried to make music that sounded cold and lonely. It’s good at putting you to sleep. I’d say my first real attempt at a musical project, Fathom, is a cosmic horror dark ambient EP. It’s about people unearthing an alien that transforms them into clones of itself. As you can imagine, it’s not quite as fun and bouncy as Vege-Men, but both narratives involve nonhuman things turning humans into nonhuman things, which I didn’t think about until this interview.
MG: Do you have a favorite track on The Vege-Men’s Revenge?
C: I’m not sure what my favorite track on Vege-Men would be. I think I get “Pretty Poppy” stuck in my head more than anything I’ve ever made (although “Yùnqì” from Entomongaku has been stuck in there a lot lately). “In the Court of the Vegetable King”, “Blossoming Dreams (in a Rich Earth Bed)”, and “A Burst of Dazzling Light” are some of my other favorites.
MG: Do you have any upcoming albums or shows I can promote?
C: I have multiple projects in development, but I don’t have any definite upcoming albums. Vege-Men is coming out on cassette tape soon though! There’s no set release date yet, but it won’t be long. Unfortunately, I will never have any upcoming shows. I’m not a performer, I just like drawing with sound for these little projects and sharing it with people on the internet. I kind of view releasing my music like a visual artist posting their work on Instagram.
MG: Where are you based out of?
C: I live in northern Alabama. I have Huntsville tagged on my Bandcamp because it’s the closest significant city for music, but I don’t live there.
MG: What is your background in music making?
C: I don’t have any kind of formal training in music composition or production or playing an instrument. I just learned how to play songs I liked and stuff about music from YouTube on a cheap keyboard in middle school and played around in GarageBand for years.
Photos via Stella Books
MG: How long have you been active in music making?
C: I’ve been releasing music since February 2022, but I guess I’ve been making stuff for around 8 years now. I only started making things that don’t suck in the past few years. All of my released music was made from autumn 2021 onward other than the two tracks on Shovelware Jungle and one or two tracks from Lily. I don’t think the Shovelware Jungle tracks are particularly good, but I named it “shovelware” for a reason. I just released them because they’re fun and go together and I like having a snapshot of non-terrible baby Chypho GarageBand music out there. I don’t have access to GarageBand anymore, which is frustrating because I had a lot of unfinished stuff with potential. It’s all backed up, but I’m not currently willing to buy a new-ish Apple product just to use GarageBand. Eventually, maybe. Probably.
MG: What instruments/tools do you use?
C: I make music with Ableton Live and a MIDI controller. I use a lot of virtual Kontakt instruments and synthesizer plugins, especially Arturia’s V Collection. Lily and everything before it was made with GarageBand on an iPod touch.
MG: Who are artists that inspire you?
C: I listen to a ton of different kinds of music. My favorite band is probably Low. In addition to the stuff I previously mentioned, I am very inspired by Tomáš Dvořák, the composer for Machinarium and Samorost. I’m kind of obsessed with the album Utakata no Hibi by Mariah, which has influenced some tracks I’ve released, such as “Chrysoperla” and “Bingoburg” and several things I haven’t finished. I think I’ve listened to that album more times than any other album. But the artists that truly inspire me are my friends that make music too. I have them in my channels tab on YouTube. I wouldn’t have pushed myself to do this without them. Making music was just something I did when I was bored from time to time, but thanks to their encouragement, I started making cohesive projects and releasing them. They deserve much more attention and recognition than they’ve gotten, so I hope some people reading this will check them out! Two of them have released fantastic new albums very recently: Stoked on Nothing by Group Photo and Emerging by A Moji.
3 Playlist by Chypho
4 Listening Aperitif:
(Mary Mary) Quite Cointreau-y
1 1/2 oz rose gin (you can use normal gin, or make it yourself. I used Dorothy Parker - Rose Petal Flavored Gin)
1/2 oz Rosemary simple syrup (easy to make. I recommend learning to make simple syrups for any cocktail enthusiast)
1/2 oz St Germain or Elderflower Liquor
(optional) 1/2 oz Cointreau or triple sec
6 oz lemonade or tonic water with a squeeze of lemon (can replace with elderflower lemonade and nix St Germain)
Few generous dashes of rhubarb bitters
Stir ingredients together with ice, then top off with the tonic/lemonade. A few more stirs
The Vege-men’s Revenge Album
Interview with Chypho
Playlist by Chypho
Listening Aperitif