Sitting Down with tdstr: YouTube Poop, Copyright Abolition, and Hardcore EDM
Arizonan musician tdstr (pronounced tee • dee • ess • tee • arr) is no stranger to the goofy and the eccentric: he’s an active participant. In just the last two years, he’s created four albums spanning ambient, drum and bass, industrial, and most notably, a spin on the ‘dariacore’ craze that shook up SoundCloud. He’s also a YTPMV artist, a furry, and a music nerd. This comes through crystal clear in his musical and visual aesthetics, which often meld together in this collage-y soup of glitchy and unrefined memetic splendor.
tdstr’s next outing is something new, even for him: the entire album is delivered in 7/4. Already this would be intriguing if not for the fact that it’d be a return to the eclectic dariacore style that made his 2022 album ‘Internet Brainrot’ such a captivating trek through memes and samples. He teased two tracks off the record at Funny Rave: Frozen III — ‘Everybody Wants to Know’ and ‘DRKE-07’ — both of which worked within the mediums of hardcore EDM and mashed samples to create something wholly fresh and fun. I caught up with him to discuss ‘7 Grand Dance’, his new album coming out Friday.
Melissa Monroe: So you got a new DJ controller, and I saw your DJing stream last night! Do you plan to make streaming a regular feature?
tdstr: Yeah, I definitely wanna do it more. Last night was really fun and I’m definitely gonna do more. I don’t know how regular — I’m planning things as I go — but it’s definitely something I want to do regularly.
MM: I really enjoyed the variety that it had.
tdstr: Yeah, I listen to a lot of genres so I’m gonna play a lot of genres. I’ve had a lot of practice making DAW DJ sets, so I kinda know flow stuff already — it’s just a matter of doing it live. I’m using Rekordbox and there’s a lot of really useful tools in terms of beat compatibility and stuff. It’s fun, I’m glad I finally picked one up.
MM: I wanna talk about ‘7 Grand Dance’: What inspired you to come back to the dariacore genre after ‘Internet Brainrot’?
tdstr: I’ve been doing dariacore stuff on my p9jm account, but I didn’t wanna put out another album until I had an album concept. ’Cause usually for most of my albums, aside from my first couple, either I’m trying to do a new genre or I’m trying to do some sort of concept. I was kinda thinking, I like a lot of music in weird time signatures. Actually, a year or two ago, I was thinking about doing a Venetian Snares send-up album that’s 7/4 breakcore, but that didn’t pan out. But that idea still kinda stuck in my mind, that I should do an album like that.
After the first couple of tracks I made for ‘FALLING’ — which I think I probably started working on that about a year ago roughly — ’cause that used a lot of weird time signatures too, I kinda got back into the groove of doing that. I hadn’t used them for a while, but once I did I wanted to incorporate that into a dariacore album. And then ‘Grave Robbing’ came out. Sometimes I worry that my newest album is a ‘Grave Robbing’ ripoff, because it is a continuous dariacore album, but I feel like the 7/4 is definitely enough of a unique thing.
MM: I think the commonalities between this album and ‘Grave Robbing’ are the taking of dariacore and pushing it into hardcore territory, and I’m curious where that came from in terms of your perception of this album.
tdstr: There’s a lot of hardcore influence. I think for me, it’s just ’cause I listen to a lot of hardcore EDM. And it’s also ’cause like, the way I think of dariacore, the way I approach it when producing at least, I generally just think of it as like a few practices: You use a bunch of samples, you incorporate a bunch of genre influences, and make it very danceable. For me, I incorporated a lot of eclectic hardcore influences — there’s a couple uptempo hardcore sections, there’s a speedcore section or two, and it’s just ‘cause I listen to a lot of it. I think the dariacore influence is obvious, and because it’s in 7/4 the Venetian Snares influence is obvious, but I think there’s quite a bit of Gladde Paling influence, so there’s a lot of weird EDM-y kind of stuff.
MM: You did put ‘dansmuziek’ in your Funny Rave III set, and it seemed to blend right in. Any other key inspirations? The title is ‘7 Grand Dance’ and the cover art is your fursona in the 7 Grand Dad costume, so to speak. Was SiIvaGunner an inspiration for this as well, or was it a background thing?
tdstr: SiIvaGunner is definitely an aspect, but it’s not an aspect as much as some of the adjacent stuff to SiIvaGunner. There’s some samples on there that harken back to SoundClown and old, popular YTPMV songs. ‘7 Grand Dance’ just came to me as a pun, honestly, and I was like “I have to use it, it’s too good of a name to pass up.” So I don’t know if there’s that much exclusive SiIvaGunner stuff, but it does overlap a lot with some of the SoundClown samples, or YTPMV songs that have been ripped by SiIvaGunner.
MM: There’s a lot of overlap within that type of internet plunderphonics.
tdstr: And it all kinda stemmed from YouTube Poop. I think ‘Internet Brainrot’ was more like the YouTube Poop album, and this next one — I don’t wanna say this is the thing that comes after — but the samples it uses are decidedly more past that period. It’s not quite as themed in that way either, there’s a lot of general pop samples as well too, just in terms of the internet-based sample choice. The sample pool is a lot broader.
MM: I guess talking about YTP, how did you first come into contact with YTP and its offshoots?
tdstr: The second YouTube video I can ever remember watching was ‘YTP: Mario’s Gay Gallery’ — the first was, my neighbor showed me ‘100 Ways to Die in GMod’ — but ‘Mario’s Gay Gallery’ is probably one of the first videos I watched on the internet, and I think I’ve gone back and found it. It’s been a couple years since I found it, so I have no clue if it’s still up. But it’s so slow and terrible and like, it’s just unwatchable. I guess that was the start of it.
Shit, I mean, depending on how you count it, my first exposure to a lot of stuff was Flipnote in the two years that that was really a thing.
MM: So you were on Flipnote Hatena?
tdstr: Yeah, so that’s how I got exposed to a lot of stuff. I think that’s when I first found out about ‘asdfmovie’ and ‘Running in the 90s’ and Sparta remixes.
MM: So that was just sorta your gateway drug to the worldwide web of memes?
tdstr: Yeah! I mean, I got a lot of that first from there, and then I got on the internet proper and then you look up Weegee because you heard about it from Flipnote and then, there you go, you’re watching YouTube Poops.
MM: And then the rest is history.
tdstr: Yeah, YTP is very much a part of — I don’t even really watch that much YTP — but it formed a very important part of how I view remix culture and stuff, which then carried along to YTPMV and music and all that stuff.
MM: I see that sort of transgressive view on sampling. The very start of your Funny Rave set was Negativland.
tdstr: I think there’s definitely a lot of internet plunderphonics that’s become sort of decoupled from its super political roots, but it is very much a political act to illegally sample things, and I have very strong opinions on disliking copyright law and I’m definitely in the camp of the old-school copyleft people. A lot of it is the same ideas, just in different ways now.
MM: Right, because with the advent of the internet, that sort of landscape and the tools that Negativland and Chopping Channel had, became common in everyday households.
tdstr: It became a thing where copyright law became so easy for people to violate, that everyone is violating it constantly. But the problem is that if someone wants to ruin your life, they can do it with it, and it sucks that that’s a thing that exists. If someone is at a wedding or something and they’re playing music at the wedding, and they didn’t legally license the music, that’s bullshit. You shouldn’t need to do that. It applies to sampling too, like, if I sample a Drake song, he’s not gonna care, why should it matter?
MM: I think you have a very eclectic taste. Do you deploy different influences for different albums?
tdstr: Totally. When I approach albums, I usually like to have some pool of influences, or it’s like sometimes I just wanna do this sorta thing. So obviously, ‘DnB Suite’ is my atmospheric drum and bass album, so the influences for that are the Good Looking Records people, a lot of old school drum and bass mixes like the Peshay Studio Set, all that stuff. When it came time for ‘Stolen Textures’, that’s an ambient album and it’s pulling from a lot of weird ambient places, like this one SoundCloud artist Espio the Chameleon, I think it’s an alias of someone but I’m not sure who, and they create this crazy sound collage ambient stuff. And that blended with Tim Hecker, OPN, and that’s a very different set of influences from the drum and bass album, and all of that is very different from ‘FALLING’, which is super industrial, lots of grindcore and metal, and even hints of microsound on there. It’s weird to throw that in there, but that one was less of an “I wanna do this genre”, it was just “I want to make the angriest music I can”. But I got that out of my system so we’re doing dance again.
MM: Speaking of ‘DnB Suite’, you seem to employ furriness a lot in your artwork and general visual representation. How did you come into being a furry?
tdstr: I have vaguely been a furry for many years, but I didn’t really consider myself one until I played ‘ECHO’, and then I was like “oh, this can be actually good”. I evangelize about it way too much. It’s a furry horror visual novel and it’s really good, and it’s the reason I’m into a lot of the things I’m into now. It’s not just that, after playing ‘ECHO’, that was what got me to read more visual novels in general and got me to watch more horror movies, ‘cause I was never a big horror movie guy, and I fuckin’ love horror movies now. It was the catalyst for a lot of things, including me deciding to be like “I’m a furry, I’m going to put my fursona on my album covers.”
MM: Are you aware of the concept of ‘transcendentally furry’ media? I think that comes through a lot in stuff like ‘FALLING’.
tdstr: ‘FALLING’ isn’t immediately furry — the cover art is from a furry artist — but it is definitely one of my more furry albums I feel. If a track called ‘CANINES’ that samples Ulver wasn’t enough, that was intentionally a furry album even though it’s not quite as obviously visually so.
MM: I think I picked up on it at first when I saw the cover art, it reminded me of the zanier stuff by TwistCMYK. Speaking of furries, how was TFF?
tdstr: For me, it was my first real convention, so I poorly planned my days, and then there was a lot of dead time. Events I did wanna go to, I was booked or tired. So it was definitely good practice for next year, cause that’s a yearly thing. I’ll be much more fully prepared next year.
MM: Did you go to any panels?
tdstr: I went to a Kyell Gold panel. I read his book ‘Out of Position’ last year, which is one of the classic gay furry books. It was fun, he read off a bit from his new novel which is a spy thriller, also a gay romance thing. I went to a Furscience panel, which is a demographic survey, and that’s always fun to see. It’s interesting, even just questions of “what is a furry”, it’s a question that noone can agree on and answer for. It’s interesting to see the makeup of what different kinds of people tend to say.
MM: I think one of the things I like about your music and your general aesthetic is it’s a very earnest analysis of the internet and the way that memes propagate. I think that’s very sorely missing in a place where there’s a lot of irony-poisoned people and, a lot of it reads to me as sincere, and also a reclamation of sorts.
tdstr: I used to be on the fucking event horizon of irony-poisoning. That shit fucking sucks. Back in high school, I was on the shitty irony subreddits, and it’s just so bitter, that way to approach everything. Some of it is fine, like if you’re ironically appreciating a Your Favorite Martian song, whatever. But when it gets past that, it really sucks. ‘Internet Brainrot’ is definitely more sincere than something like a ‘Social Justice Whatever’, even though that was a big influence — I wanted to do that but less ironic.
MM: In a couple weeks, ‘Internet Brainrot’ has its second anniversary. I’m wondering how you feel about that in retrospect.
tdstr: That was crazy. That’s still my biggest album in terms of popularity, at least. It’s kinda crazy that it has been two years, it’s weird looking back on it sometimes. I don’t know. It’s crazy it’s been two years already.
MM: I can definitely say on my part that, when it came out, a lot of my friends were looping it nonstop while the dariacore craze was on the up-and-up. I think that speaks to both the quality of it as well as the sincerity, and what I think you’re doing is necessary. We have a lot of people like Shadow Wizard Money Gang, Sam Hyde, Joeyy or whatever hijacking art and using it to push an agenda that is very against an understanding of queerhood.
tdstr: It’s definitely not as much of a problem in dariacore as it is in other super sample-heavy genres, but there is a lot of irony. It’s hard to truly escape irony, but I’ve wrapped back around to thinking Epic Rap Battles is good.
‘7 Grand Dance’, the newest album from tdstr, is available for pre-order on his Bandcamp.
Thank you for reading.
