The Making of Anti-Loss EP
CW: puking
The writing and recording of Anti-Loss EP stems back to my senior year of high school, around April of 2023. As I was working on Floorboard, an album that would turn out to be my last under my previous alias Chalkboard, I had started trying to figure out how to actually use a proper DAW for music making (I mostly used Audacity up to that point). I messed around with FL Studio a bit the year before but found it frustrating to work with and the crack unreliable. After browsing my options a bit, I eventually settled in on using REAPER. I recorded a couple of rudimentary covers on it, but the first attempt at recording an original song on it would soon present itself.
Milton Mabanza.
My online friend of many years Helter Skelter had been aware of my musical endeavours for pretty much as long as I had partaken in them, and as I made a shift towards noisy experimental rock, he asked me if I could help him with the music for a comic he was working on with an illustrator he met about a shoegaze band. A couple of months before he told me about a song title he had, "Pieces of the Sun", and asked me to write something for it. I took to my DAW and started workshopping ideas based off the title of the song and some music I had been listening to at the time. The 
first full-fledged demo was finished by the end of the month. I set it aside for the time being to continue working on Floorboard.
By the first week June, I was essentially juggling three projects at once - I was finishing up Floorboard, had some songs set aside for a new project, and - what I thought at the time would be my top priority going forward - a punk album called Dashboard. I had multiple songs recorded for it, wanting to do maybe 10 to 12 in total. Ultimately though, I felt as if my committment to the project was seeped more in a sense of obligation to my younger self - who wanted to have three albums out by the time she graduated high school - than any actual interest in what I was making. This was also around the same time I wrote Next to Me, which took me about three weeks to finish the first demo of due to said juggling.
Much of my summer of that year was spent in an apartment in Brazil where my dad lived. Away from my computer and leaving all my instruments back home (although we did buy cheap acoustic guitars to tide me and my brother over), I wasn't able to come up with much music in the 40 days I spent there, the only musical output of the time being an acoustic concert at the house of one of my dad's friends in front of 7 or so people. When we returned, I was too busy with starting college to work on music, and it wouldn't be until mid-September that I'd find the motiviation to start writing and recording again. By that time, the "new project" I had set aside Pieces of the Sun and Next to Me for took a more concrete form under the name "Anti-Loss". The project was named after a technique I had sporadically experimented with for as long as I've had an electric guitar and an audio interface to plug it into, maxing out the input gain of the guitar for distortion. This guitar sound would prove the baseline on which the rest of the EP would be recorded and mixed: loud and overblown.
I wrote two more songs meant for Anti-Loss EP, along with re-recording the two previous tracks I had set aside. The two tracks in question were parasocial - a song about forming parasocial relationships with musicians that I scrapped pretty much immediately - and Where?? Where??? Where????. The story of Where?? Where??? Where???? involves an incident that had occured to me on the way to college. Having overslept and risking missing the hour and a half bus trip to my college campus for my classes, I made a mad dash in the rain to the bus stop with nothing in my stomach but a cup's worth of blueberry yogurt. When I (barely) got on the bus in time and sat down, I felt sick to my stomach from my run. It was at that point that I realized I forgot my water bottle at home. I struggled to keep my stomach contents inside of me, and eventually I couldn't take it anymore. Full of embarrassment and remorse for having just repainted the bus floor a sickly pink-ish purple hue whilst surrounded by fellow commuters, I was dazed and paralyzed. The bus soon stopped in front of a deli or something, and the bus driver opened the door and told me to go to the bathroom. I got up, stumbled my way to the front of the bus, and turned around to the bus driver. I asked him if he was going to wait for me. He said "yeah". Unfortunately for me, he drove away the second I stepped off, which is when I'd realized I left my belongings, including my phone and my laptop bag, on my seat.
I'm not quite sure how long I spent after that walking down the street, going store to store asking to borrow someone's phone so I could call my mom. It wasn't until I ended up at an NJ Transit bus garage and explained my situation that I managed to get ahold of her. I told her what happened the best I could before asking her to get me a car to campus. I knew what time the bus got there and I knew that was a chance I could get there before it. When I got to campus, I waited for what simultaneously felt like five minutes and an eternity until the bus finally arrived. Fortunately for me, not only were my belongings still on the bus, but someone who also attended the college who got on the same stop as me held onto my things for me, with the intent of handing them over to the front desk. After she handed them to me and I went to the bathroom to wash up, I did my best to continue my day until I got home and recorded the first demo of Where?? Where??? Where???? based on the incident.
DeadEyedFae.
Despite not being a part of the EP, my debut single Bunnydeath still plays an instrumental role in the EP's development. I was coming to further grasp with my identity as a queer person and as a furry. This grasp would come to a head during the summer following my high school graduation and my first college semester, where feeling as isolated as I had long felt I took to the internet for solace. Through a combination of extended conversations with a friend from Washington state, exposure and overanalysis of artwork by post-furry artist DeadBunny, and one of the lowest of lows in the history of my mental health, I came to two realizations: I am therian, and I have an innate suicidality that I had to learn how to live with. My method of choice for processing these feelings was one I took to a lot. I recorded a couple of voice messages singing quietly in my college's hallway and spent the next five or so days working tirelessly on kickstarting the next phase of my music career (don't do this). The song I released at the end of those 5 days, Bunnydeath, was an 8-minute soul-pouring diatribe about identity, mental health, and queer relationships over shoegaze guitars, distorted synths and a dance beat and for a while the most attention I had gotten from any song.
pollyanna*.
The newfound attention sparked a drive in me that made me finally decide to abandon the Chalkboard name and fully focus in on finishing Anti-Loss EP. Juggling schoolwork and the project, I eventually brought my friend Abby onto the project to mix it, due to liking her work on her own album open me. In February, we got in a Discord call that lasted 12 hours mixing the three songs and making some last minute changes, including adding additional drums to Next to Me and adding a new verse to Pieces of the Sun, sung by Abby. By the end of the call, we had finished the EP, and I started promoting it online, slated for a March 1st release date.
Reception for the EP was mostly positive, with a lot of attention especially going towards the opening track, which got added to trickyStoop's Intro to Furry Music Spotify playlist (now a part of their music blog indieAnthro). The month after I would additionally work on a music video for Where?? Where??? Where????, the details of which you can read about in the making of Striped Shirt EP. All-in-all, I'd largely consider Anti-Loss EP a success. It helped further cement a following for my music (Where?? Where??? Where???? has nearly 9k listens on Spotify as of writing!) and was a really good learning experience and exercise in more pop rock centric arrangements than what I'd been doing earlier. It's the groundwork on which everything I've made since stands on.