Music Makers

Three Music Thingz with MIDI Bunny

As soon as MIDI Bunny's "Cecily falls from the Sky Tower into HELL (or, Falling Down Part 3)" hit my inbox earlier this year, I knew there was something special happening. The self-described "Furry fifth wave emo internet band," led by the duo Cecily Renns and Biddy Fox, lassoed arcade game bleeps, post-punk riffs, muted trumpet, Obamacore electro energy and My Chemical Romance-level drama into an almost 13-minute track. The impression I got was of a frantic deluge of enthusiasm—kind of like the feeling of connecting with a new friend and realizing you don't have enough hours in the night to gab about all the things you have in common.

That bubbly energy has carried over onto MIDI Bunny's first full-length album, MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others.", an epic collection of songs that teeters on the brink of total genre chaos at all times. "Cecily falls..." isn't even the only mondo-sized track present. "Kill Your Darlings or 'Pop Star Girlfriend'" clocks in at 14:13 and careens from twitchy chiptune to massive, shimmering blasts of arpeggiated synth to a single, lonely-sounding alto sax (played by InkyFirefly); the musical intensity matches the equally inflamed lyrics, which depict an artist in a state of destructive inspiration: "Kill your darlings, write a song to shut up my ceaseless asking heart / Kill your darlings, until my life is my art."

Even if progressive hyperemo isn't your bag, there's something for everyone here—woozy jangle pop ("Night of the Living Permateens"), sugar-rush dance punk ("Princess Close the Door or, "Bunny Rock!"), even a garage rock interpolation of Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" ("The Ballad of Kid Kitty"). Despite the varied output, MIDI Bunny's boundless energy unifies its sound—by the end of the album, it seems like neither Renns nor Fox have extinguished even a fraction of the musical ideas left in their tank. The duo first started collaborating by sending music files back and forth over Discord (Renns in South Korea, Fox in New York), and have since assembled an international team of contributors, including Skvader in Sweden, and Isabella James in the UK.

This first MIDI Bunny album is a wild and ambitious project, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next. Biddy Fox and Cecily Renns both shared a communal Three Thingz with the blog, from choice plugins to mystical Bandcamp genre tag linkups, let's check it out!!

Wah pedal.
BIDDY: Wah pedals are my friends. In the 1960s they invented the wah pedal and a bunch of guys with hair decided that its main purpose would be to make duck noises using the already-anatidaean sounds of their single-coil guitars. As with all psychedelic sounds invented in the years after the Summer of Love it was later rediscovered in the 1980s, this particular one by a dude named J Mascis, who used it for a method of expressively controlling the pitch of feedback and the timbre of distortion. I got one for free from a guy. Since then I have never unplugged my guitar from it. It is so pure and useful. There's some analog resonant mess going on in the circuits where it interacts directly with the sound of distortion in a way simple EQ never would. Even when you're using it on rhythm guitar that'll get buried in the mix it adds invisible emotions.
Cheap, sloppy, simple tech.
CECILY: I firmly believe that you don't really need to buy any audio plugins to make music. I've used paid plugins before, but I've never had to rely on them, and always found free alternatives that could do the job or do it better. I've never been able to even get a start on producing music if I couldn't find these free plugins.

On a daily basis, I use Synth1 and Vital as my main synthesizer plugins. Magical8BitPlugin is also the best chiptune plugin you'll find, along with Famisynth. Spitfire's LABS has a lot of great realistic sounding instruments if you're looking for that. For mixing, I almost exclusively use a combination of Fruity Parametric EQ, TDR's Kotelnikov (compressor), and Valhalla Supermassive (reverb).

BIDDY: You heard the bunny! Synths are way simpler than all that shit YouTubers tell you about. Listen. Most good synth sounds can be approximated by running a Casio through a fuzzbox. Most good synth sounds can be approximated by putting distortion and shit on a sine wave. Anything will sound hi-fi when you run it through OTT. And all of these have more swag! And you can circuit bend them without feeling bad about it.

Listen. It's rock and roll. The sound is the sound of cybernetics, the sound of the human body wielding and harnessing an uncontrollable electronic future. Link Wray's "Rumble" was a song whose tremolo knob twiddling was so powerful it caused riots. Then decades later, the M1 piano takes the most natural and sweet of all the instruments and creates the most perfectly unconvincing simulacrum. If the Stratocaster and the TR-909 ever met and they were girls they'd kiss.
Bandcamp genre tags
CECILY: Sometimes I look through one of those genre tags at the bottom of a Bandcamp album page to find new music. I usually sort by newest because you find cooler more obscure stuff that way. I've managed to find a lot of good stuff like this.

One day in 2021, I was going through the "art pop" tag, which I thought would yield interesting results. I found an album by Biddy Fox called Super Biddy Fox and it immediately caught my attention. I listened to the first song and decided her music was my new obsession. So that's the origin of MIDI Bunny! If I never looked up that tag on that day, MIDI Bunny might never have existed...

Thank you MIDI Bunny! Listen to their new album here.

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