Eleseer

Our “real” first song

From August 2022 – November 2023, Tyler and I played in a band by the name of “Goblin NY” alongside three of our closest friends – Anthony Mingoia, Bryce Maopolski, and Reece Maopolski. We started this band as a means of taking advantage of the rock ensemble class at SUNY Oneonta. In these classes, students that typically don’t have much live musical experience are placed into a band with other students and are tasked with creating a live performance for a grade. However, we learned that we could pre-select our band members. We realized that we could start a band, register it as a rock ensemble, and then get a guaranteed rehearsal space and some college credit for playing our horrible metal music for the small price of playing the two requisite “Rock Combo” concerts with all the other rock ensembles.

Goblin NY at The Pale Horse in Oneonta – 11/11/2022

In January of 2023, we decided to start writing some of our own music. Bryce and Tyler were taking some upper-level audio production classes that would require them to compose and record music. Naturally, this was the perfect playground for us. In the first few weeks back at school we had written and recorded our first song – “Killdozer”. Before the release of that wonderfully terrible track, we also recorded our 3-song grindcore EP – “Grundlepimp”. Both of those releases would see their first bit of daylight in March 2023.

Goblin before our release show for “Killdozer” at Club Odyssey in Oneonta. March 3rd, 2023

In April, Tyler brought a song in to the studio for the last class project of the semester. Unlike either of our previous works, Tyler had composed the whole song apart from the vocals. He asked me to write lyrics to the material he had presented. This formula would go on to become Eleseer.

For this recording with Goblin, Tyler would record one guitar part, Anthony recorded another, Bryce laid down a live drum track. Reece had initially planned to play bass on this recording, but found himself a bit overextended in the home stretch of the semester. So Tyler ended up borrowing Reece’s bass rig and tracking the bass parts as well. Trystan recorded the clean vocal and scream vocals in the song, and wrote another scream part for Bryce to deliver. In the studio, Tyler stepped in to record a harmony vocal part, and ended up singing a high falsetto line echoing the main clean part. When we walked back into the control room, I told him that he had just made the song. Shortly after he recorded that vocal part, Tyler and Bryce realized that a criterion of their project was the inclusion of a keyboard instrument. Tyler set up a microphone over the Steinway in Studio A (the same piano heard on “The Whole”) and starting playing. If my memory serves me right, the piano part in Goblin’s version of 1025 was recorded in one take, almost improvised. If it wasn’t one take, it was a very small number.

Lyrics

In contradiction to my usual spiel on not divulging the meanings of songs, this is the one exception.

The lyrics of this song were inspired by a breakup I went through over a year before the song was first written. In April of 2023 when we started writing it, I felt that I had only pretty recently gotten over the hump of being “over” that relationship. The lyrical subject matter of this song is something I had never planned to write a song about, but something about the mood of the song resonated with those old feelings, and coincided with much of the early Dance Gavin Dance material I was listening to at that time. I decided to just bite the bullet and write about what I thought suited the music.

Today, this is a song I certainly wouldn’t write. While I take no issue writing songs about other people and my own interpersonal relationships, I’d prefer to avoid writing songs where there’s absolutely zero guesswork as to what it’s about. I felt a good bit of remorse after the release of this song in June of 2023. What I thought would be one final moment of catharsis turned out to just feel like rumination. A revisitation of negative emotions that should have been left in the past. But, just like a bad tattoo can serve as a yearbook-esque memory of the time it was inked, this song serves that same role to me. I feel it to be a great representation of feelings I once had, even if it’s in opposition to my headspace now.

The Eleseer Rendition

While Tyler and I were in the process of recording “Attrition” he brought up the idea of revisiting 1025. While it had also crossed my mind previously, I had initially shrugged off my own idea. I didn’t want to beat the dead horse any further. Having already regretted that song to a degree, I didn’t particularly want to bring it back in any way. The only reason it had popped into my head was that it was the first song Tyler and I had written together, just the two of us.

When Tyler brought up the idea to me, he said exactly that. I don’t think Tyler even knew of my hesitancy, as I said yes to his idea without a moment of thought in that conversation. All I’d needed was the push from him and we were off.

Tyler would re-record both guitar parts, and replace the original drum sound with the same GGD programming he had used on the rest of the album. The bass parts recorded with Reece’s bass rig would stay in.

When re-tracking the vocals, I had planned to alter many of the lyrics to be a little less “on the nose”. Upon actually recording, I couldn’t seem to get those new words out. The lyrics of the song were so engrained in my head from having listened to the Goblin version as many times as I did that I couldn’t help but stammer when recording these new lines. Eventually, I grew frustrated in the studio and just put my papers away and tracked the vocals from memory. The only lyrical change that actually went through was the omission of the word “oblivion” to start the breakdown.

I made the decision that we would alter the name from “1025” to “Ten Twenty-Five” in the spirit of Eleseer’s version being detached from Goblin’s, but also as a little easter egg in homage to “1252” / “Twelve Fifty-Two” by Good Tiger, which has been a favorite song of mine since Bryce showed it to me in January of 2023.

Guests

One major issue I took with the Goblin version of the song was my clean singing. I felt that my screams weren’t performed poorly on that recording, but the cleans left a lot to be desired. My main focus in re-tracking the vocals was to get a better performance of the cleans in the outro. A few weeks before we started the vocal tracking in late March of 2024, I injured my voice. In a recreational lacrosse game, I took a shot from another player just under the chin of my helmet, straight to the Adam’s apple. Somehow, this robbed me of my ability to speak for two days, and my ability to sing / scream properly for a few weeks. This was incredibly inconvenient considering we were in the middle of a few months of recording vocals every week.

We made the call that someone else was going to perform the clean vocals in the chorus / outro of the song. Our first choice was our dear friend, Mirabella Phinney.

Bella recorded the part with grace and efficiency. Laying down a better take than I could’ve ever toiled toward at my healthiest.

Tyler re-tracked his falsetto vocals in the outro, and I recorded both my part and Bryce’s low screams from the Goblin version.

With that, we were done.

Revision Day

Over the summer, Tyler and I listened to our “completed” album countless times. We both developed a laundry list of parts we wanted to fix. While Tyler made his instrumental revisions on his own, I wanted one last day of studio vocal recording to polish up some rough bits. I reached out to our friend Andrew Carrington to book the day at Dry Hill Studios in Oneonta.

With Ten Twenty-Five, Tyler and I agreed that there weren’t any real “rough edges” that needed to be fixed. My one issue was that I missed Bryce’s screams in the outro. I knew Bryce would be around on our studio day, so I called him earlier that week and asked if he would be game to reprise his old part. In his usual fashion, he showed up to the studio ready to take on Hell with a squirt gun.

Bryce got his part recorded in under a half hour, but added so much to the song with just those few minutes of his day.

Finally…

As always, if you have any questions about the creation of this song or anything else in regard to our music, DM us on Instagram @eleseer_official

Thanks for reading!