Vapid by Lantern Lens

my final offering of the year: another weird side project! i decided to remake an album i drafted for 2018's National Solo Album Month (in this challenge, you would attempt to write and record a whole album within the walls of november). these songs, through the confines of the challenge, ended up as strange fictions and half-fictions that often veered into stream of consciousness stylings. much of the meaning in the lyrics i may have intended then is certainly lost to me now.

i published the album under a proto-persona, Transatlantic Malice, whose character was a self-important poet type who wanted to believe their lyrics to mean more than they actually did (what else is new?). someone who was vapid. revisiting the project almost 7 years after it was clear this was never the pinnacle of my writing ability, but i heard something endearing within it. something that compelled me enough to recreate it in full, anyway. so i spent not much longer than another month coming up with new instrumentation and i recorded it all in march 2025. i also made some slight lyric alterations to fix some tiny things that bothered me on the original version the album. and i made something i think sounds pretty cool.

so revel with me in the nostalgia of my polished juvenilia, if you care to. it was nice to have a little break from writing new material while having a chance to practice some production skills. i look forward to making more new weird music in 2026!

i have creatively plundered this album and stripped its parts for other projects in the past. i rewrote the song "I Was Dead Before the Light Came" for my cookie meat album, Blackbody (https://cookiemeat.bandcamp.com/track/i-was-dead-before-the-light-came-3). i also retooled various elements from "One-thousand Grandfather Clocks" for the same album's "A Hymn of Floodwater. (https://cookiemeat.bandcamp.com/track/a-hymn-of-floodwater) ." the more recent iterations i do believe are better, though i think the ones on Vapid definitely have their own place and specialness.

lantern lens is sebastian bluejay (they/them), making music of the future science-fiction dystopia that is today, screaming into the void

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