It’s been… a while. A few years? Maybe a decade and a half since I wandered the streets of LA with the kernel of a melody in my head, trying to coax it into a song. The idea behind Fie was to test my hand at an album, not just a showcase of music and styles that would get me in the door with the burgeoning homebrew community. That was my approach with Level Zero, a portfolio to impress Swanson, Khan, and the rest of the late 2000 homebrewers on NintendoAge (RIP) and show them that the placeholder music in their OST could be leveled up with a serious, dedicated 8bit musician. I was knee deep in projects at the time, but decided to add one more. This was going to be for myself, to see if I could come close to the massive success that Mauer had already done with No Carrier,: release an album on a NES cartridge.
It would take another four years and a few albums until I published on physical hardware (Silicon Statue) but back in 2009/10 I took Fie as far as I could, creating ten songs using PPMCK (a command line assembly language that would compile your mml files to nsfs), arranged them, created the art work (which I lost and had to re-create years later), and then released on CD Baby (are the still around?).
I’ve always come back to Fie, having done a few remixes that can be found on our Soundcloud – but it was always “too much” work to manually transcribe the original Fie mml file to Famitracker which would allow for a clear avenue to a cart release. Until today. Well, a few years ago when I hid in my basement and did it. Boy, that was very annoying, but a small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules. And, to add some perspective, it was just listening to the album and typing in the notes.
The in-cart graphics were a struggle, so I pinged the genius FrankenGraphics to help me place what looks like FFI’s final boss Chaos but isn’t, into my desolate landscape. As the creator of the NEXXT graphic tool, they quickly modded the nametable to the amazingly clean graphics you see in-cart!
Lastly, I couldn’t secure my previous developer (he’s busy representing the NES homebrew community with his own high-profile projects and seriously there’s no better ambassador than Khan!) so I pinged the NESdev Discord (yep, I @here and caused some policy changes…sorry!) and connected with a phenomenal Polish developer Denine. He re-created the classic Bleep Bop Records look, added a few button features, and a fun credit transition.
There was a time where I stepped back from composing and just… well, I don’t know what I was doing. Life? Hiding? Surviving? But getting back to Fie, sitting down and listening to the album as I transcribed it, remembering what it was like to dream bigger than just make a song but rather add to the on-going history of the system, to hopefully inspire artists to out-pace me… all of that drove me back to composing. There’s so much more coming, my live album (it isn’t live, but the idea… well, you’ll see), my work during COVID, an album of beats, one of covers, another of recovered songs that I love but couldn’t find a home for… Sitting down and playing what’s happening with me, recording it, then putting in the work to evolve that moment into a song, meshing the emotional and intellectual… turns out that’s a lifelong project. But for now, about fifteen years behind schedule… is Fie.
