“I really tried to push Hatsune Miku to her limitations. Her software has HEAVY restrictions on how it functions… …if it doesn’t recognise a word then you’ll instead have to manually input each phoneme to create a custom word.”
Phoebe Apfel
What does it mean to compose for vocaloid? What is created when one combines samples from Björk, anime, old YouTube videos, and breakcore? Composer and performance artist Phoebe Apfel’s debut EP Panopticon seems to provide an answer. A record rooted in synthpop and art-pop, Panopticon draws heavily from contemporary classical music, new wave, and Fluxus, creating a soundworld that is uncannily futuristic while looking at both classical and pop traditions of the past.
Phoebe Apfel is a London-based composer, songwriter and performance artist. Across genres and mediums, their work typically contains gothic and eccentric themes, and explores their own life experiences and dark “taboo” subjects such as mental health, with references to pop culture scattered throughout. They are currently in their second year of their BMus degree in composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, studying with Matthew King. Alongside writing classical music, they publish songs and perform Fluxus pieces under the pseudonym Misty Moscow, releasing their debut EP Panopticon in January 2024.
Following the release of Panopticon, we asked Phoebe to guide us through the process of creating the EP, bringing together disparate samples, and composing with vocaloid software…
Panopticon is the culmination of multiple years of my artistic development.
I’ve known I wanted to make an EP full of original songs for a long time. I’ve been writing and producing my own songs since I was much younger, probably for about the same amount of time I’ve been playing instruments and writing classical music. However, for several reasons, this never came to fruition until now — A-Levels and then starting my degree at Guildhall kept me extremely busy, and being a huge perfectionist prevented me from releasing anything I wasn’t 100% happy with. Over the years I’ve written a huge deal of songs, many of which I produced nearly to completion before scrapping them. In the end, I only included tracks that I felt fit the visual and musical aesthetic I was going for. This EP has grown to be such an amalgamation of different genres that I don’t think I can give it a single genre label; I’d say the closest fits are art-pop or synthpop, but that would be leaving out so many of the genres that I explore only for a single track.
While not a concept EP, Panopticon does have an aesthetic image, represented by its cover. The purple-haired girl is called Eclipse; she’s a character I created years ago and she has been an avatar of sorts for my songwriting since I first started making songs. Her design has evolved quite a bit over the years, but she has always had long purple hair. She doesn’t have much of a backstory; to me, she just exists in the cyberspace to perform my music. Every track shares a similar electronic style of production, atypical song structure, and mental health-related themes in its lyrics, and I feel that these things turn the EP into a cohesive art piece, rather than just a collection of songs.
Most importantly, every track on the EP incorporates pieces of a much earlier track I made in 2020, before the first UK lockdown. It was an instrumental track for a video game about Eclipse I was making at the time (which I never ended up finishing). I hardly knew what I was doing production-wise and I created the entire song in GarageBand, which doesn’t have many useful production tools to begin with. This track used a short MIDI piano riff and improv solo, and a saxophone playing a lead melody throughout, which was recorded by my GCSE music teacher. In every single Panopticon track, I either used pieces of the MIDI from the piano part, or chopped up and spliced together bits of the saxophone recording to create entirely new melodies. On some tracks this functions similar to an easter egg, but you can hear it used prominently in ‘Eclipse’s Theme’ and ‘Starskating’.
Before I dive into breaking down each track, I will warn that I don’t really like going over my lyrics in depth. Many of the songs are disturbing and are very very personal and I’m not so comfortable revealing absolutely everything about my personal life. I’ll mention what themes a track contains, or what life experiences inspired it, but I think that over-explaining the lyrics dampens them a bit. To me, it’s more fun for the listener to find their own meaning in each song than for me to reveal the intended meaning.
Quadrant Leader Fairy Syndrome
I’ve always had super vivid dreams since I was a kid. One night last summer, I dreamed I got diagnosed with a personality disorder called “Quadrant Leader Fairy Syndrome”. I don’t remember what the symptoms were in the dream but I thought the disorder name was super cool, hence the song title. I’ve somewhat themed the lyrics around mood swings but left the lyrics intentionally vague, so you can easily interpret this track in many different ways. I used Hatsune Miku1 — a japanese synthesized voicebank software — to produce the vocals for this track. I wanted her to sound very robotic and unhuman here so I used autotune, and not much vibrato or decoration — although she briefly switches from this during a bridge later on in the song.
In this song I use multiple samples. The first is an infamous PSA on drugs from the 50s, which has gone viral a few times before on TikTok. I picked out short clips from the voiceover and interspersed them throughout the intro. The second sample is less well known — it’s a clip from Kodocha, an anime I watched a few episodes of when I was younger. In the anime there are segments in every episode where the main character raps for a bit, so I took two of these raps and used them in the song. The sampling will continue throughout the EP; it’s a technique I really really love to do, and it’s so satisfying to reuse old sounds in new ways, whether it’s obscure videos I find on YouTube or my own archived material.
Entanglement
I honestly cannot tell you what this song’s lyrics are about — because I don’t remember. I wrote the lyrics for this song all the way back in 2021 and then produced this track in early 2022. The lyrics obviously convey some kind of sadness, but since they’re so abstract and surreal it’s not easy to pull any narrative from them. They use a lot of sci-fi and cyber imagery, which I tried to reflect in the production. This is also the only track on the EP where I sing the vocals myself. Back then, I didn’t yet own the Miku software, so when I wrote songs I would usually get my friends to sing them for me. In the past I didn’t have much confidence in my own voice, but listening to it nearly 2 years later I think it sounds pretty good, and it’s a shame I haven’t sung on my own tracks more. It’s something I definitely plan to do when making future music.
Sonically, the song is inspired a lot by Björk’s song ‘Possibly Maybe’ — I loved the lo-fi sadness of the production and how it contrasted with Björk’s super expressive singing, and I tried to emulate this pretty much by bitcrushing the hell out of every instrument (for non producers this means reducing the sample rate of audio). Although it’s a simple technique, I’ve gone on to use bitcrushing a ridiculous amount in most electronic things I make; I can’t explain why but I adore the crunchy, nostalgic sound it creates.
The second half of this song was especially fun to make, due to the multiple instrumental solos. I played the keyboard solo myself but my friend Gene [Morissey] played the guitar solo. What you hear on the song is not what he originally played — I had him improvise over the chord progression for a few minutes straight, then spliced together select clips into two different complete solos, with a few decorative moments during the last verse.
Eclipse’s Theme
‘Eclipse’s Theme’ is an instrumental breakcore track. I’ve always loved breakcore and wanted to make my own track as part of the genre, but I’ve never got around to it until now. People tend to assume breakcore revolves around only a single chord progression within one key, but lots of the original breakcore artists like Venetian Snares frequently change things like key, mood, tempo, and even time signature, so this is what I tried to emulate in my track by changing key and mood several times. This track features a lot of material from the video game track I mentioned earlier; the main synth theme you hear at the beginning is sampled MIDI from the track, which was originally in 3/8 but I edited it to fit it into a 4/4 signature. And the saxophone solo that plays towards the end is also from the old track, and it appears mostly unedited (except for lots of bitcrushing!). Because of all this, I’ve named the track after my character Eclipse.
I use different drum sounds for different sections of the track. The beginning and ending are just one of logic’s drum kit presets I arranged into a breakcore pattern, but the midsection uses the iconic Amen Break sample that appears in so many famous jungle and breakcore tracks. For this, I had to break up the audio into tiny individual segments of the kick, snare, hi-hats etc. — then duplicate and rearrange them into a new rhythmic pattern, which I distorted and doubled the kick on for extra power. I noticed a weird trend of a lot of recent breakcore tracks using parallel major 7th chord progressions. (I’ve not really heard this in any older breakcore tracks). Harmonically it gives a weird illusion of a lack of tonal center, and to me at least it gave a feeling of “uneasiness” — this explains my choice of chord during the Amen Break section.
Lastly, I have to mention the other samples on this track. It uses the most samples out of any track on the EP. Aside from the saxophone and MIDI from my old track, and the Amen Break, there are four other samples to mention. First is an old clip of my friend Mia singing part of a song I wrote a long time ago; I think we recorded it around mid-2022. Second is a very short clip of Björk speaking, taken from her Icelandic Christmas interview, and third is an old clip of me reading a line from some old discarded lyrics. Both these two clips have been formant shifted and processed to sound unrecognisable. Finally, I used a recording of a concert by the noise band Hanatarash. This is a group I hugely admire, despite their style of music being completely different to mine, and their distorted screaming was the perfect addition to the noise buildup during the Amen Break.
Starskating
This might be the only track on the EP with a clear-cut meaning that’s obvious from just listening once. I made this track when I was struggling after a breakup; the lyrics try to capture the feeling of hopelessly longing for someone who doesn’t care about you. I only wrote one verse for this song — I tried to write a second but I just couldn’t I thought that the first verse standing alone was much more powerful. So the first “verse” on this song is entirely instrumental, and the vocals only begin halfway through the track. The chorus mentions Yahweh — God’s real name in Abrahamic religion. I’m Jewish and had a religious upbringing, and while I’m not so observant anymore I still do believe in God and pray to him in times of need. Typically out of respect, he’s not actually supposed to be referred to by name — instead with substitutes — but I use Yahweh here because it’s much more personal, emphasising the desperation of the lyrics as a kind of prayer.
Again, I have Hatsune Miku on the vocals. I processed her voice bank to sound super soft and thin, as if she’s holding back tears.
Sonically, I wanted to actually translate a series of images into audio format. I have this pinterest board, also called Starskating, which is full of star-related pictures: dark blue night skies, fairy lights, glitter sequins… I have a kind of synaesthesia that’s common amongst neurodivergent musicians, where I can see colours when I hear certain pitches and keys. So I wrote this song in D minor because its colour palette is navy blue, pale cream, and light yellow: perfect for a night sky. The track’s texture full of lots of little details to give it additional colour and sparkle, with the multiple delayed EQ’d pianos and the synth pads being my favourites. I sampled the same saxophone solo as featured on the previous track — but I chopped it up and heavily processed and repitched it to the point where it’s completely unrecognisable. At points of the song it still sounds like a saxophone, but at some points it almost sounds like a trumpet because of how much I’ve remolded it.
Song that plays while your bandmates are dying in a housefire
This is a short interlude to break up the pace. This massively pitched down saxophone clip was left unused in the DAW file after the end of ‘Starskating’ (I had simply moved it out of the way after I was finished chopping it up). But I really liked how it sounded and had weirdly grown sentimentally attached to it playing in my headphones at the end of every ‘Starskating’ relisten, so I decided I had to include it in the EP somehow. I didn’t further transform the clip in any way except for adding a fadein and fadeout, and I added a sampled fireplace roar over the whole thing.
The fire audio and the title are references to an old virtual band project I had many years ago, similar to the kind of stuff Gorillaz does. My character Eclipse was originally part of a group of five characters — but I have long since abandoned those other four. Friends who were around while this project was active sometimes ask me “What happened to those characters?” or “Will you ever bring them back?”. But I can never be bothered to think of a proper answer so I always used to jokingly answer that they died in a fire. Lo and behold, this character lore has now been canonized.
Tachycardia
This is by far the track on the EP I’m most proud of. It’s an amalgamation of multiple different genres that have influenced me, the most important of which being new wave. This song actually started out as a short cover of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s 1979 song ‘Behind The Mask’, which I did to practice recreating analogue synths. I was really happy with how each instrument ended up sounding and I didn’t want them to go to waste, so I applied some effects to the synths, changed the chord progression, and used them as a basis for ‘Tachycardia’. If you listen to the openings of ‘Behind The Mask’ and then ‘Tachycardia’ back to back, you can hear the similarities! I continued adding to the new wave sound that I’d got from the cover by adding heavy reverb to the vocals and several layers of extra synths. There’s also a couple of fun samples in the song — the glitched drum part in the midsection is from a broken drumset sample pack I bought online, and the piano improvisation that plays halfway through the mid-section is MIDI taken once again from my old track from years ago.
Lyrically this song is pretty dark, probably the darkest yet out of any song I’ve ever written. It’s about forgetting your worries and mental issues by drinking, dating and partying — something I have battled with in the past. The title is the medical term for a fast heart rate, which is a symptom people often get from excessive drinking. The song is in English, but there are a couple verses in French halfway through — partly done to obscure their meaning from most listeners, but also because I speak French (although I’m not fluent yet!) and wanted an opportunity to write French lyrics. The overall contrast between such depressing lyrics and the upbeat, energy-filled accompaniment is really enjoyable to me, and I feel like it reinforces the song’s meaning even more.
Moi, je crois que plus je bois
Plus je reviens vers toi
Tu dis que c’est une obsession malsaine
Mais je mourrais sans toi
I think that the more I drink
The more I return to you
You say that it’s an unhealthy obsession
But I would die without you
This track is also where I really tried to push Hatsune Miku to her limitations. Her software has HEAVY restrictions on how it functions. It has an English bank of words it knows how to pronounce, and if it doesn’t recognise a word then you’ll instead have to manually input each phoneme to create a custom word. Using this, I managed to make Miku sing in French by stitching English words and phoneme sequences together to make French words. Another difficult thing I did was making her “speak” – this basically involved me recording myself reading a few lines, transcribing the exact pitches of my voice, then inputting those same pitches into Miku so it sounds like she’s talking rather than singing.
I have a music video for this track, animated by my friend Sofia. Rather than give her a detailed script of what I wanted in the video, I gave her little to no instructions, and complete creative direction. I wanted to see her own visual interpretation of the song and its lyrics, and what she produced was absolutely incredible; I couldn’t be happier with it!
Finally, I want to thank all the people who were involved in making Panopticon — Felix, who mastered the EP, Gene and Mia, who contributed on two of the tracks, Minsu, who made the cover art, and Sofia, who made a music video. All of you have done an amazing job and I couldn’t have made this EP without you.
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Stream and download Panopticon at the link below:
Phoebe is performing as Misty Moscow on Friday 23rd February at Electrowerkz, London – you can find more details at:
Follow Phoebe Apfel and Misty Moscow:
Discover more guest articles focused around albums here.
- Most people refer to the Hatsune Miku software as “her” rather than “it” due to it using an avatar of an anime girl in its marketing, so I’ll do this throughout the article. ↩︎
