Interview with zipwok
Tarro:
Hello zip and welcome to Zooey! Thanks so much for doing this! You’re probably one of the number one zoo musician out there, which I know isn’t an incredibly large category, but I’ll admit, I’m a pretty huge fan. I don’t know if the readers know this, but I’m a music lover, and I’ve actually released a zooey song too! I really wanna dive into your creation process, but before that, I want to learn more about you. First of all, you have such a weird name. But also it really seems to fits you! What’s the story behind it?
zip:
It’s my pleasure to be here! Thanks for the compliments but I’m by no means number one of anything, specially not music. While it’s true that openly zoo musicians are few as of now, the ones we do have are nothing short of amazing! I hope we can talk some more about them later on.
Also, I can’t believe I haven’t hear your song yet, that needs to be remedied asap! It’s really nice to be interviewed by a fellow zooey music lover.
On my name, I wanted something that was original and easy to find. What I did was combine the song name for two tracks of the Bomberman 64 soundtrack, those were Zip and Wok. Not my favorite songs but it sounded nice to me, not too serious. I guess I forgot to check with native English speakers on how weird it would sound to them, but I’m still pretty happy with it. I’ve had a couple people call me zipwork by mistake though. That sounds even funnier to me.
Tarro:
As a native English speaker, I think it’s a pretty great name still. It’s charming, and easy to remember! Anyway, I know this is a boring question, but I like asking it because I always get such a variety of answers! How did you discover your sexuality, and how did you then find your way into the community?
zip:
Not boring at all, In my experience, growing up with a frowned upon sexuality gives way to the most particular stories, and I myself love to hear such stories from fellow zoos.
In my case, I always knew I had a special thing for animals, even though I never confronted these feelings up until very recently. As a teen I got used to burying them deep inside, fearing someone could find out what was “wrong” with me. As a result, I came up with very interesting self-imposed and unspoken rules, like forbidding myself from looking at dogs walking down the street. I would get quite nervous around animals, and that came with its own deal of frustration. It’s crazy what the fear of not being like the rest can do to you.
It was around four years ago that I found this community thanks to those openly zoo Twitter accounts, they’re doing Dog’s work! That’s when I started confronting my true feelings toward members of other species and finally throwing in some reasoning of my own. Shortly after the first ZTT episode came out and I was instantly hooked. Back then I was still in denial, and even wrote in as a “non-zoo ally”, but a couple of podcast episodes and a short but intense emotional breakdown later, I came to the realization that there was nothing wrong with me, and that my zoosexuality is something as peculiar as it is beautiful, and it is to be embraced. Since that point, everything changed: I made my online zoosona, started making zooey friends, and last but not least, I could appreciate every animal in my life in a brand new way, even passing-by dogs! To be honest, it’s hard to overstate how much of a positive impact the Zooier Than Thou podcast has had in my life.
Tarro:
It’s awesome to hear that you’ve managed to come so far! ZooTT is so incredible, it’s amazing what kind of impact you have have on the world by just creating something that people resonate with! But now you’re creating amazing things too! While music is pretty different than a podcast, I think that music is such a great way to spread a message. Especially when you can do it well! Based off of what you create, it really feels like you appreciate music. Where did that come from? What got you into music in the first place?
zip:
As a kid I was exposed to a nice variety of music from my parent’s CD catalogue, which they would play while on the road, but my first personal musical love came with videogame soundtracks. Games like Minecraft, Undertale and the Portal series left me totally enamoured with those intricate sounds and melodies. Even now that I don’t game as much I still explore OSTs from games I’ve never played, and I enjoy them just as much.
It was from videogames that I gained an appreciation for electronic music, and somehow found myself fascinated by tracker music. A music tracker is a piece of software that was used to sequence music for videogames back in the Commodore 64 days, but they evolved into something fun that anybody can use to make any kind of sequenced music. That’s when my music making journey first started, posting chiptunes online.
From then, and after discovering the furry fandom, I became a huge LapFox/HalleyLabs fan. Then it was jazz, folk, lots of songwriter music and lately I’ve found myself really enjoying punk rock.
I’m still not sure what is it with music, but it’s one of those magical things that never fails to make me feel on top of the world.
Tarro:
Oh god, I loved Undertale, and I think a huge part of it was the soundtrack. I listened to a full orchestra play through the OST of that game somewhat recently and it was incredible. I was playing something else and had the performance on in the background at first, but I had to stop playing to just watch and listen because the music that came out of that game is so phenomenal. Video game soundtracks are for sure underappreciated. I think that the music that musicians listen to is always really interesting. When you really understand the techniques and specifics behind certain things, I think it can make different music stand out a lot more. For instance, if you spend your whole day writing pop music, you might listen to metal in your spare time just to mix things up. When you talk about liking punk rock nowadays, are there any specific songs or bands you want to shout out? They don’t have to be punk, either!
zip:
Certainly! When you make music you tend to pull ideas from anything you’ve been exposed to before, resulting in a conglomerate of sounds that only you could’ve come up with! I think that’s really special. Sometimes you do it on purpose, sometimes by chance, but for sure mixing things up is a lot of fun.
And sure! If we’re doing music recommendations, big inspirations for me right now are Bill Wurtz, Joanna Newsom, Martín Buscaglia and Die Ärzte. Definitely check out “Claudia hat ‘nen Schäferhund” by this last band for a real fun zooish punk song! Now, I have to give thanks to Konny from Shiv for this newly found musical taste. He’s is an incredible musician and goodboy. Konny and Cookie’s songs are the first punk music I truly enjoyed, and it was through zoo music that we got to know each other and became great friends!
Tarro:
Music really is incredible. It can spread messages, help you make friends, bring people joy or even make them cry. It really seems like it can do anything. What do you think makes music so powerful?
zip:
Big question! This is something I’m still trying to figure out. It might be all that you said, and its capacity to bring people together. As a way of sneakily avoiding the question, this reminds me of that “playing music for cows” viral video, in which a trombone player plays a song by Lorde out in the deserted open fields, but by the end he’s completely surrounded by curious cows grooving along and having the time of their lives. There are many more of those, with dogs, donkeys… They’re absolutely heartwarming, and show that music can unite more than just two-leggers!
But to be honest, I feel like any response I can give you would on text would be incomplete. I’m not sure it can be put into words. The best possible answer is playing any music that you like, then everything becomes crystal clear, even if abstract.
Tarro:
Honestly, I think that’s a fantastic answer! Anyway, enough about you. Lets talk about the nitty gritty of your music. Your songs hit this perfect folk-y tone where it feels simple and clean and gives you this just overall positive sound. Is that an intentional choice that you make?
zip:
I’m flattered by your words! Still, I believe my music is in a pretty early stage yet.
It’s certainly not an intentional choice, as I never go into the writing process with the idea of say, making a positive song. My songwriting process is very much left to intuition and the “flow” state. In fact I find that the songs I think about the least end up being the better ones.
I tend to write songs about things that touch me personally, specially with the more folk-y ones. I like to think that if they have an overall mellow or positive vibe to them is because I’m feeling that way and it somehow shines out through the song. Or perhaps it’s you feeling positive!
This way of writing is pretty new to me, and I think that it’s a natural extension from the changes that I’ve been going through after finding the zoo community and accepting myself as I am. All of this has had a very radical impact on my music. Three years ago I was making electronic music only, and now I feel an endless urge to pick up my guitar and sing songs in my own voice, which is something I had never dared to do before.
Tarro:
Wow, that’s such a sweet sentiment! Although with the way that you use your voice, you could really believe that you’ve been doing it for ages. Speaking of the way that you write, on your album “Howling at the Moon”, you have a song called “Delusional”, which just based on the lyrics feels really personal. I’m not sure if there’s a story behind it, but I think that the message is something that all zoos can really relate to. Was there a particular thing to inspire that song?
zip:
Yes! You’re spot on. I wrote that song in one of those instances of momentary despair, when we need to remind ourselves that what we’re doing is noble and valuable, despite the whole world seemingly fighting against us.
In my case, this feeling was exacerbated for a good while after a situation when coming out to a friend went pretty badly and I ended up losing contact with a bunch of good furry friends. Some of them didn’t like zoos one bit and clearly told me that they didn’t appreciate my songs. As you can imagine, it can hurt when you hear something like that coming from someone dear to you. Writing “Delusional” helped me greatly to overcome this, and now it feels more like a bad dream.
However dark that anecdote sounds, I consider myself really lucky when it comes to disclosing my zoosexuality to beloved ones. I’m out to most of my good friends and close family, and all of them took it surprisingly well.
Tarro:
You can really feel that emotion in the song. It’s definitely one of my favorites. My absolute number one though is “The Reasons Why”. I think it’s so beautiful. Your singing is amazing on it, and that line about “The space between your snout and my mouth” is so cute and makes me want to smooch my partner every time I hear it. When it comes to performing songs with that level of emotion, do you have some technique that you use in order to get the right tone in your voice? That’s definitely something that I personally struggle with in my singing.
zip:
Aww that’s so cute! Please do smooch your partner as much as they like!
I’m immensely happy to hear that you like “The Reasons Why” so much! This is a song I also love, but that I grew to hate, as the recording of it was somewhat frustrating. I’m completely self taught in singing, recording and mixing, so sometimes things don’t sound like you want them to and you don’t really know why. I spent days re-recording and fiddling with compressors, to the point that this song delayed the album release for almost a week. In the end, the whole song sounds overworked, and thus stands out from the rest of the album, but I’m very glad that you were able to enjoy it regardless!
Nonetheless I still love playing this song and I’m sure I’ll record another version sometime, to make up with it.
I know very little about the practicalities of singing and I also struggle with it at times. The only advice I can give you or anybody else on singing is… Keep singing! Do it as much as you can, and I’m sure you’re gonna do it anyway, because singing is fun and it feels amazing.
Another useful tip to keep in mind is to try not to be so hard on yourself. We tend to be our harshest critics and that can hamper our creativity. I often have a hard time applying this advice myself, as you could probably notice in the former paragraph.
Tarro:
Speaking of mixing, your most recent song is “You Make me High” and0 it’s clear that this is a step up in terms of the technical aspects behind the song. You’ve got layering, voice effects, more instruments and even a music video behind it! That’s a lot to learn between your album release and now. What was the hardest thing to learn to produce “You Make me High”?
zip:
Well, the story is a bit messy, but in summary, I’ve been learning and experimenting with new songs between the album and this last song. These involve more instruments, samples, synths, etc. Lots of fun stuff! I managed to finish one of those songs, and I liked it so much that I decided to make an animated music video for it. But since I’ve never done anything remotely like that, it’s taking me a very long time, as I get comfortable with the software. Thus, I understood that if I keep working on this one video, I won’t be writing any songs at all for months, and composing new stuff is what I really care about right now. So I decided to put out a music video made entirely from scratch, in one day (kind of an unreasonable deadline looking back). This project became “You Make Me High” and ended up taking 4 days of nonstop work, which is still not bat at all. As exhausting as it was, I hope to make more songs this way, because it was also tons of fun!
As of the hardest part, I’d say it was working with no samples. This last song was completely made out of sounds that I recorded, either with the guitar or my voice.
Tarro:
I think the music video for the song is so perfect for your style. Simple, but incredibly effective. It’s a cardboard cut out of a dog and a rabbit in a forest finding each other. I’m curious though. The basic read on it is that the rabbit is you, or some zoo anyway, and then the dog is their partner. Is that right? Also, why a rabbit over any other animal?
zip:
That’s a beautiful takeaway and I wouldn’t like to spoil it with any words of my own!
I chose the hare probably because I met a couple of them recently. They’re very cool! I also saw a striking good-looking deer in that forest, while shooting the video.
Tarro:
In a couple of your songs, you take an existing piece of something else, and then use it as a base to create on top of. Is that how your song writing process typically starts? Or can it be totally different depending on the song?
zip:
Yes! I enjoy changing the lyrics of songs I like to something more zooey, like with “Zany Zoo Memes”; or writing some to melodies that didn’t have any lyrics in the first place, like with “Howling At The Moon”. When I do this, it usually comes out of me randomly listening to a song and thinking of some funny lyrics, then going “This is too neat to not share it!” And then zooey cover comes out!
So yeah, it’s a totally different process to the other songs that I write “from scratch”, where the music and lyrics typically arise together. “From scratch” comes with Great Dane sized quotes, as you know that with music everything is borrowed.
Tarro:
Last question! If there are other zoos out there that hear your music and are inspired to pick up a guitar or plink some keys, what would you say to help them get started?
zip:
If you’re starting out, don’t get too caught up in trying to make it perfect, there’s already lots of “perfect” music out there and it gets boring after a while. Also, don’t be afraid to share what you make! We zoos have a unique perspective that is missing from the world, and your voice, whether quiet or loud, is extremely valuable.
And lastly, have fun!
Tarro:
Thank you again so much for talking with me today. I honestly can’t wait to hear what you put out next. You’re such an amazing musician, an honest talent. If any of our readers haven’t heard your music, they can find a link to your Youtube channel below this. Definitely at least check out “You Make me High” and “The Reasons Why”. Is there anything else you want to say before we wrap things up?
zip:
Thanks to you for the fantastic interview! Zooey is an incredible project and I hope it inspires zoos all over to come together and create cool stuff like this.
One last thing I’d like to say! I urge anybody interested in zooey music to check out the songs by Shiv, Zoo’d, Kynophile, and the ZooTT crew, without which I wouldn’t be putting out music, as they all greatly inspire me! Hopefully we can link them as well. And don’t forget to link your song too!
Find zip at https://twitter.com/zipwok
And Tarro at https://twitter.com/hereforthezoo
Questions, comments, or concerns? Check out the discussion thread!
