Today Sadie and I are going to be talking about our inspirations for our VN! We did this in a sort of… cross interview format over Discord while I went out to get my hair trimmed. I'm C (Crystal!) and she's S (Sadie!). Without further ado, here’s…

Two Tokyo Tgirls Talk: Musical Inspirations

So about that title...

C: So, about this title! Neither of us are Japanese, but we are in the Tokyo area! Sadie and I actually met briefly before we even knew who the other was! That was at our job orientation in the big hotel.

S: Yeah, I asked you if my outfit looked okay, and then completely forgot about that until a bit before we met for real.

C: I didn't remember it at all! It was just meant to be, I guess. A year later I was on Her looking for someone new... and the rest was history! Now we live together, so it's easy to collaborate for a project like Cosmos!

S: It’s the happiest I've ever been. We used to have to commute 2 hours to meet, but we still met every week.

C: You used to live way out in the country! Now you get the big city experience.

What would you say is the influence of music on Cosmos?

C: Sadie's the expert when it comes to music; before I met her I barely listened to anything outside of video game BGM! It was when we got a record player that things started really clicking together. We both started getting into old prog rock, and one day Sadie brought home a weird looking record called Flying Teapot by a band out of France called Gong!

I honestly had no expectations going in, but I loved the weird jazzy instrumentals and the playful, goofy lyrics (in particular, a song about a cat). As it turned out, Gong had, over the years, operated under a number of different names. Planet Gong, Mother Gong, New York Gong... drunkenly I kept joking about a version called "Air Gong". Just complete nonsense. But when we thought about it, that was kinda like a weird way of describing a UFO... so our studio suddenly had a name! One of our supporting characters is also named after the band as a bit of an homage to its lead singer, Daevid Allen.

S: I think we both became big fans of Daevid Allen's blissed out and stoned scifi optimism. He seems like he was such a free and beautiful person, and his anything goes experimental outlook is something that I think Air Gong takes with it. We're both huge fans of his solo album Divided Alien Playbax80. It’s advanced level Gong, but I think it fits what we're doing even more.

S: On the other hand from Gong's silly sci fi optimism is Hawkwind, the official band of Michael Moorcock (more on him in the future). Hawkwind is all about how drugs are cool, but space and the future are cold, scary, and often violent places. The first chapter of Side Future is named after one of their very best songs on their best studio albums, Assault and Battery from the fantastic Warriors on the Edge of Time. I think we want to invoke the same kind of shock and action of their music. How about you, sweetie, what do you take from Hawkwind?

C: Sorry, I got to my hair appointment early and she did my hair early too. I’ll type up a response on the train.

S: Sounds good. We should keep this all in.

C: Even this!? No way!

S: It’ll humanize us!

C: We’re plenty human, aren’t we? Anyway, Hawkwind! Hawkwind is, as you'd expect of a band called Hawkwind, extremely cool! There's a sort of energetic quality to the guitar and vocals that just gets me pumped! So any time I wanted to write an action scene, I'd do two things. One was to drink a lot of coffee, which would get my mind racing at a thousand miles a minute. The second was to put on some Hawkwind! That got the ideas coming like nothing else! I hope the energy that music inspired in me carried over to the final product!

C: I think there's probably two more bands that really inspired Cosmos. The next one I want to talk about is King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard! By the time the whole "Mind Fuzz" suite had completed on "I'm in your Mind Fuzz", I was completely sold on them. That lo-fi, garage sound so many of their albums had was a huge inspiration to me. And if you're sharp enough, you might spot a reference I snuck in from their spoken word hybrid album, Murder of the Universe, in the first chapter.

S: Right, I forgot about that! King Gizz is a big one for both of us I think. Their songs are filled with bizarre imagery, action, storytelling, it's everything I want Cosmos to be. Might be the most referenced band in Cosmos? But we can just ignore their dire boogie album dodges rotten vegetables thrown by Gizzheads

C: Hey, Cyboogie is a good song at least!

S: I'd say the other biggest musical influence is Peter Gabriel era Genesis, for me at least. But I'd like to hear what you think of them.

C: Peter Gabriel's Genesis has some really fantastic imagery in it. I mean, there's not a lot of bands where I can sit back and unwind to a song about snake women, so they got that going for them! That era of Genesis has some truly sweeping narratives with some weird events going on! And we got the name for the standard goons from them.

S: My biggest reference point for Cosmos from them is the fantastic The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Whenever I write for the Future at least, its surreal urban nightmare of identity is really what I'm trying to channel. It probably wasn't written as a metaphor for being trans, but the shoe certainly fits with its tale of an outcast street kid who struggles with masculinity falling into a psychic landscape trying to find who he really is.

C: You really hit the nail on its head. So much of the Future part is all about discovering who you are and struggling to survive in a nightmare world, so it works well.

That’s all for now! We’ll post about our other inspirations another time. Next up is going to be a closer look at Meteor, another character you meet in the demo. See you then!