twikipedia is the project of 20-year-old Brazilian musician delta, who we had the pleasure of interviewing last year about her latest album, for the rest of your life. Her previous album-length release, Chronic (2022), was a culmination of years spent releasing digicore on SoundCloud.
delta says in the liner notes to for the rest of your life that “I heard To See The Next Part of the Dream [by Parannoul] in 2022 and… it clicked for me that the side of music I thought was impossible for someone like me to create has been sitting there all this time.” for the rest of your life taps into the melodic vocabulary of the 2010s emo revival while sounding entirely original, owing to delta's love for Brazilian bands.
Ali Cyrus Saeed: Where are you from in Brazil? What was it like growing up there?
Delta: I’m from Niterói. You know Rio, with the Christ statue right? You cross over a bridge, then there’s where I grew up, which is way lamer. Then I moved to the US for high school.
Growing up in Brazil, there’s a lot of musical references from here. For my album for the rest of your life, I was listening to a lot of Brazilian emo. Not just Parannoul and stuff like that. (Ali: Who are your favorite Brazilian emo artists?) My favorite of all-time is Fake Number. Fresno is also really good.
Ali: To what music did your family expose you before you went exploring on your own?
Delta: Brazilian popular music: MPB and Bossa. Some rock too; my mom used to be in a punk band when she was a teenager. It wasn’t a big thing… I wish I could be a nepo baby, but I wasn’t. (laughs)
I think this background plays into the ways I do chords now. Bossa music has a lot of weird chords, sevenths and ninths (or whatever that shit’s called). (Ali: I was talking to Young about this earlier, and they were doubting me… I was like, I find a lot of synergy between MPB guitar and emo guitar, because it’s strummy major sevenths.) I think so. I think a lot of the dissonant moments in emo can be compared to the dissonant moments in Bossa too.
Young Fenimore Lee: Your music and the music of your greater “social movement,” so to say, is linked to video games. When did you get into gaming and what have been some of the most important games to you?
Delta: I remember my first ever game. My aunt had a DS when I was a kid. She got me to play the New Super Mario Bros minigames. I remember the specific minigame that I played; it was this whack-a-mole one.
I don’t think I developed a “meaningful” connection to games until I played one that made me feel something. That was probably Undertale. I was around 11 when I played that game, which is the age when you start being able to interpret things in a deeper sense. Later on, I became obsessed with Earthbound.
Young: Before you were releasing music, you were making video game content on YouTube, like Roblox and stuff. How did you make the jump from that into music?
Delta: I started making music before the videos. I was making vaporwave in 2015 at the earliest in Sony Vegas. I don’t know what the fuck my business was making vaporwave as an 11 year old, but I was. By 2016, I was making chiptune on a site called beepbox.co, and in late 2016, I downloaded FruityLoops. I’ve been too lazy to switch off since.
While I was already making music, it wasn’t a focal point until I discovered the scene I’m in now on SoundCloud. I was like, oh this is happening. I don’t want to miss out. So I dropped the channel real quick because Roblox got boring.
Young: How do you reflect on that era of your music in the “Soundcloud Rap” scene?
Delta: I would say I’m still in it, somewhat. My public hasn’t changed all that much. I’ve probably gained about a thousand different fans from this new thing, but most are still my old ones. I still talk to the same people. I’ve been trying to break into the emo circles, but it’s not easy. Most people that I look up to are closed off and doing their own thing.
Ali: Who are your favorite soundcloud rappers of your era?
Delta: I used to listen to pitfall and kurtains a lot. I’m trying to think of more people, but most don’t even rap anymore. It seems like everybody that I listened to back then wanted to break off into something different. Well… everybody still raps I guess, but now they’ll make a rock song, then drop a rap song back-to-back. It’s starting to become a normal thing, which is cool to me.
Young: That’s sort of your trajectory too, right? In the last year or so, you’ve taken this big new direction. So our question was, when did you start feeling like your music needed to change?
Delta: When I was finishing up Chronic, the last three songs were me testing how weird I could get until people start getting mad, but they liked it apparently. So I had been wanting to do it for a minute, but I didn’t have the push until I heard Parannoul’s album at the end of that year. I wasn’t taking myself seriously up until early-2023, when I started trying to write lyrics that mean something real. I get mad reading my old lyrics at this point – most of them don’t mean shit. (Ali: What’s an example of lyrics that make you cringe now?) In the “ok like” song, the opener of Chronic, I lied so much. Oh my god. Talked about a car – I don’t have a driver’s license. Talked about a watch – fucking hate watches, I would never buy a watch.
Ali: Did you always play guitar?
Delta: No. I started last year and only began to feel confident recently, so for the rest of your life only has VST guitars. But I’m making a new album right now, and it’s all real guitar. My process of learning is mostly just looking up “how to play x chord” on YouTube then eventually making a song that uses it. (Ali: Are there any songs that you think were particularly satisfying for you to learn?) I don’t really learn other people’s songs that much. But I learned two K. K. Slider songs recently. I can play one. [Delta picks up a guitar and plays "K. K. Bossa".]
Ali: Any favorite bands?
Delta: Wings of the Isang is a Korean post-rock band I really like. There’s Guther, this twee pop artist who inspired a lot of my still-life album. I think they’re German or something. They have this album called I Know You Know. It has a 2 on Pitchfork. I love it so much. I’m trying to think of anything else… Radiohead, obviously. Everybody likes Radiohead. I don’t like them that much, though, I’m kind of a hater sometimes, but there’s a few songs I like a lot. Susquatch is a jazzy math rock band that I love. Brave Little Abacus is really good.
Ali: We asked Parannoul and acloudyskye about how they identify with the movement that sprung up in the wake of Brave Little Abacus, sometimes called “fifth wave emo” or “post-emo”, and I’ll ask the same of you.
One thing about Brave Little Abacus that made them so foundational, and I only realized this after thinking about your music, was the integration of chiptune, which is also part of your musical lineage. Do you recognize twikipedia to be part of this movement?
Delta: I think maybe my back catalog puts me somewhere else. That makes me kind of sad. But I get it. (Ali: I’d consider you part of this movement. People can be part of different things, and go between things.) I don’t know. People called it like a shoegaze record. I thought it was more of an emo record than a shoegaze one.
Young: We have a few questions about how you made the album. You started out rapping, making beats, and now you’re singing. Did you always enjoy singing? How did you approach recording and producing the vocals?
Delta: It was very different. I’ve always liked singing and always wanted to do guitar songs. I really didn’t want this to be the kind of rock that you can tell is processed and autotuned, so I ended up trying to work around processing and fixing my vocals less. When I used to rap, I’d use the same preset in every song. I’d just load up a preset that would have the EQ and whatever ready for me.
For the new album, I decided to triple all my vocals. Every line I sing in that album, I recorded it three times and panned it left, right, and center. I was trying all sorts of shit to see what made it sound more authentic.
Young: I had a uber-specific question about the vocals. On “Seams” at 2:10 [linked above], there’s this melody where your voice breaks on the flattened third. How did you get it to sound like that? It sounds pretty insane.
Delta: I use BitSpeak. It’s this VST that Jane Remover put me onto. I had no use for it until I was making that song. I figured, oh it would sound cool if it sounded weird here segueing into the next part. Plus I sung it pretty bad, so I wanted to mask it by throwing some effect on it.
Ali: Is it true that the only non-VST things were a couple of acoustic guitar parts? Which were those?
Delta: It was just the end guitar in “Boy”, which was the acoustic, and the end of “Seams”, which I recorded on that guitar that I played "K. K. Bossa" on. It’s an electroacoustic, so you could plug it into the computer. That was before I had any real guitar. That song is really old, that song is from April of last year. I kind of improvised with the electric guitar part of that song.
Ali: What VSTs did you use for guitar and drums?
Delta: I used Evolution Strawberry and Addictive Drums 2 because I read that Parannoul used them in an interview. (Young: He told us the same thing, those exact VSTs.) I was kind of annoying to him, I feel like. I tried asking all my friends who made rock for help, and none of them were trying to help me. I was like, okay, I’ll try asking Parannoul. I know it’s dumb, but maybe he’ll answer it. And he did answer. It was very helpful and kind of him to help me with that.
Ali: Did you arrange all the VST guitar parts on your DAW? Or did you try it out on guitar first?
Delta: I made it all on the computer, just piano roll on FL Studio. It was a hard process to get the guitar to sound real. I made a bunch of different strumming presets that were basically chopping up the MIDI to the common guitar strumming rhythms, so I could try them with the different chords I made afterwards.
Ali: Which track was hardest for you to make?
Delta: “Boy” was an instrumental for six months because I couldn’t figure out what to say on it. Then it was really hard to get the mixing on it to sound right. I still kind of hate the mixing of the album now. If I could, I’d give it to someone else to mix it. It's easy to come up with the instrumentals for me. It was the singing and the mixing that was really hard. Just making the VST guitar sound different in every song. That’s the problem I have with the VST guitar – it sounded kind of similar no matter what I did to it.
Ali: With the style change, have you been afraid of alienating your earlier audience?
Delta: I mean, I still rap. I dropped a rap song not long after the album on a side account. I don’t want people to expect me to go back right now. I’m never going to stop rapping. It’s so fun. But I want people to understand that I’m gonna keep releasing emo albums for a bit. It’s just what’s most fun to me right now.
Ali: You mentioned you’re starting to get more in touch with the Brazilian DIY scene or your local scene. To what extent do you feel part of that scene? Do you have any favorite artists from that scene?
Delta: I don’t really feel like I’m part of it much – most of my songs are in English, so I’m slotted into the scene from the US. I’m not mad about that, but my native language is Portuguese, so it’s not like I’m not from here.
One of the artists who ended up influencing my album a lot was an artist called hateyourmusic. You know, like the fucking site, but hateyourmusic. There’s this album they made with some bear cover art that really inspired me. Another person who helped me with feedback on the album is a very cool artist named simon e o rei gelado.
Ali: How do you think Discord has influenced how music is made today?
Delta: Let me think… I think maybe it becomes a little less serious and a little more fun. I’ve made so many songs in front of my friends, including the songs from the album. The feedback you’re getting has an immediate impact. Basically every day, I’m watching my friends make music, or they’re watching me make music. It becomes a more collaborative process. I showed every single song on this album in every single state to my friends as I was making them, and the feedback was important to me.
Young: Where does the album art come from?
Delta: I was bored one day and looked up “South Korea missile test” on Google. That image showed up. It looks like a rocket, but it’s a missile. That’s kind of crazy. I wrote about it a bit on the Bandcamp bio for the album. It could be either, but the shit they do is totally different. I appreciate the ambiguity. It relates to the contents of the album and the direction I’m trying to take myself in. (Young: It’s a pretty sick photo.) I noticed that people like it, and that made me happy. A lot of people said that the cover is better than the album. Damn. But what if I had a bad album and a bad cover? That would have really fucking sucked.
Young: In the Virus interview, he asked you, what have you been doing with your time lately? Do you remember what you said? (Delta: No…?) You said, “I make plugg beats all day, every day.”
Delta: I still do that. I’ve made like 10 in the past week. It’s so fun. And I don’t send them to anyone. I don’t care. It’s just fun to me. Fun chord progressions. I feel like making plugg probably helped me understand chords better than any amount of rock. All the gospel inflections and the jazz shit that goes into making a plugg beat is so intricate. It helped me a lot making for the rest of your life. I ended up using a lot of the same tricks that I did while making plugg, but with a guitar.