Magical Girl Hop Hop
Animatic music video I created as part of this project in 2013, featuring the first song completed as MGC. I illustrated and edited this using Paint Tool SAI and Windows Movie Maker.
While I was in college, I started messing around with writing lyrics and experimenting with music more seriously. I had always been a singer, but something clicked for me during that time and I decided to take the leap of actually producing music to put online. You can listen to the albums in this blog post.
I ended up reaching out to someone on Tumblr who went by the name Ouji. I honestly cannot even remember how I first found their music, but back then Tumblr was where I discovered so many independent artists who were just doing their thing. I found one of Ouji’s beats and felt really inspired by it, so I messaged them and asked if they would mind if I tried writing lyrics over it. I had always loved hip hop and rap, especially that vocal delivery and rhythm, and I wanted to see what would happen if I stepped outside my comfort zone and gave it a try.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Gorillaz and the idea of using a cartoon or fictional persona to represent yourself online really appealed to me. I did not have a clear plan, but a concept started forming anyway. The story centered around a magical robot girl who fell to Earth and was trapped underwater in a containment pod. Ouji, an alien prince who ran away from his home planet to come to Earth and be cool, discovers her, pulls her from the water, reactivates her. Together, they team up as a trip pop inspired duo who are constantly on the run from mysterious forces.
We called the project MGC, which stood for Magical Girl Crew. Definitely a little cringe in hindsight, but we were having fun with it, so it didn’t really matter to me. That project ended up spanning around seven years with our first EP releasing in 2013. I was working as a janitor at the time and spent those long nights listening to instrumentals and writing. I was still finishing my undergrad degree during this time. We would eventually end up releasing a handful of singles and another album over the course of 7 years.
Our first album was Magical Girls From the World EP. It was extremely experimental and pulled from a lot of different influences like EDM, house, and other punchy electronic genres. One of the darker tracks was Glitch Queen, but one of my personal favorites from that release is Internet Kids. That song is basically about how the internet belongs to the younger generation, and if you do not understand the online world, you get left behind. A lot of that album was me processing thoughts and feelings that I did not know how to communicate any other way. I started the project when I was probably around 19 or 20, deep into anime, cartoons, and anime conventions, and it really reflects that phase of my life.
A fun fact about this period in my life is that Ouji is actually from Argentina, and we have never met in person. We collaborated entirely online. Since then, they have gone on to work with some really incredible independent artists and continue to put out amazing music. I am incredibly grateful that I got to experiment and create with them early on, and to be part of their journey as a producer as they grew into where they are today.
Before our second album, we also did an English cover of one of our favorite songs by the Japanese pop duo Capsule. The song is called I’m Feeling You. We were completely obsessed with Capsule, Perfume, and a lot of artists from that era of Japanese pop. I had always wanted to cover that song, and Ouji helped make it happen. We reinterpreted the lyrics in English and added a bit of rap. It was really a highlight of that time for me.
The final album we released together was called Post Virtual. This one leaned more into pop and had a bigger, more polished sound. One standout track is Just Lose It, which is essentially a corruption narrative where Julius goes kind of crazy and powers up through Ouji’s music. The line “every kind of villain needs a magical girl” was based on my feelings of helplessness in some situations I was going through at the time. In most magical girl anime, the feminine power comes from a really deep place of empathy and empowerment. My hope was by channeling these feelings through music it could encourage others that listened to it, but really I was giving myself a pep talk. A lot of the songs on this album are more emotional, and reflected what I was going through in my life at the time.
Working with Ouji taught me so much. It gave me the confidence to put myself out there and collaborate with other producers, which eventually led me to making my own solo album that I will talk about in another post. I am really proud that this project exists online. We made everything ourselves, in our bedrooms, with no support. Every once in a while, I will randomly get a few dollars from someone buying one of the albums. It’s always a pleasant suprise.
I also want to mention that all of the design, illustration, and graphics were created by us as well. I even started trying to turn the story into a comic at one point. Maybe that will still happen someday. For now, I kind of love that the narrative exists mostly as an illusion, something you piece together through the sound and atmosphere of the albums.
I eventually became part of an independent music label called Audmonsters that introduced me to other like minded creators and I partnered with a handful of them to create singles as part of compilation albums and subsequent individual collaborations and even made an Audmonsters zine that featured other artists’s characters and illustrations by a handful of artists associated with the label. It was a really wonderful time and I have many fond memories of working with them.
I am genuinely grateful for this project and for meeting one of my long time collaborators this way. I hope that one day we will finally get to meet in person and hug it out. This experience really set the foundation for so much of what I have done creatively over the last twelve years, and I will always be thankful for that.
