Music: Instrumentals

Original title and hook: “The Ego Autopsy” – 2014

-“You’re, The Bourbon Street Genesis, man!”
-“No! No, YOU’RE the guy who is a smarty pants on the street of bourbon… Wait, where the fuck are we?” 
– “I dunno. The moon is over there now, so that puts us…. Like, somewhere in New Orleans… I think.”

The track is a relic of a heavy, absinthe-fueled night on Bourbon Street in 2014, born from a way-too-many-dinks collaboration with the legendary author Chuck Palahniuk.  The night a blur of attempting to out due the other with darker and darker storylines, stumbling around like a halloween sugar-high on “Vike&Mikes” candy mix, the session was an attempt to capture the same spirit-tearing prose that Palahniuk is known for. While the creator, Stephan, fully admits to be only “1/10,000th the writer” of the legend, the track is a mere homage to raw word-smithing prose into something that strips away the human facade until only a 100% genuine core of grease and gristle remains.

The Arc of a “Somebody”: From Obscurity to the VIP Room

He understood then that a meaningful life was built on the “genuine article,” substance over style. However, the 2009 “Money War” surrounding his first book deal fundamentally shifted his internal compass. As he transitioned from obscurity to internationally read status, the introspection he once valued was replaced by a powerful addiction to the dopamine of importance.

For several years, Stephan lived as a type of incognito celebrity. He describes this period as a time of being, “weak to all that makes humans the desperate rodents we are.” We are susceptible to the same traumas and most of us pretend we’re above it.  He found himself drinking too much and gravitating toward those he perceived as “the shit,” relishing the ability to skip the line and enter the VIP world. Though he claimed to despise “star-fuckers,” he admitted to letting them into his orbit because little is more dangerous than an addiction to the feeling of being desired. During this era, the persona of “Being Important” began to overshadow the genuine man, a transformation that he acknowledges made him, “dislike himself.”

The Great Extraction: Returning to the Marrow

Stephan’s return to a “healthier normal world” was not a result of failure, but a conscious rejection of the “Big Deal” identity. He realized that the high of being special was a cage that prevented him from living an intentional life. By 2012, he was turning down book deals to find a “hard-earned peace,” a process he views as stripping away the “sparkle and glam” to find the purpose of existence again.

Decoding the Lyrics: The Philosophy of the Ride

The lyrics of “This Is Your Ride” act as a post-mortem for that era of ego and celebrity.

• “Falling is what happens to you. The ride is you choosing to control the fall.” Stephan views the fall as an allegory for surfing/living/dying everything that chaos can bring. Things are gonna happen, it really has a lot more to do with how you choose to deal with it than what happens to you.

• “Not the one they sold you… between boner pills and protein powder.” A sharp critique of the lie of consumerism and materialism. Marketing is telling you what you want to hear for money. The reality is that fashion is slavery and paying to be told lies you want to hear is what whores are for. It represents his current disdain for the day he saw his book being advertised at an airport kiosk between an ad for a Jersey Shore endorsed nutritional supplement and an over-the-counter counterfeit Viagra made with rhino tusks that you buy at gas stations and convenient stores.

• “A name, a mold, a leash, and a screen to keep you pacified.” We are living in times where we are more pacified than ever before. Reality television and dopamine optimized apps keep everyone burning 30.41 days a year consuming content that doesn’t warrant 30 seconds much less several hours a day. Cut the leash that binds you to this meaningless existence. Anyone tells you that when you are bored the best thing to do is be patient, has not fully accepted life is ending. Boredom is the sign that you are wasting your life.

• “Don’t be a slave to obligation and other people’s demands.” This refers to his time letting publicists and people he didn’t even like dictate his time, his energy and often his sanity. He had to learn to stop serving the version of himself that others wanted to see.

Remastered after discovering efoiling: “This is Your Ride” – 2022

“The price of flight is letting go of imagined safety.” Stephan draws a parallel between efoiling and personal growth. To truly “fly,” he had to let go of the his party piece and welcome peaches back into his life and embrace the vulnerability of being a “nobody” again.

• “Better to be stripped to the bone… as long as you can still suck the marrow out.” The ultimate conclusion: it is far better to be a real person with a real name as an authentic nobody than an anonymous star.

The Origin of Ride Forever: From Parody to Perfection The story of Ride Forever begins, like many creative accidents, with a joke that didn’t land—at least not in the way it was supposed to. Composer Stephan Kuslich never set out to write a serious song. The original concept was deliberately unserious: a Weird Al–style parody loosely inspired by Oasis’s Live Forever. The goal was to poke fun at a specific corner of his YouTube audience—those persistently critical voices who fixated on safety gear, or the lack thereof. The tone was meant to be exaggerated, defiant to the point of absurdity. Helmets, armor, condoms—nothing was off-limits in what was intended to be a tongue-in-cheek anthem of reckless bravado. On paper, it was ridiculous. That was the point. But when Kuslich translated the idea into a MIDI sequence and rough lyrics, something unexpected happened. The structure didn’t behave like parody. The phrasing didn’t lean into punchlines. The melody didn’t signal humor. It didn’t wink at the listener. It didn’t exaggerate in the right places. It simply… worked. Enter Darwin Panic of Specific Ambiguity. As Darwin later recounted, the moment he heard the early version, his reaction was immediate and decisive. “I heard it and said, well this isn’t going to work. It sounds way too different for anyone to get that it’s a parody.” The issue wasn’t that it failed—it was that it failed in a very specific way. It wasn’t funny. But it also wasn’t bad. In fact, it was the opposite. Instead of discarding it, Darwin did something far more consequential. He leaned in. What followed was less a correction than a reframing. Stripped of its intended comedic context, the track revealed a different identity—one that had been there all along, hiding beneath the surface of what was supposed to be satire. As Darwin began reshaping the arrangement in the studio, adding real instrumentation, adjusting tone, and letting the structure breathe, the realization set in: this wasn’t a parody that missed the mark. It was an original song that had accidentally been written in disguise. Not ironically good. Not accidentally amusing. Just… good. There’s a certain poetic irony in what happened next. Within the studio environment—populated by trained musicians, producers, and engineers—it became clear that the least musically trained member of the group had stumbled into something the rest recognized immediately. The person who intended to write a joke had instead written a foundation. One that others, with more formal musical instincts, could recognize, refine, and expand. In that sense, Ride Forever is not a story about a song being written. It’s a story about a song being discovered. Darwin’s next move was pivotal. Rather than trying to “fix” the parody, he proposed abandoning it entirely. The new idea was simple: keep the defiant spirit, but remove the comedic framing. Let the track exist as its own thing. Not a spoof, not a reference, but an original piece inspired by the energy of Live Forever, not dependent on it. Kuslich’s reaction, by his own account, was one of surprise. When he first heard Darwin’s version, the Oasis influence had already dissolved to the point of being unrecognizable. What remained was something entirely new. “It sounded really good,” he admitted. Good enough, in fact, to anchor something larger. That “something larger” became the Ride Forever project. But instead of consolidating around a single definitive version, the team made a decision that would ultimately define the identity of the song. They let it fracture. Rather than choosing one direction—rock, parody, ambient, theatrical—they invited multiple interpretations to coexist. The same core material was handed to different artists and groups within the studio, each encouraged to push it in their own direction. The result was not a linear evolution, but a simultaneous divergence. Specific Ambiguity’s version carried the DNA of Darwin’s original intervention. It leaned into rock structure and grounded intensity, shaping the song into something declarative and cohesive. Heather’s in Heat took that same energy and amplified it, transforming it into a loud, persona-driven performance that leaned into attitude and exaggeration. Cia Berg, alongside Raster Ops, moved in the opposite direction entirely, dissolving the track into dreamy synth textures and atmospheric immersion. Madeline Roma’s Sensual Mix would later internalize the song further, turning it into something intimate, restrained, and deeply focused on feeling rather than motion. None of these versions replaced the others. None were “definitive.” Because there was no original to begin with. All of them were born from the same moment. All of them were valid. All of them revealed something different about the same underlying structure. What started as a failed parody became a kind of musical prism, refracting into multiple identities depending on who was holding it. Kuslich himself acknowledged how unexpected this transformation was. The track that began as a throwaway joke ended up becoming the title track of the project, standing in stark contrast to the more atmospheric work that initially defined the album’s direction. It wasn’t supposed to lead. It wasn’t even supposed to exist in that form. And yet, it did. In retrospect, the most remarkable aspect of Ride Forever is not that it turned out well. It’s that it resisted intention. It refused to be what it was designed to be and, in doing so, revealed something more authentic. The musicians in the room didn’t create that authenticity—they recognized it. They gave it shape, amplified it, and allowed it to evolve, but the core of it was already there, embedded in what was supposed to be a joke. There’s a quiet lesson in that. Sometimes the difference between failure and discovery is not the material itself, but the willingness to reinterpret it. To hear something not for what it was meant to be, but for what it already is. Ride Forever didn’t become a great song because it was carefully planned. It became one because it was accidentally honest—and because the right people were in the room to notice.

01. Drift — Raster Ops

Genre: Cinematic Electronic / Dreamwave

Description:

“Drift” opens the album like a slow breath — weightless, expansive, and quietly powerful. Built on warm analog pads, soft pulsing bass, and distant melodic echoes, the track feels like floating just above the surface of reality. It’s immersive, calm, and cinematic.