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Creator / ThornBrain

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Mikaela Thorn, also known as ThornBrain, is a writer, video editor, musician, humorist, Let's Player, and voice actor. She is the head of the Let's Play channel TheStrawhatNO! and their comedy/parody channel TheMidnightFrogs, host of the music podcast Sophomore Slumps, and is the writer of The Legend of Zelda: Book of the Traitor.

Information for her music and personal projects can be found on her website, and information on her projects with Yoshi and Jacob can be found on TheMidnightFrogs' website. Tropes related to those projects and her involvement are on their own pages.

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Records as ThornBrain

Albums

EPs and Singles

  • BlackspaceWorkinprogress (EP, January 2011 - demos and WIPs of tracks from BlackholeWhitespace, came with downloads of BlackholeWhitespace. Available as part of The Forgotten Ones 2 compilation)
  • Saw Beat (Single, 2011 - available as part of The Forgotten Ones 2 compilation)
  • The Right Way to do Everything (EP, March 2011 - remastered for The Forgotten Ones compilation, and the original master is on The Forgotten Ones 2 compilation)
  • Lost Effort (Single, March 2011 - remastered for The Forgotten Ones compilation, and the original master is on The Forgotten Ones 2 compilation)
  • Rise in Love instrumentals (Demo EP, February 2021)

Compilations

Records as Sellafield

  • Profile (Album, ETA: 2022)

Features

  • "Industry Standard" (2011) by Sawtooth - Vocals
  • Snacks (2014) by Sawtooth - Vocals and noise sampled from "Tribalism" on "Human (I Like You)", Lyrics and vocals on "Grudges"
  • viva lasagna (2019) by smell - Lyrics, vocals, guitar and Ebow on "bird ghosts"

Charity Appearances:

This creator provides examples of:

Her music provides examples of:

  • Affectionate Parody: "the shift key is broken and so is my heart" is titled as an affectionate jab at musicians who title their songs, albums and/or band name in all lowercase letters, particularly her friend Patrick's project 'smell', whose first album woof was a big inspiration for Mikaela returning to music from 2018-on.
  • Answer Song: "There for Me" is written as the opposite of Al Green's "Take Me to the River", which David Byrne described as not comparing love and baptism but simply combining them. "There for Me" actively compares love and religion unfavourably.
  • Anti-Love Song:
    Sorry love there's nothing there for me
    I don't want somebody there for me
    • "Angel Lungs" dips into this when the lyrics aren't outright surreal.
    I was the last thing to go right for you
  • Book Ends:
    • Nobody Cares... and its remade tracks on The Forgotten Ones begin and end with a sample of a telemarketing voicemail from "Bobsatm.com".
    • A favorite composition trick in Buried Secrets & Old Lies. The album begins and ends with Old Lies walking through the desert and dying, "Neuropia" with a blast of noise and a distorted voice, and "Principle Shit" with the same soaring Ebow guitar and chords.
    • Rise in Love opens and closes with part 1 and part 3 of the Title Track (part 2, "Disassociation", is in the middle). The "Supermoon" suite also opens and closes with the same acoustic guitar-driven composition.
  • Boxed Set: Though The Forgotten Ones 2 is a digital-only release, it is treated as this with the 75 tracks separated into 12 conceptual "discs". Tracks that are part of the same album, EP, or general era of recording are considered part of the same disc, E.G.: "Disc 1" is the BlackholeWhitespace album, "Disc 2" is its companion EP BlackspaceWorkinprogress, etc.
  • Call-Back: "Rainborne" from Rise in Love makes reference to Thorn's previous works - "For Not 206" ("the boy with the thorn in his brain") from Buried Secrets & Old Lies, The Right Way to do Everything EP, and Worldbuilder - as a way to put her coming out as trans into a wider context in her life and her music.
  • Canon Discontinuity: Downplayed with 2011's BlackholeWhitespace, which she acknowledges as her first album and still has some nostalgic affection for, but she avoided re-releasing it in its original form after Futures Passed Free Music shut down in 2013. Its tracks only appeared in compilations, with only the fully original tracks being remastered for The Forgotten Ones. Finally subverted in 2021, when the entire album was included as its own 'disc' on The Forgotten Ones 2, every track intact in their original forms.
  • Cover Version:
  • Death Song: Frequently:
    • "The Forgotten One" is about a person who dies in a car accident and is buried under leaves and snow never to be found.
    • "What a Way to Go" and "Hang On, I Got This" are about the strange ways people kill themselves.
    • "Let's Make a Martyr", a satire of martyrdom and how people and their causes become venerated after their death, so you'd "better pick up the pace".
    • "Quaero" is about a man dying in the desert, only for his skeleton to rip out of his body and keep on walking. Except his flesh gets back up as well.
    • "Misery Is A Riot" has the narrator and a funeral procession mourning the death of the aforementioned skeleton but happy that the person is gone too.
    • "Woke Up Seeing My Killer" is about Thorn trying to survive her suicidal mental health crisis in September 2020.
  • Epic Instrumental Opener:
    • The extended version of "Spider" has 1:30 of intro.
    • The 8:20-long "Abbott is Death Process" has 3:40 of a shoegazing instrumental before the vocals begin.
    • Downplayed in "Northern Mantra", which has a vocal line at one-and-a-half minutes, but the intro is otherwise two minutes of guitar riffing before the first verse.
    • "Rise in Love" part 1 has a minute-long opening in a four-minute track.
    • "Afraid of Music" has a two minute organ intro, then another 30 seconds before the vocals come in.
  • Epic Rocking:
    • The Right Way to do Everything: "Echo to Canal Street" is 9 minutes, and "Knock Gabriel Knock" is 7 minutes.
    • Buried Secrets & Old Lies: "Misery is a Riot" is 6:41, and "Abbott is Death Process" is 8:20.
    • Worldbuilder: "Tell Me About Your Planet" is 6:42, and "Northern Mantra" is 8:08.
    • Rise in Love: "Afraid of Music" is 8 minutes, and a bonus track combines the three separate parts of the title song into a single 12:48-long track. Though the two suites, "Bloodstar" and "Supermoon", have their parts separated into individual tracks, they are respectively 14:22 and 11:08 when their parts are combined.
    • The Forgotten Ones 2: Thorn's cover of "Games Without Frontiers", which was later stripped and remade into "Knock Gabriel Knock", is even longer than the latter track at 7:36.
  • Everything Is an Instrument:
    • The phased noise intro and outro for The Right Way to do Everything is her computer's fan.
    • "The Flint Robot has a Perfect Day" uses a processed microphone thump and some Skype call static as a rhythm track. "Quaero" does a similar thing with recordings of Thorn hitting her desk with her fist and making vocal noises, both recorded over Skype while it was bugging out and playing her side back over Mugiwara Yoshi's mic. The processed recording of Thorn hitting her desk comes back in the intro for "The Mask is the Face."
    • "Quaero" also uses drum sticks hit against her desk and each other for percussive texture.
  • Fading into the Next Song: Worldbuilder and Rise in Love do this for many of their tracks, being linear storylines.
  • Genre Mashup:
    • Her then-label boss didn't know what genre to use to describe "Count All the Flies in My House", so Mikaela called it "Avant Dance".
    • Nobody Cares Unless You're Pretty or Dying and Spider are self-categorized as "Hardcore Pop" because they mix so many random Punk and Alternative subgenres together, and as a play on "Power Pop".
    • She describes the album Buried Secrets & Old Lies as a "Post-Punk/Alternative subgenre blender", combining even more disparate subgenres than Nobody Cares.
    • She describes some of Worldbuilder, namely "Micronova" and "Electricity", as Dream Rock to differentiate their harder sound from their softer Shoegazing, Progressive Rock and Noise Pop influences. This carries over to Rise in Love, which also has more pronounced Krautrock influences.
  • Genre Roulette: Her music is a mix of Punk Rock, Post-Punk, Alternative Rock, Noise Pop, Shoegazing, Industrial, Electronic Music, and various other influences combined or alternated. Worldbuilder went even further left-field, adding influences from Progressive Rock, Jazz Fusion, and Heavy Metal.
  • Grief Song: "The Singer Died Today", while itself a story song with characters only named after them, is about the deaths of David Bowie and Scott Walker.
  • Idiosyncratic Cover Art: Starting with Buried Secrets..., all of her albums have "ThornBrain" and the album title in a jagged, hand-drawn style in the top-left corner. LPs have their titles written in red, while compilations have their titles in the same pale yellow as the ThornBrain logo.
  • Improv:
    • Most of the music for her original songs from 2011 were improvised. This is noticeable in "The Forgotten One", which has multiple flubbed notes and structural inconsistencies in the guitar performances.
    • The guitar solos on "Get Out of the House" were recorded one after the other with no planning other than to make them dissonant and disorienting. They had to be re-edited to fit the song's tempo, and this is most noticeable in the outro where she left the recording as-is, so the solo loses the tempo.
  • Loudness War: A firm aversion. All of her albums and songs have a minimum average dynamic range of DR10 and avoid clipping (though this was mainly due to her pre-2018 work not actually being mastered or significantly compressed). Though many unmastered versions of tracks from Quaero and Buried Secrets & Old Lies went as low as DR7, her mastering process actually increased the dynamic range of louder songs; most significantly, DJ Sawtooth's remix of "The Mask is the Face" was DR5 before mastering, after which Mikaela doubled the dynamic range to DR10.
  • Lyrical Dissonance: She enjoys writing uptempo, melodic, Punk-inspired songs with lyrics like:
    "Let's make a martyr, you're gonna die someday
    Let's make a martyr, you're gonna die anyway!"
  • Medium Awareness: "Hang On, I Got This" includes the line "I hear you better when you're further away", sung by the backing vocals which are buried in reverb.
  • Miniscule Rocking: Many of the tracks from Nobody Cares Unless You're Pretty or Dying were under two minutes long, being heavily influenced by miniscule rockers Wire and Bad Religion; "My Parents Died and Everyone Loves Me" and "All the Wrong Friends" are both only 30 seconds, and the album outtake "Headcase" is 45 seconds. Buried Secrets & Old Lies was significant for it being the first album were she consciously averted this, making an effort to have every track be two minutes-long at minimum.
  • Pastiche:
  • Packaged as Other Medium: The cover art for Buried Secrets & Old Lies is designed as a horror comic book cover.
  • Religion Rant Song: The second half of "There for Me":
    "To cheap experiences I'm not a stranger
    I went to church for a number of my years
    Sat in back with my eyes glazing over
    You never see one like me coming to tears"
  • Sampling:
    • The Saw Beat single is composed of three songs made entirely out of this.
    • The extended version of "Spider" samples a California Lottery commercial.
    • "Don't Hear Me" samples a Skype call with Mugiwara Yoshi as Yoshi's mom yells at him.
    • The first and last songs on Nobody Cares have samples of a telemarketer advertising the now-defunct website, "Bobsatm.com".
  • Self-Deprecation:
    • From "There for Me":
    "You gave your compliments long after I decided
    I have a face that you scrape off the road"
    • She released a compilation of unavailable music from 2011 and titled the compilation ThornBrain is Really Bad at This - The Best of the Worst (2009-2011). Its free companion No One Needs Me is similarly subtitled The Rest of the Worst.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: invoked Worldbuilder was recorded entirely in February 2019 for the RPM Challenge. Rise in Love and the Sellafield album Profile began the same way but couldn't be completed in time.
  • Shout-Out:
    • The title of her first album, BlackholeWhitespace is a loose reference to the David Bowie album Black Tie White Noise.
    • "Saw Coffee (Mensforth Hill)" is "Saw Beat" reversed and further treated, a reference to "Mensforth Hill" by The Clash, which itself is a reversed and overdubbed remix of "Something About England".
    • "Knock Gabriel Knock" has multiple lyrical references to "Games Without Frontiers" by Peter Gabriel, due in part to the song originating from an avant-garde cover of it.
    • "I'm Your Victim" opens with a guitar riff lifted straight from Black Flag's "Rise Above".
    • Buried Secrets & Old Lies:
      • The title of "Here Comes Singularity Black" is one to "Here Comes the Singularity" by Killing Joke. Its original title was "Vantablack" after the world's blackest pigment, but Thorn wanted to avoid any potential legal trouble due to the name being copyrighted; "Singularity Black" is the name of the blackest publicly available paint - only slightly less black than Vantablack.
      • The title of "Room for One More" quotes the Arc Words from The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Twenty-Two." It was also originally going to sample the line before Thorn decided not to anger Viacom.
      • The title of "For Not 206" is one to the sometimes inexplicable Word Salad Titles of Wire.
      • The title of "Abbott is Death Process" is a quote from Arrival.
    • Worldbuilder:
    • Rise in Love:
      • The cover art shows a figure flying upward, which is actually an image of them falling flipped upside-down (evidenced by a palm tree at the top of the picture), a reference to the iconic scene of Miles Morales falling upwards in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
      • Much of the album was inspired by the works of Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, together as Neu! and separately in Dinger's band La Düsseldorf and Rother's solo album Flammende Herzen. The title track utilizes Neu!'s signature motorik drumbeat, and "Supermoon" uses drums inspired by Jaki Liebezeit's drumming on Flammende Herzen.
      • David Bowie's death in January 2016 is "ground zero" for the events that inspired the album, so the lead character in "Bloodstar" is named after him, a line from his song "★" is paraphrased in "The Singer Died Today", and Sue in "Afraid of Music" is named after his song "Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)" from the same album.
      • Other named characters include Scott, named after the late Scott Walker, another major influence on Thorn; Wendy, after pioneering transgender Electronic Music composer Wendy Carlos; and Angela, after late transgender composer Angela Morley who arranged for Scott Walker's early solo albums. The second half of Rise in Love is about the lead-up to Thorn coming out as transgender herself, and she found Carlos and Morley being out as transwoman and winning awards for their work back in The '70s as inspirational.
      • "Woke Up Seeing My Killer" is heavily referential to Philosophy Tube's "Blackstar" trilogy of videos, particularly the "cosmonaut" character, in tribute for Thorn using the videos to get through a suicidal depression in late 2020 before deciding to come out as trans. Some of the album's references to Bowie's Blackstar are circuitous influence from these videos.
      • "Rise in Love" part 1 opens much quieter than the rest of the song before blasting out at full volume to surprise listeners, a reference to Roxy Music doing the same thing with "Virginia Plain."
  • Spoken Word: "Self-Portrait with Stolen Painting" is Mikaela telling a story over Industrial Post-Punk music.
  • Take That!:
    • "Let's Make a Martyr" mocks the tendency for people who die or are killed for their cause to become symbols of said cause that others rally behind, saying that those people wouldn't have cared until that person died.
    • "Edged Out" is this to the Straight Edge movement's and Ian Mackeye's views on sex, comparing it to sexual oppression in religion as a pointless rejection of a natural human instinct.
    • "Principle Shit" is a vicious takedown of Baby Boomers who look down on millennials and Gen Z-ers for being unprincipled by saying their outdated principles are what lead to things like domestic abuse and school shootings.
    • "As Gods As Demons" is one to people who use religion as an excuse to commit acts of evil.
    • The final third of "Cancerous Winter" is one to celebrities who were revealed to have committed sexual assault. The first two thirds of the song are about celebrity deaths.
  • Title Track: Worldbuilder has "Worldbuilder (A Denoument)", and Rise in Love's title track is separated into three parts at the Bookends and middle.
  • Uncommon Time:
    • Worldbuilder flexes its prog and jazz influences this way:
      • "Competition for a Bad Life" alternates 7/4 in the verses and 3/4 in the chorus.
      • "Electricity" is in 7/4.
      • "Tell Me About Your Planet" has the lead-in to the "Shark (A Distraction)" piece that alternates 5/8 and 3/4. "Shark" itself starts in 5/8 before switching to 7/8, then 3/4, then 5/4, before ending in 4/4.
    • Rise in Love:
      • "The Singer Died Today" is 4/4 with short choruses that are 7/4.
      • "Afraid of Music" has a 7/4 organ intro, 4/4 rock section, 7/4 organ transition, and 6/4 shoegaze ending.
  • Word Salad Lyrics:
    • "Count All the Flies in My House":
    I like to sit on a petrified head and
    Count all the flies in my house
    I like to think that there's plenty more people
    With insane amounts of time on their hands
    I wish the voice in the roots of my teeth stopped
    Buying pizza it can't afford
    It makes more flies, it makes more flies...
    • Invoked with "An O in Hell", written to spin sentences and clichés in weird ways ("what have you done" becomes "who have you done"). The song's other lyrics were recycled for "Face Down Walls", where they and the new lyrics make just as little sense.
  • Word Salad Title:
    • BlackholeWhitespace.
    • "An O in Hell".
    • From Buried Secrets & Old Lies and Quaero: "Here Comes Singularity Black", "Face Down Walls", "Fountain Neck" and "For Not 206".

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