Gathered friends, welcome to yet another post by the Le-Koro Band!

This week, I was taking a stroll around the shoreline when I stumbled upon Markle! He was drawing music staff lines in the sand next to a partially submerged golden Kanohi Hau and humming a tune to himself. It was “We’re The Le-Koro Band,” a song he had added his voice to for “Ide’s Journey: Act 2, Disc 2,” released in 2024:

So, I sat beside him, and we chatted about his winding journey through the BIONICLE^® community, his involvement with Unmasked Games, formerly Team Kanohi, his work on Masks of Power, his musical education, and his philosophy of collaborative play.

So, gathered friends, and honored guest…

When were you first introduced to the world of BIONICLE^®? What was your first set?

I have a very clear memory of my introduction to Bionicle. I was only 4 years old at the time, and I got a McDonalds happy meal toy of Reidak that spun the saw blade when you pushed down the button on the top. 4-year-old Markle took one look at that and thought, “Yep, this is a good thing to base my entire personality around for the next 20 years of my life.” My first actual set was Thok, and all of 2006 holds a really special place in my heart.

When and how did you become involved in Masks of Power?

I stumbled across Masks of Power in 2017. I had known someone IRL who was on the dev team at the time, and they encouraged me to look into the game. I had seen some videos covering the early versions of Legacy, and was curious to check it out for myself, so I joined the discord server. Around that time, a few of the devs and some fans wanted to start a Bionicle roleplay discord server. I was around 15 at the time, hadn’t really had anywhere else to channel my love of Bionicle before now, and it seemed fun, so I joined. One of the devs in there really liked my writing, and they recommended me to the rest of the team to join as a writer. And the rest is history!

Was Team Kanohi your introduction to the larger community?

In many ways it was. I wasn’t really active at all before getting involved with Masks of Power, only really knowing about some of the bigger YouTube channels. But as I got more involved with Team Kanohi, I became more involved with the community as a whole. My involvement with Team Kanohi pushed me to get involved with the larger community, and I’m incredibly grateful for all the opportunities I’ve been given as a result!

The tragedy of Masks of Power regarding the LEGO^® Group’s apathetic decision is well known throughout the community by now. We won’t pressure you for updates about the next game, but as a writer for Team Kanohi, and now Unmasked Games, what are you most excited for when helping write the story for Project Rustbound? 

Something I’m really excited about is the chance to get to create and flesh out an original world and story. One of my favorite parts of writing for Masks of Power was getting to explore the rich world of Bionicle, getting to add even more depth and personality to it. And now, we get the chance to do it with something that’s entirely our own. I can’t say much about Project Rustbound right now, but I can say that there’s a lot of incredible ideas from the team, and I’m incredibly excited to get the chance to bring them to life.

Pivoting to your musical adventures, how did your love of music-making come about?

I’ve always been interested in music for as long as I can remember. …If I’m being honest though, one of the most influential things from my childhood that got me interested in making music was WarioWare DIY for the Nintendo DS.

That’s right. This is all Wario’s fault. I spent hours in that game’s music creation tool trying to make my own songs, or to make recreations of existing songs. And young Markle loved every second of it. I think I can honestly say that if I didn’t have that available to me growing up, I wouldn’t have had the same drive to create music that I do today.

You mentioned to me at one point that you were studying music composition. What has been the most useful and rewarding thing you’ve learned in those classes? What was the least? That is to say, what’s something interesting you’ve never used, but sticks with you regardless?

That’s correct! I graduated with my degree in Music (with a concentration in composition) last year in 2024. One of my favorite things from studying music at a university level was getting to learn more about music theory. It can be extremely dense, and at times it can get so complicated that it’s stupid, but that’s kind of what I love about it. Understanding better how music works and how different notes and chords relate to one another has really given me a deeper appreciation for music as a whole. Getting to learn more about it was a huge source of creative inspiration, and it’s absolutely helped me to become a better musician and composer.

As for the least rewarding thing I learned? 12-tone rows. You’ve never heard of them? Good. Keep it that way. Once you start learning about atonal music in your theory classes, the “music” part of music theory goes out the window. 12-tone rows are just math masquerading as music. I don’t think anyone in my theory classes enjoyed learning about them. Please, if you’re reading this, don’t try and write atonal music. Just don’t. Please.

Just this last year, you released an absolutely beautiful choral song called “Ro’o Kai,” a rendition of the themes from the movies in the Matoran language! How did that come about?

Ro’o Kai was an incredibly rewarding experience for me to write and create. Its creation ended up happening in 2 phases. I initially wrote the song in 2023 as a part of a project for one of my classes, without the intention of necessarily putting it together as a full, finalized piece. At the time, we had begun working with OutOfGloom on Masks of Power in order to incorporate the Matoric conlang into the voice acting for the game. And as I was studying music composition at the time, as well as studying choral arrangements, I thought it would be fun to write a choral song in that conlang. The Legend of the Bionicle text from Mask of Light seemed obvious as the most fitting text to set to a choral song. I started with the simple beach chant and expanded on it from there, working to incorporate as many themes and motifs from the movies as I could. When I finished writing the sheet music, I was incredibly happy with the result, but didn’t really have the chance to take it much further at that time.

Near the end of my Senior year, however, I realized that I had the opportunity to create a proper recording of the song. I knew that if I wanted this recording to exist, I needed to make it now. I had performed for several years in my university’s choir, so I got together a few of my choir friends to record all of the parts. And the end result of that entire process is the finished song as you heard it on 810NICLE Day 2024.

How long did the whole process take (writing, translating, composing, revising, recording, editing, mixing, and releasing the song), and what was the most difficult part of that song’s creation?

I started thinking about the concept of Ro’o Kai as early as October 2022, but it wasn’t something that was a huge priority for me at the time, since I had other school-related projects going on, and had no plans to turn it into an actual recording at the time. I think I didn’t finish the finalized sheet music for the song until around mid-2023.

I started the recording process in early 2024, which took around a month. That process ended up being a little bit fast-tracked due to me waiting until near the end of the semester to decide that I wanted to put it all together. I then spent around 2 months after that working on editing and mixing the song after I graduated.

I think the most difficult part of the song was just the technical process of getting all the voices recorded together. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to projects like these, and my vocalists were all fighting an uphill battle during the recording process, needing to learn their parts to the song, as well as an entirely fictional language that they’d be singing (not to mention that these recording sessions were happening in the midst of finals). A lot of the mixing process for the song was me sifting through each voice part individually, listening to multiple different takes of every individual phrase or syllable to find the best line for each voice. While there are only 7 vocalists credited, there are actually 18 different voice tracks playing at once (3 Bass 1s, 3 Bass 2s, 2 Tenor 1s, 2 Tenor 2s, 2 Alto 1s, 2 Alto 2s, 2 Soprano 1s, and 2 Soprano 2s), each of which I painstakingly searched through in order to perfect them. While 18 voices might sound like overkill, it was absolutely necessary to provide enough depth and weight to all the voice parts, especially during the 8-part harmony in the introduction.

It was an incredibly tedious and time-consuming process, but it was completely worth it in the end to get the song as polished as it was.

You also added your voice to the mix in “We’re The Le-Koro Band” as part of a collaboration with the Le-Koro Band themselves. Have you collaborated with other projects in the Bionicle community?

Yes, I have! In addition to voicing Toa Orde in Ide’s Journey, I’ll also be voicing 2 of the Toa Mangai as a part of the Mangai Project! You can look forward to hearing me as Toa Motara and Toa Mafa in episode 2 of The Mangai.

I know you’re also the writer of “Mr. Scoliosis”:

What is the story behind that song?

Ah yes, my magnum opus.

Mr. Scoliosis has a bit of a long history as to how it came about. I straight up stole the name and concept of the song from a Scott the Woz video:

However, this song wasn’t the first thing I wrote that starred Mr. Socliosis.

My university’s theatre company had an event called 24-hour theatre, where plays would be written, rehearsed, and performed all within 24 hours. Writers would begin writing a script at 8PM, and at 8PM the next day, it would be performed in front of a live audience. It was a stressful and hectic experience, and I loved being a part of it. I was a writer for 24-hour theatre my sophomore year, and I thought it would be funny to center a script around Mr. Scoliosis. My exhaustion led me to write this: Scoliosis Strikes Again (https://docs.google.com/document/d/19pvaVTbkakoXN-_GVEtNG0RABVCgGVYkw05EYUp2b-w/edit?usp=sharing) …please don’t judge it too harshly I wrote this at like 1AM.

The script ended up being received really well, and I was happy with how it turned out. Then, the next semester, I began to take a class on songwriting. Pretty early on in that class, I thought that it would also be funny to center an entire song around Mr. Scoliosis. In fact, the chorus for Mr. Scoliosis was one of the first things I wrote in that class. But at first, I ended up just dismissing it as too weird and out-there to actually pursue making.

But it stuck with me. The chorus to my own song that I had written stuck inside my head for the entire semester, and when I needed to come up with a song to write as a final project for that class, I knew what song I needed to make.

At the same time that I was taking the songwriting class, I was also taking a music technology class, focusing on different DAWs and types of music software. The classes were both taught by the same professor, both taught in the same classroom, and were scheduled back-to-back with each other. I ended up using Mr. Scoliosis as a final project for BOTH classes at once, and the song became instantly adored. The song’s become somewhat of a meme within my close friend group, and it’s one that will always hold a special place in my heart.

People have constantly been asking me to put it on Spotify too. Maybe I will one day. But maybe I won’t out of spite.

Looking back on it, how would you say your style of music composition has changed over time?

Oddly enough, I feel as though my style of composition hasn’t really changed all that much. Even though Mr. Scoliosis and Ro’o Kai are two radically different songs in terms of tone and style, I feel as though my approach to them and experience composing them were remarkably similar. I approached each with a musical idea that resonated with me and expanded upon it. As I’ve grown more as a musician, I’ve certainly acquired more tools and better understand how to create and expand on these types of ideas, but my core ideas about creating music and the joy that I receive from it hasn’t really changed. In a way, the music I was creating on my DS as a kid was created with the same mindset that I had when creating Ro’o Kai (only having a college degree under my belt now and no longer having to work with WarioWare’s sound editor).

After all your experiences in school, helping to work on developing Masks of Power, and leading the collaboration with other local musicians to make “Ro’o Kai,” if you could give one nugget of advice to your younger self, or to a stranger who wants to follow in your artistic footsteps, what would it be?

Something that I’ve noticed often holds me back is my own ideas of perfectionism. Sometimes it can be a good thing: I doubt I would have bothered to polish Ro’o Kai as much as I did if I didn’t have the desire to push it to be as perfect as I could make it. Other times, I’ll find myself so paralyzed at the idea of creating something out of fear of my own lack of experience or knowledge.

So, if there’s one piece of advice I’d have to give, it’s that not everything you create needs to be perfect. Heck, this is advice that I often need to hear myself. Oftentimes, the most important thing for you to do creatively is to just… create. Just make stuff, whether it’s good or not, whether you want to show it to anyone or not. Don’t let the fear of creating something less than perfect become a fear of creating anything at all.

Lastly, do you think you’d collaborate with the Le-Koro Band again? Bring them into one of your own projects?

Absolutely! I loved working with the Le-Koro Band on Ide’s Journey: Act 2, Disc 2, and I am excited to work with you again in the future!

And if you’re willing to, I’d love to work with you guys on one of my projects some day! I don’t currently have any plans for working on anything right now, but I definitely have a few ideas that have been floating around in my head for a while… who knows, maybe one of those will actually end up materializing one day!

Wind-fly! Hopefully! Thanks again for sharing your creativity with us! What’s next for you, individually?

Of course, one of my biggest priorities is working with Unmasked Games on Project Rustbound. As far as other personal projects go, I’ve honestly been kept pretty busy with real-life responsibilities recently, and don’t have much else planned. But if there’s a demand for new Markle music, definitely let me know! I’d be excited to create if there’s an audience for it.

We’re sure there is!
If you, dear reader, are interested in the adventures of Unmasked Games, check out all their links in the upper right corner of their website (http://unmasked.games).
And follow the astounding creative adventures of Markle here: (https://www.youtube.com/@marklesmusic).
And on BlueSky: (bsky.app/profile/marklesnoppy.bsky.social)
Until next time, come together, and join with your nearest band! 

If you’d like to join the band, follow the linktree below (https://linktr.ee/lekoroband), and feel free to reach out to chat in the comments, or wherever you find us!
Tune in next time for another single release and the next episode of “Tree Talks!”

–Sanso