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

We, like all of you, are reeling in the aftermath of Masks of Power’s cancellation. But the Le-Koro Band was founded for the community, using BIONICLE^® as an excuse to make music and collaborate with other creative minds.

Let’s not be divided by the unfeeling actions of a robotic corporation. That’s what Makuta wants. Let’s support the real people beside us in our grief and lift one another up to stand strong. Support Rustbound, engage in community events and activities, and support the passionate work this community continues to create for each other. The game might be gone, but the people are still here.

For the great spirit of the community, we shall not be silenced. We’re going to play louder than ever!

Thus, we hope to have more of a presence within the community, beginning with a new series of artist features we’re playfully dubbing “Tree Talks!”

Paired with a single release, we’ll be interviewing a musical artist within the Bionicle community about who they are, how they became enraptured by both the world of Bionicle and the world of music, details about their creative process, and wherever else the winds of conversation take us!

This week, we found a wild Rahisaurus jamming out to an electronic rendition of “Caught in a Dream” by All Insane Kids he did with us (and art by illudens):

So, gathered friends, and honored guest…

What’s the story behind “Rahisaurus?”

Well, in terms of the username, I was trying to think of an alternative to my old tag which had my name in it. I was leaning further into the “furry” side of my interests, so “Rahi” came from that (but also as a nod to my Bionicle interests). Then “Saurus” came from the fact my main mascot character is some kind of dragon/dinosaur thing.

When was your first introduction to the world of BIONICLE? What was your first set?

I first came across them in a shop called Woolworths which is sadly shut in the UK now. I was already into LEGO^® toys, but I saw the Bohrok on the shelves and thought they looked cool – plus they were just cheap enough that I could afford with my pocket money. My first set was Gahlok. I took it home and my mum said it looked evil. I showed her the neck function and said “No look! It’s like a chicken!”

Did you absorb the other Bionicle media too once they came out, like the comics, games, and books, or was that afterwards?

The Bohrok sets came with little comics in them and I thought they were so cool. I had the LEGO Club Magazine at the time, so I saw a couple of Bionicle comics in there, but my first main exposure to the lore was just the Mask of Light movie. After that came the other 2 movies, and then Bionicle Heroes on the PS2. I never even really dug into the lore until maybe 2008.
So, that was just in time for me to get the real significance of the GSR reveal! 😀
I think I actually almost cried seeing the island falling apart.

Speaking of Bionicle movies, I noticed on your YouTube channel that you’ve got some stop-motion animations from 17 years ago! How did that start?

Haha, well that’s almost the reason for it all! Back when I was first getting into Bionicle, my dad got me LEGO Studios as a present. It was one of The LEGO Group’s first “Software and a LEGO Kit” bundles – it came with a dinosaur, a car, and a scrolling background set with a paper reel that you could wind along and make the scenery move; plus the CD with the software on it, and a really awful old Logitech webcam wrapped up in a LEGO-brick-compatible shell.

So that (the set) was set up almost as a “live action special effects” idea, but the more interesting part of the software for me was the ability to do stop-motion animation. I spent many many days just commandeering my parents’ study with Bionicles strewn across the floor, making little fight animations on my family computer. I was always inspired by animations such as Spidey406’s “Bionicle The Duel of Fates”.

The software even had an onion-skin overlay on the camera feed which made it nice and easy for me as a kid to grasp the concept of what I was doing.

I got so well into animation as a hobby that I ended up running an animation club at school. From there I did a Computer Animation and Visualization degree, realized it wasn’t going to pan out as a full-time job… and wound up doing software development instead. 😅 But it all came full circle in the end as I’ve recently worked on 3D animation software.

That software also prompted me to start learning how to play Bionicle soundtrack! I didn’t know how to simply import audio files into the program, so I used to play them on my electric keyboard and record it through the camera’s terrible microphone. 😂

Oh wow! Well, that answers one of my other questions as to what you do now! It’s incredible to me that you were inspired to follow that calling from that introduction to Bionicle. Very impressive! We’ll get to music shortly, but I want to ask more about your animation experience for now. 
I imagine you’ve told so many stories through your education days and beyond, ever since those early days of animating LEGO sets with your friends (I especially liked “Touching the World of Bionicle”). What kind of stories have you told through your animation career?

Oh god, TTWOB. I cringe at the “acting” in that one! To be honest, they’re all on YouTube (if you can really call them stories). I’ve never really been much of a good storyteller! I definitely thought I was hot shit when I was 13 (2008) and it’s really silly looking back at my old videos where I’m presenting everything as though it’s the best thing since sliced bread. I didn’t really even have an animation career, I pushed most of my university work towards the visual effects and software side of things.

Animation was always very much a hobby and sadly I think that university course pretty much killed my interest in it. Even though I understand the concepts now, I definitely don’t have the time or space to commit to a project that I would be happy with. Maybe once I get a new house with an empty garage I can… 🤔 That said, I do enjoy making visual effects and little graphic animations to go along with my music!

Nonetheless, the animations you have done are impressive. What software do you use, and how many steps long does one of those complex compositions take?

It’s been ages since I made a stop motion animation. Honestly, once LEGO Studios stopped working, I didn’t really find another piece of software that make it easier. I tried MonkeyJam but that was way too minimal. I even used to use windows movie maker and manually shrink the duration of every image to one frame! The most recent stop motion I did, I used an Android app called Stop Motion Studio. That one felt ok, but it does have the disadvantage of tying up your phone until the shot is finished. I think stop motion roughly took me between 5 minutes and half an hour for each second of animation.

These days, I use Krita to make the occasional hand-drawn 2D animation (I made a nice one of Edie running that I was quite proud of). That was 16 frames and it took me like 8 hours so I don’t do it often! 😅 When I do the short vfx sequences for my music videos, those can take me upwards of 8 hours as well, but I enjoy it. I use DaVinci Fusion/Resolve for those, it’s like Adobe AfterEffects without the Adobe part. 🙂

Do you have any other talents besides animation, music, and coding that we should know about?

I do digital art! I pretty much just draw the same two OCs over and over again, but I occasionally do some gift art for friends and recently I’ve taken a couple of commissions for PNGTuber models. That reminds me – I also wrote my own PNGTuber software called RahiTuber! I’ve been really enjoying seeing what people make with it.

Shifting gears a little bit: how did you come about being a composer of music? Who were your inspirations?

It’s been an interest that’s kind of steadily grown in me over the years. I started learning piano in primary school, and I eventually found that I could learn a tune by listening to it. I spent pretty much my entire teenage years just playing Bionicle soundtrack on the piano. In secondary school, the music room had a bunch of Macs with GarageBand, and I used to spend many of my lunch breaks just sitting in there and making stuff. Again, it was usually Bionicle covers (the autistic special interest may be becoming apparent here…) but I did make a few original pieces as well, one of which was for a friend’s animation project.

When I got a Nintendo DSi, I found RYTMIK, on which I spent so much of my time again making various covers of songs I liked. You can actually still find those on my YouTube. Up until very recently I’ve been using stuff like RYTMIK to compose music, the first version of my AIK Hero cover was done on KORG M01D which is 3DSware. These days I use Bandlab Cakewalk (because it’s free and I’m a cheapskate) and I have been enjoying the new possibilities it gives me. I do sometimes miss the intuitive stylus drag-n-drop style of RYTMIK’s sequencers though.

Most of my inspiration is video game soundtrack. I really fixated on the soundtrack from Drawn to Life (the DS game) when I was younger, and I used to spend days looping some of those tracks (particularly “A Rocket!”). Much of my RYTMIK compositions have a similar kind of feel to that, and even the track I composed for my stream outros, “Edie”, aims to capture that kind of energy. Later inspirations include Starcadian and Essenger, I started really enjoying the Synthwave genre and have been taking inspiration from that in my choice of instruments

Would you say your style has evolved over time like your inspirations, not just due to the different software you’ve used?

Yeah, definitely. I think it’s actually more a case of me picking new tools to accommodate the style I’m aiming for.

Can you walk us through the work process behind your remix of “Caught in a Dream?”
How did you begin?

I think the first thing I did was try to get that main riff down (that you can hear by itself right at the start, until 0:11), while getting a feel for the overall vibe of the tune. I had the sound in my head already for that part, at least – I knew I wanted a really harsh punchy bass to start the low notes, with a kind of choked synth taking the place of that repeated high note. I basically just went through all the presets in Surge XT (my synth VST of choice) until I found one close enough, and then tweaked it to my liking. That’s how I do most of my music these days, I use Surge XT a LOT… From there, I basically carried on the rest of the bass line for the song with the same instrument, then added drums, and some more synths to take the place of the accompanying guitar in the original. Then I recorded the vocals. I actually took a bit of advice from Essenger here, using the CLA Vocals plugin on the “Start Me Up dry” preset to add that bit of rocky tone to my voice that I don’t really have irl. I had trouble deciding whether or not I should emulate the American accent from the original or lean into my native South-East-England accent. I opted for the latter in the end, as I think you don’t often hear it these days and I wanted something unique and genuine.

That was the main part of the song, so the rest of it was just figuring out ways to add components of the original song in ways that matched the new feel. The “guitar” solo at 2:28 was a weird one, since I wanted to stick to a fully electronic synth feeling, but the solo was too iconic to leave out. I personally think that synthesizers can never live up to the sound of a real guitar, so I decided not to even try. What I actually ended up doing was using a synth lead with some portatone, but pumping that through a simulated guitar amp plugin to bring back the kind of overdriven guitar feeling without pretending to actually be a guitar.

As for mixing, I can’t really speak much on the subject – I certainly don’t consider myself a mixing professional and every time I make a new track, I go back to it a few months later and think “wow, this mix is really flat/hollow/etc.”… I’m recently trying to improve by using some new tools which give me real-time visual feedback on the EQ as I adjust it, so that I can see things balancing out as I tweak the various levels. I used this method on my recent Ga-Wahi remix, and I think it really helped. I didn’t have these when I made the CIAD cover, though, so essentially my method was to export the song, listen to it on loop for a few days until the novelty wore off, and then adjust the things that started to grate on me. I still kinda do that method too.

I also make a point of listening to it in the car. Something about car speakers has a mysterious way of showing up where your mix is lacking!

Great detail! I especially like how you were able to add in an allusion to the motif of Lewa vs the Swarm from Bionicle: Quest of the Toa by Jonathan Kaplan. What was the biggest challenge in working on this song?

The biggest challenge in working on this song was trying to find a balance between the original rock feel that I knew I couldn’t/didn’t want to accurately replicate, and my weird brand of electro synth that I use in my usual tracks. I settled on calling this track “Synth Rock,” which I think works, despite it having no real guitars.

More to the “synth rock” idea, I loved how you recreated the guitar solo, and the choices you made for synth instruments, and felt like a rhythm guitar behind your mix to support it, rather than drown it out, served to elevate the choices you made in your remix. For that reason, it makes me appreciate what you did all the more!
On that note (ba dum tsh), how did you get involved with the Le-Koro Band?

I… can’t remember…

I think they abducted me at some point.

So, you just appeared in the middle of a Le-Matoran drum circle, and the rest is history?

Actually, I think Vahkiti pulled me into the LKB server after I submitted a different cover as part of 810NICLE Day. “Caught In A Dream” was done too late for American 8/10 so I released it on English 8/10 instead!

Did you have any fears in collaborating over music making? If so, how did you overcome them?

I guess my main thing is I’m a real perfectionist about my own stuff. I have a very strong sense of what works in a track and what doesn’t, and if my vision for the track doesn’t align with what comes out of the collaboration, I get pretty worked up about it (pretty sure that’s the autism). So, the hardest part about collaborating for me is having to surrender that control and trust the other person to do their thing!

If you could distill what you’ve learned so far from your experiences into one of many nuggets of wisdom, what’s one piece of advice you would give to someone who’s walking in your footsteps?

I really don’t know what I’m doing, but neither does anyone else. You just gotta keep trying stuff, and eventually you’ll find something that works for you! My main thing that always keeps me going is that there’s no solid method. If you’re getting tired of making your art or your music, switch things up and go scribble with crayons or find some new software. The change of tools can really freshen things up and get you back in the mood.

What direction would you like to go with the members of the band in the future, Bionicle or otherwise?

Honestly, I’m totally happy to remain in orbit around LKB and join in if something piques my interest. I’ve always been a bit of a Kopaka in that way.

The thing is, I have tried to offer help with various projects in the past and nearly always burn out before I finish, so I just avoid making those sorts of commitments now unless it’s something that can be done in like…. 2 hours. 😅

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

I’m continuing with RahiTuber development, and I’m thinking I’ll make a v2 of my own model rig. I’ve been really enjoying streaming as a hobby, so that’s pretty much driving all of my creative energy right now! That said, I do have a potential commission coming up for another bionicle remix, so keep your ears… peeled?

And so we shall!

That was our interview with “Rahisaurus!” Thanks for reading.

You can follow Rahisaurus’s further adventures on BlueSky @rahisaurus.itch.io and here: (https://linktr.ee/rahisaurus).

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