What is furry music? Q&A with Runetooth and Bandit Raccoon
by Patch O'Furr
Part 1 of this series of short Q&A’s asked: what defines “furry music”? Furry dance parties are one of the strongest real life furry movements besides conventions. In a growing fandom, con stages now use millions in equipment and are the crossroads for congoers. Sound is half of the performances and videos furries love. But music isn’t exactly made by animals, it isn’t visual, and it’s an ineffable experience to even write about. “Furry” isn’t really a music genre, but it matters enough to fandom that it’s worth treating it like one for a deeper look. Start with a loose working definition: It overlaps with fandom, it’s made with furries, or it shares a general theme. Then comes the fun part of asking musicians about it. (See part 1 for the full list):
- Are you a furry musician?
- What is furry music?
- Can you share a cool fact or story about your music?
EdgeDestroys (AKA Runetooth): A fandom commenter, graphic artist and musician.
Yeah I’m a furry musician but I don’t write music about the community, at least not yet. I have a lot of music projects though so I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from starting a new one to do it in the future.- As far as what furry music is, I don’t think there’s one answer that’ll do everyone’s perception of it justice, just like it’s hard to really define the community at large and make everyone happy. Furry music could be music with lyrics deliberately written about the fandom or just music written by furries, I personally write stuff to be accessible to everyone so I don’t know if I would count mine as furry music even though I am a furry. I feel like a more nuanced way of looking at this would be something like a venn diagram of music BY furries VS music FOR furries and the overlap between those. With the community at large, I think that overlap and the FOR furries parts are probably what’s perceived as “furry music” and thus tend to get more support which has always bummed me out because I’d like to see every facet get lots of support but I don’t wanna drag this out into some huge existential tedtalk.
- As for a fun fact about my stuff uh, one of the songs that got me like, a very tiny bit of attention was a remix I did of Bonetrousle from Undertale that ended up being officially licensed through Tiny Waves and Materia Collective and released on a remix compilation album. Myself and several other artists on it got together at Anime Festival Orlando to sign it and send it to Toby Fox so Toby Fox has a CD with my signature probably somewhere in some warehouse under a mountain of millions of other things he’s been sent from fans haha. That same remix (and the rest of the album) was played at Awesome Games Done Quick last year so that was cool. If people wanna check it out I have a soundcloud and if EDM isn’t your thing I goof around with tons of other genres, ambient, metal, my newest project I’m hopefully releasing soon is easycore/chiprock so I probably have something for everyone.
No, I am not a furry musician, I am just generally a musician, however I am very deeply involved with the community and the furry fandom and myself have worked with and would love to work more with many amazing content creator furries.
Those susceptible to his gaze can tell he was crafted by furry paws, even if he was smuggled out of fandom under cover of an ordinary ad campaign. I’d say the difference from other mascots is he isn’t just a general character… he’s a fursona! Leinado is his name, and he was chosen by an art contest in 2013. He’s been spreading the magic to the public ever since.
The smash-hit furry anime Aggrestuko that came out April 2018 is already slated for a second season, but we got a Yuletide treat: a Christmas special.