Artist Focus: Who is Neil Cicierega and why has he done everything?

I first got the idea of this issue’s Artist Focus the other day when I was watching a hypothetical storyboard for the song “It’s Gonna Get Weird.” This song was originally written for the eleven-time award-winning children’s television show Gravity Falls, for the first episode of the three-part season finale titled “Weirdmageddon” (a play on words “weird” and “armageddon”). This amazing song was unfortunately scrapped due to time constraints, but was eventually released online on April 17, 2016, roughly two months after the series came to its bittersweet ending. The interesting thing about the song in the video is that it isn’t sung by the original voice actor for the character and creator of the show, Alex Hirsch. Instead, it is sung by the person that initially wrote the song, Neil Cicierega. Now, whenever I find a song that I enjoy, I’ll probably look up the artist so I can have the chance to support them by listening to more of their music. So, I looked him up in the search bar. Little did I know that he has done so much more than just an album or two. I realized that I had accidentally stumbled upon one of the founding fathers of early internet music culture. So if you care, I’d like you to follow me down this insane internet rabbit hole that is the story of Neil Cicierega. Who he is, what he does, and how he’s quietly been influencing the alternative/independent music scene as we know it.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts on August 23rd, 1986, Cicierega had one brother and two sisters, one of which went on to become a storyboard artist on numerous animated series including Gravity Falls, the 2017 reboot of the popular 1987 cartoon Ducktales, and The Owl House. Because their father was a programmer, the four were raised in an environment surrounded by computers. Beginning in the fourth grade, his parents began homeschooling him and his siblings. Around his time, Neil began creating amateur games and would even create digital songs to feature in these games. These songs were later released onto MP3.com under the name Trapezoid, which was eventually changed to “Deporitaz” due to a band of the same name asking him to change it. 

In 2001, Neil released a series of nonsensical flash animations called Animutation, which mainly consisted of pop culture set to music, usually in a foreign language. These peculiar animations were claimed to be based on strange Japanese commercials and the 2000’s internet meme “Hatten är din” (translated from Swedish meaning “The hat is yours”).  

Just two years after the debut of Animutation, he had started another project published on the website Newgrounds titled Potter Puppet Pals, a series of short Flash animations parodying the popular book series, Harry Potter. In 2006, these videos were later transferred to Youtube, in a new set of episodes where the characters instead represented through crudely made finger puppets. The series is still ongoing as of today, and their most popular video, titled The Mysterious Ticking Noise, has amassed over 200 million views.

Backtracking a bit, after going under the moniker “Deporitaz” for quite some time, he renamed himself once again to “Lemon Demon,” and with this change, a new focus on vocals in his music. Since then, he has released eleven different albums. Back in 2005, in collaboration with Shawn Vulliez, he created “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny,” an animated short featuring numerous characters from 80s and 90s pop culture battling it out to be the last one standing. This song had become an online phenomenon, garnering over 13 million views on Newgrounds and over 25 million on Youtube. His most recent album under this name, Spirit Phone, was the No. 1 best-selling album in the first week of its release on the music distribution platform, Bandcamp.

He also released several albums under his own name, the most recent of which being Mouth Dreams, released in 2020. A recurring theme among these albums is that the songs are mashups of recognizable tunes combined with others. Oftentimes, these can come together to form a surprisingly coherent story throughout the album. 

In addition, he also created “Windows 95 Tips, Tricks, and Tweaks.” This was a satirical blog based on navigating the dark and twisted world of Windows 95. Posts are that of threatening error messages displayed in the style of Windows 95. 

In short, it doesn’t take an expert to say that Neil Cicereiga has done a lot over the years. He’s done everything from music to puppet shows, and I’m sure that I, as well as many other fans around the world, are waiting with bated breath to see what his brilliant mind does next.