Originally, this album was going to be called Index, with the theme guiding the technical direction toward FM, wavetables, table-based waveshaping and so on. One of my thoughts was to always use LFOs FMing or PMing other LFOs as the rhythmic driver for everything, but that fell through pretty quickly. But with Halloween approaching and thoughts turning toward the spooky, the feel of the music and the titles I was coming up with clearly shared a theme. So I adapted.
Some dreams stick with you years later. One of these was being invited to the office of the goddess Nebt-Het (Nepthys), the Friend of the Dead, to be shown a specific page of a thick notebook that She kept. There was an illustration and text, but it swam before my dream-self’s eyes and I couldn’t decipher the secrets She was revealing. Though She is typically silent, I had the impression of the words “you’ll remember it when the time comes” as I woke up. In a way, it was the ultimate in banned books.
Given that, I feel like it’s appropriate to keep at least some secrets about this album’s creation… but I’ll share some things too.
Statement on AI: I am an official AI hater. While there’s potential in the tech, the way it’s been promoted and the applications it’s been used for have, overall, made the world a worse place and I wish that genie could go back into the bottle. So I don’t touch it. The background of the cover art was a cc0 royalty-free photograph, manipulated with simple filters in Paint Shop Pro Photo and a little manual color painting.
01 Glass Icepick
This was entirely the incredible K-Accumulator with its Morph modulated by a Just Friends LFO… and a lot of effect plugins especially toward the end.
02 4shadow
While that starting bass drone is Toros Iteritas Alia driving Walk 4, Akemie’s Castle is doing most of the work here, processed 3 ways.
03 A Drive Around Carcosa
This is primarily Plogue Chipsynth OPMZ, with that LFO-on-LFO technique.
04 Queasy Street
Just K-Accumulator and Beads. No additional modulation sources, no other FX aside from dynamics and EQ, and a brief post-processing pitch shift.
05 Owl’s Abbatoir
(This is the name of a shrine to the Owl totem in Guild Wars 2, not quite as creepy as the name might seem unless you’re a small prey animal.) Again, mostly Chipsynth OPMZ, this time played on a Linnstrument 128; the bassline is Absynth 6. (I kept trying to use Absynth for things and having those tracks just bomb for various reasons, but it worked well for me here.)
06 Shadow Valley Transit
This noisy beast is primarily Walk 4 and too much distortion; some of the rhythmic pulse is the most bizarre Karplus-Strong patching with the exciter in software and softened resonator in software, and the ending drone is Strega and Mesmeriser.
07 Set Contains…
Once the main sequenced voice gets going, that’s K-Accumulator sequenced by Mimetic Digitwolis, with and without Multimod to delay and shift it, with and without being fed to a zero-crossing pitch detector to drive a swam oscillator patch.
08 Portents
We start with Rings driven by a very low frequency Ataraxic Iteritas. The rest is drones, with the final pulsating drone actually being the Ataraxic->Rings thing again but with a couple of switches thrown.
09 Forbidden
Check out that smoooooth transition! The end of “Portents” blends right into a Seqund/Absynth 6/Valhalla Delay patch at a matching tempo. The main voice here is Thorn.Audio Splines acting as a VCO, with a sequence from Marbles and delay time manipulation from a separate, slewed step sequence.
10 Not with your mortal eyes!
The main voice here is Blades self-oscillating, waveshaped by Splines. Backing it up is Odessa, with some octave-shifting distortion and cleverly employed Valhalla Delay letting it play both bass and soprano parts. The deeeeep drones are from Mimeophon and Walk 4 with some lead-footed saturation and steep filtering.
11 Codex
Finally the title track. We have Ataraxic Iteritas being modulated in and out of noise territory, through Beads and feeding back to its own FM. Myth is played on the Linnstrument, and a bundle of hardware and software synths join in ensemble-style to play individual notes of the ending chord.