The new EP is out Wednesday on Bandcamp and streaming services.
My usual approach is to put together a track I’m happy with, then pursue the underlying ideas and elements for a whole set. It keeps a consistent feel and things come together pretty quickly. Araminta Station was an exception. I had a huge amount of distraction in my life, so the tracks came together sometimes months apart. I was happy with the end product, but it’s definitely all over the place in terms of feel and atmosphere.
On this one, {Now + n, Now – n} was the first track. It’s largely based around a complex digital drone, overlaid with washes of reverbed-out pads and a minimal house beat.
(Yes, those are handclaps. No, I’m not apologizing.)
Now I had the agenda. Minimal house at twilight in the woods. I built the box and worked within it. The other two beaty tracks came somewhat easily, but I had a fourth that just would not work with any sort of beat. I yanked the beats, rejiggered a few things and got the title track.
So now I’m doing some ambient stuff? Sure, it still fits the mood. I allowed myself some wiggle room and got Breckenridge and the Continuum.
Five tracks, 29 minutes. That’s actually a bit long in the age of streaming, in which the average attention span for an album is about 22 minutes. But I ran a few of these tracks past some folks, and they preferred the longer versions. Nice. I feel it works best when things can stretch out a bit.
Last steps were sequencing, mastering, and shoveling it off to the streaming services. Then I got antsy and felt like I wasn’t quite done with the patches I’d built for the set. I had a leftover track that really bloated the runtime, but I didn’t want to abandon it.
It won’t be on streaming services, but it’s an unlisted bonus track included with the Bandcamp downloads.
A note on the track names: they’re all titles of Robert Silverberg short stories. I was a science fiction fan from a young age. Around 8 or 9 years old, I got a short story collection of his called Beyond the Safe Zone at an airport bookstore. I had no idea what a midlife crisis was, but that’s what Silverberg was expressing through those stories. Despite not getting the underlying themes at the time, Breckenridge and the Continuum resonated with me. It’s a beautiful story with a disorienting premise and a redemptive ending that only got better when I got older and understood it more.
The gear:
- I used the ASM Hydrasynth for the glitchy, staticky drones. Wavetable synthesis with five LFO’s works great for that. I ran it through the Hologram Microcosm pedal quite a bit to add more grain and flutter.
- The Dreadbox Nymphes provides those sproingy stabs and string-sounding pads. If it sounds very 1980s, that’s because it’s based on some of the same principals as the old Roland Juno. Yes, it’s a bit of a one-trick pony., but it does that one trick really well. I ran it through an Empress Echosystem delay unit and a Strymon Cloudburst for the lush reverb.
- The Dreadbox Typhon was used for bass lines. It’s a bit quirky, but it’s one of the best analog monosynths out there. I’d marry it if I could.
- Drums and sequencing were handled by the Synthstrom Deluge. Samples used for the drums include a set of old 909 samples I made in the 90s and some patches from the folks at Samples from Mars.
- There’s also some guitar buried in a couple of tracks. The backwards bits were done using the reverse delay on an old Electro-Harmonix Memory Man.
I hope you enjoy it. If I make enough money, I can build my doomsday machine and hold the world’s governments hostage for even more money.