The Past Is Another Country is quietly contemplative. Your mind is emptying , taking in your surroundings, the light breeze, the cooling of Autumn after another hot dry summer.
Constructed using a convolution method from a different track which essentially controls the flow of the whole track. From this base point I added extra instruments to highlight sections.
Dark Places, Winter Shadows is when the bad memories come back and take you into a darkening state but not a frightened state. You are taken through your memories but you try to repress them as they are upsetting - down, down into a darkened state. But you are observing this state of mind and not experiencing it yourself.
Like so many of my tracks they start out as one thing and then parts of the track take me in a different direction. This track started as a fully sampled track and still include voices taken from some of the first wax disc recordings. One element that helped create the drone background was softsynth, Geosonics, which has some great field recordings that have been manipulated into instruments.
He Who Bathes in the Black Sun - Some believe in a devil, Satan, but this is just your state of mind, the dark side. A place you venture to which gives your life contrast. Here are the souls who have gone to far - taken the dark side as the only option. You are being drawn closer to these souls.
This is quite an old track which finally found its way onto a release that suited its mood. Most of the structure is created by automating a delay unit and "playing" the unit over the period of the track and thus it was created live and then edited a little to iron out glitches.
Cave of the Swimmers - you've taken yourself to a desert location, an abandoned out station. You are alone sort of - your memories are here and they are still reflecting those souls. Should you be there yourself ? You are alone with your thoughts.
This piece is held together by a field recording I did during a dust storm when on a filming trip a few years ago. The sounds of rattling galvanised iron on the walls of the hut. I also used some similar live playing of a delay unit in this piece as I did with well though I controlled the unit while I was performing parts on the synthesizer.
The Day The Crickets Listened - the bad memories are knocking at the door and you fight them but they are strong. Inhabiting your whole soul but they will not win.
Starting out as an experiment with vocoded words which were filtered to give them more contrasting textures and then structured into a base layer. From here I played the live "squelchy" synth track and finally I played in the guitar parts from where I edited a little.
Campfires of the Night Skies - your mind is clearing and your focus has gone to your surrounds - blinded by the beauty of the desert - the silence. Your thoughts return many times - phasing in and out. Those campfires - the stars - are there with your as your guardian - forever changing but appear so static.
I took the base drone layer from another track - reversed the whole track and then layered in the glitch guitar and other incidental instruments. This track is meant to sound like a soundtrack for those stars which circle overhead.
In My Depths, All Treasure Dwells - Your body feels disconnected to your mind - they are different beings, separate entities - you float - your mind is a million miles away travelling through the galaxies.
Started as a drone layer which a tried a couple different methods for creation. I often create drones without a synthesizer or softsynth but just using waveforms and applying effects to create a slowly morphing element. The organ sound was next to give the drone some melodic movement. Other instruments and sounds added to give some highlights along the way. I also played around with a random generator which played the bell sounds.