830 words across 7 entries.

Incipient Overture Listen on: YouTube, SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

Got commissioned to make six land themes for ClockworkReapers, maker of Aleph Null. Doing music for settings, especially settings this memorable and stark, might the most fun I’ve ever had composing. I was given six beautiful pictures and brief descriptions, and every one of them grabbed me. I got really attached to trying to capture what it must feel like to exist in all these awesome, impossible places.

Land of Amber and Frogs Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

Like all the others, the track art was a huge inspiration. For this one, that meant a slow vibe, a muddy floor with a bunch of shimmering stars above. It felt like it was missing something with just the more normal instruments, So I played with a synth until it started making that croaky noise. I liked how it sounded. Didn’t realize the stupid obvious fact that it sounded like frogs until afterward. It’s the space player’s land, so some part of me must have been thinking straight about it. A big buildup to a million frog noises drenched in reverb. One of those guys is gonna be a universe.

Land of Crystal and Spectrum Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

This one was so fun. The main thing about this Place is MIRRORS, and I probably chose the most straightforward way to incorporate that. The main synth (The first thing you hear) has a one beat delay on it, that takes like 30 seconds to decay fully. The delay bounces from left to right, y’know, mirrors. So with that long decay time, It keeps iterating on itself over and over. So writing it felt like a puzzle, because you had to make sure every note doesn’t just sound right with the other notes being played at the same time, but also has to harmonize with what was being played exactly one beat before, and a beat before that, and a beat before that. Mirrors!

Land of Gravity and Pathways Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

The mind player’s land seems like a huge pain in the ass to exist in. Gravity is always changing, shapes are always changing, nothing makes sense, nothing’s constant. The first iteration of this one had more energetic strife vibes and weird, all over the place time signatures, and just did not sound very good no matter how much I wanted it to, and after learning there weren’t even any enemies I knew I needed to take a different direction. This version ditches that stuff, but I like to think I kept it disorienting in less in-your-face ways. That bass/kick rhythm never changes throughout the entire song (though It does alternate three different drumsets), and the kick doesn’t land on the first beat, so the one part of the track that stays the same the whole way through is the part that ensures that you’re never really able to find solid footing, like the whole thing is built on an wobbly foundation. I thought that was neat.

Land of Pulse and Kingdoms Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

I tried to hit a sort of Ennio Morricone type vibe here, it’s a big land of adventure and mushrooms and warring factions. I’m not Ennio Morricone so it didn’t really end up sounding like that, probably for the best. One of the guitars is a Kontakt library, one of them I recorded myself (The one at 1:30 in). At first it frustrated me how different and tinny what I played sounded, because I didn’t exactly have a good recording setup/am not a professional studio musician paid to record guitar like the Kontakt guy, but it turned out it sounded pretty cool when I layered the two on top of each other at the end so I called it a win. Good and kinda shitty are like Yin and Yang apparently.

Land of Resent and Destruction Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

This one is for a kingdom already more than halfway destroyed by a hivemind of cancerous tentacle growths that sprout from black hearts beating beneath the surface. Spent a while tweaking a kick to sound like a big evil heartbeat and after that it was writing itself. Made me want to put big evil heartbeats in every track.

Land of Towers and Flow Listen on: SoundCloud

Dylan S.:

A couple years before I wrote this, I tried to write some little fantasy island theme with a million tempo changes. It sounded like ass and I never tried to do something like it again until this track. The land is a bunch of clock towers with different temporal bubbles around them (step in here time goes slower, step in here time speeds up), so it would have been the lamest thing in the world not to commit to that. I’m actually pretty happy with how it turned out. The sound palette ended up as the exact not-quite-steampunk, train station-y vibe I wanted, the clocks are doing their thing in the background, and the tempo changes have more thought put into them than the aforementioned thing that sucked. I just imagined I was a little guy jumping around all those floating islands in the thumbnail getting all up in their different time bubbles, getting into their rhythms, working with them rather than struggling against them. Think it put me in the right mindset.