753 words across 4 entries.

Eye Of Providence Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud

Rainy: (YouTube / SoundCloud descriptions, excerpt)

Out of all 3 songs, Eye of providence is the only one that wasn’t retooled for another character or purpose. Like all my songs on this album, this was intended for vol.6 as a character theme for Metatron. The main influence from this track was Toby Fox’s early homestuck “” chiptune”” work using NES Pulse, Tri and Noise. To be blunt, these plugins are pretty shit for creating believable chiptune instruments but they have a distinct crust to their sound, so I’ll let it slide. As a challenge to myself, I decided to write within NES channel limitations and only use 5 channels for my various instruments. The result is a song that tries to do a lot with very little. There’s really not a whole lot going on in this track but I think the track conveys the whimsical, yet all seeing nature of Metatron well enough.

Battle Against An Unyielding Foe Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud

Rainy: (YouTube / SoundCloud descriptions, excerpt)

Like most of the songs I wrote for Magnum Opus, BAaUF, was initially intended for volume 6 but wound up on here when some of the songs were retooled for this album. It was initially titled "Atomsplitter" and was originally intended to be a Dismas Track since dude hasn’t had any music specifically about him since Vol.4 (which I will rectify mark my words). This track in particular was directly inspired by the “Altered Beast Suite” off of King Gizzard’s “Murder of the Universe” album, specifically “Altered Beast III.” The whole song started with me writing a riff in 6/4 and the whole track or less was built out from there. Funnily enough, Votl actually gave me the idea for the to incorporate 7/4 into this song when he misheard the riff as being alternating measures of 6/4 and 7/4. While I didn’t do that in the song, I did make it so that the main riff, I did make it so that riff ends with a single bar of 7/4 before starting again. This might be one of my most complex songs just given the fact that it goes through like 5 different time signatures through the whole thing. At one point, it literally had a math equation to capture all the rhythmic changes going on. I digress, but I’m very proud of how it came together and happy how the pick scrapes by Votl added to the piece.

By My Blade (Justice Is Served) Listen on: Bandcamp, YouTube, SoundCloud

Rainy: (YouTube description, excerpt)

As you are probably astutely aware of at this point, By My Blade is collaboration between me and dbnet. I’ve actually been a pretty big fan of his VE work for long time prior to joining the music team and I thought it would be a cool idea to collab with him on a song. He agreed and I got to immediately starting cooking up a melodic idea for us to work on. Within an hour of tooling around on piano, I had the main melody and we got to work. From there, the collab mostly consisted tossing an FLP + stems back and forth while adding to each other’s ideas. When dbnet arranged the initial idea he gave it a “very homestuck era Toby Fox” feel, so I decided to lean into that a bit and take influence from “The Blind Prophet” by incorporating Shreddage guitar and MMX2 instruments. Neither of us really had a concept going into making BMB but I eventually settled on making it a Vigilant Protector track given how heroic it sounds. It works shockingly well as a battlefield theme too. Anyway, you should give dbnet’s work a listen if you haven’t already, he’s pretty good at music imo.

Analemma Listen on: Bandcamp

Vast Error:

There are many who have designs upon this world And dream of wild and vast reformations I have heard them talking in their sleep Of elegant mutations And cunning annihilations I have heard them whispering in the corners of crooked houses And in the alleys and narrow back streets of this crooked creaking universe Which they, with their new designs, would make straight and sound But each of these new and ill-conceived designs Is deranged in its heart For they see this world as if it were alone and original And not as only one of countless others Whose nightmares all proceed Like a hideous garden grown from a single seed I have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep And I stand waiting for them As at the top of a darkened flight of stairs They know nothing of me And none of the secrets of my special plan While I know every crooked creaking step of theirs