As I promised some time ago when the first single was released, here follows a more in-depth entry about the project.
The mix
When so many bands today go for MIDI drums, virtual instrument bass, guitars edited down to a millisecond, and vocals tuned to the cent, I find it refreshing to work with those that still believe in raw, unaltered human expression. Expression, that lives in imperfections - that's what differentiates actual music from whatever computers can come up with.
I know it's completely up to personal taste and I'm not saying that this way of making music is inherently better than any other, but that's what brings me the most joy at this point in time.
That said, metal music still has to sound a certain way for completely objective reasons. If this kind of expression is to be successfully translated to a listener's experience, elements of a harmonically and temporally dense piece of music have to sound, at least to some extent, legible, clear, and precise. Ok, I'll stop metaphorizing and wrap this intro up - the point I'm trying to illustrate, and have written a two-paragraph intro for, is that I think that the best results often come from a mixture of both approaches.
So that's how I approached this album! I wanted it to sound consistent, but still very human. Real disgust, angst, and hopelessness don't feel perfect. They feel raw, disorderly and disoriented at times, so the presentation of such songs should at least to some extent be imperfect, ugly even. I wanted it to be dense and aggressive, cluttered even at some points, but still clear enough for the cool instrument details to come through.
Geek facts
The basic "sonic fingerprint" is the bx_console N feeding an AMEK200 master bus EQ, followed by my hardware GSSL 4k clone. For me, this combo is a kind of middle ground between the classic Neve and SSL sounds - the air, separation, and hardness of the transients of a VR-series Neve and the low-mid compactness and punch of the SSL. Another two "discoveries" worth mentioning here are the Elysia's Karacter on vocals, which became my absolute favorite distortion for any kind of heavy vocals, and the GK-800RB bass amp plugin that single-handedly shortened a chain of 9 plugins across 2 real amp channels to itself, the channel strip and a compressor. When it fits, it fits.