Voyage EP: Liner Notes
It’s been two months since I published the EP that will likely remain my magnum opus for at least a few years.
Alongside every upload on streaming / download sites, I attached the following note:
Voyage EP is a story about the uncertainty of life, and what awaits us beyond the horizon.
I wanted to take some time to write at length about this story, as well as the story of this EP’s creation over the nine months that it was in development.
It’ll be long, so don’t feel obligated to take in every word.
Nonetheless, for the curious, here is all the lore you could possibly ask for.
Watch It Burn
the fire inside you will guide the way
Watch It Burn is a song about moving on, focusing on your passions, and taking control of what consumes you.
The original vision for this song was a lot different from where it ended up – it started out as a song about burning bridges, using anger to fuel one’s journey.
But in the six months it took me to write this song, my feelings shifted away from the resentment that sparked this idea.
The fire I felt was no longer made of spite.
It feels weird to grow up halfway through the creative process like this, but I think the end result is far better off for it.
As I tried to figure out what this song was about, I ended up writing and even singing lyrics for it.
I won’t be publishing the full lyrics (and certainly not the vocals themselves); they were never finished, and they don’t reflect the final message of the song.
There was one line in particular at the end of the chorus that I couldn’t shake:
don’t watch it burn, just let it go
There’s something about writing lyrics that directly contradict the title that doesn’t sit right with me.
I was uncomfortable with my own narrative; it wasn’t true to my emotions any longer.
In the end, I abandoned the lyrics and allowed the song to speak for itself.
However, the choir-like vocal pads you hear in the bridge are my own heavily-processed and Paulstretched voice, recorded in the same session as the discarded lyrical vocals.
This is by far the most emotionally-charged track on the EP to me, and it went through the most revisions of any song I’ve ever made.
It also stands out as the song where I made the most use of the music theory I spent the last year learning.
It’s written in the Dorian / Aeolian modes, and the recurring melody
(the one that finally comes to the foreground at 3:24) is shared between the two modes, touching every note but the 6th.
I make use of harmonic scope, modal switching, and minor-major sevenths at various points throughout the song.
I personally consider this to be the best song I’ve ever released, even knowing that most people prefer the next song on the EP.
The song’s length displays as 4:20 on YouTube, which, in conjunction with the word “Burn” in the title, looks like a really good/bad joke on my part.
This is unintentional but wonderful.
Vanishing Point
what lies beyond the horizon is unknowable
If Watch It Burn was about letting go of the past, then Vanishing Point is about looking towards the future.
This song was originally demoed as part of #MIXTOBER,
a project I took on last year as a music-oriented parallel to “Inktober”.
I made one 8-bar loop every day of October as an effort to develop a stronger workflow and get back into the creative process.
Vanishing Point started out as day #8, labeled “psychedelic DnB”.
How this core concept of a psychedelic drum & bass track would evolve from an 8-bar loop to a full track proved to be a much longer story.
There was a lot of trial and error involved in the process of fleshing out the loop, and the number of ideas I had to scrap was discouraging, to say the least.
As a consequence, this track took the longest to finish out of the four on the EP.
Vanishing Point is the only song on Voyage to feature any lyrical content in the end result.
At the end of the bridge, there’s a quote from the 2014 movie Interstellar:
“If we see beyond the horizon…”
“We can’t.”
“There are some things that aren’t meant to be known.”
There’s some context to this excerpt in the film that isn’t relevant to the song – the conversation is specifically about the event horizon of a black hole.
I encourage the listener to take a more liberal interpretation of “horizon” here.
This bridge is noteworthy in the wider scope of the release for two reasons:
it marks (roughly) the halfway point through the EP’s length, and it perfectly divides the drum & bass content from the other genres featured on the EP.
You could draw some parallels between this divide in genres and the past / future theme, if you wanted to.
Who am I to say otherwise?
I used this song as an opportunity to hone my skills with frequency modulation.
The most obvious use of FM synthesis is the abundant psytrance squelches, which turned out to be really fun to design; there are some more subtle uses scattered throughout the track.
Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the end result, and relieved that I figured out how to execute the drum & bass / psytrance fusion after so many failed attempts.
My advice to you if you ever get stuck on an idea for a song: keep trying things, don’t be afraid to rewrite anything that doesn’t fit, and take breaks to develop other concepts.
Your biggest barrier is giving up.
Valley of the Void VIP
don’t lose yourself
In September 2015, I released the original mix that led to Valley of the Void VIP.
It was so far ahead of my past work that I rebranded my musical output under the moniker “EXAQT” in anticipation of EDM fame… sadly, that’s not a joke.
I’ve already written about this subject under the post EXAQT is Dead: A Postmortem.
Rather than rehashing that post, let’s walk through the valley and see how it was reshaped over a year and a half.
Be warned that the following section contains some relevant discussion of mental health.
To be frank, I was not in the best of mental states when I wrote the original Valley of the Void.
Circumstances that don’t warrant going into detail about had put me into the worst bout of depression I’ve ever gone through.
I stopped playing videogames, I didn’t talk to anyone outside of work, and my creative output had slowed to a halt.
The last track I had produced was a remix for a contest back in May, before I moved cities.
The feedback I received on it was generally positive, with a few constructive bits of criticism that I felt I had the technical prowess to address.
It was something actionable, and that was all I needed to grasp onto.
Once I found the spark of inspiration, music became not just my primary focus, but my sole focus for a month.
Every day I would come home from work, immediately open my DAW, and only close it to sleep.
It was arguably an unhealthy obsession, but still an improvement over the prior state of affairs.
The title “Valley of the Void” was a summary of my feelings at the time about my newfound life in the Phoenix metropolitan area, otherwise known as the Valley of the Sun.
I shared the finished product with the same community that provided me with feedback on my remix from earlier in the year.
The response was like nothing I had ever seen before.
Valley of the Void became my first song to break 500, 1000, 5000 plays.
I was happy that so many people enjoyed what I made.
Music hadn’t solved my problems, but it was a constructive outlet that could briefly pull me out of my dissociative state of mind, and so I kept at it.
My mental condition started to improve around the start of the following year,
and I channeled this into making even better songs.
By summer I had fully recovered from my depressive state.
Thoughts on a VIP mix started to formulate around the end of 2016.
Valley of the Void began as a demonstration of my improvement as an artist, and I had yet more actionable feedback from fellow producers that I could stand to work on.
In the original mix, my focus was on developing a fuller sound, in terms of both dynamics and frequency, as well as finding a more original sound.
For the VIP mix, I wanted to elevate my percussion and synthesis skills: the drums in the original mix were reasonably well-designed but weak, and the synths were passable but uninteresting.
I learned a lot about the finer details of mixing in the process of writing this VIP mix.
I refrained from heavily layering the drum samples this time around, instead opting to pick better, punchier samples and giving them room to breathe in the mix.
As for the synths, I made heavy use of ring modulation to introduce anharmonic, dissonant overtones – a technique I neglected in the original mix, having just discovered the wonders of wavetable synthesis.
Another one of my favorite techniques in this song is the way negative space is carved out by cutting off reverb tails.
In terms of production quality, I think the end product is as great of a leap from the original mix as the original mix was from my past work.
Ashes Rising
words can’t describe the miracle i saw
In the summer of 2010, sixteen-year-old me went for a walk in the wash near my family’s house in Tucson.
It was a walk filled with existential contemplation, fueled in equal parts by the drudgery of teenagehood and a newfound belief in agnosticism.
It was a lot for a kid to take in.
Why was I here?
Why should anything be here, instead of the far more reasonable prospect of nothing being here?
I looked to the sky for answers.
All I could hear in the middle of the desert was the wind against my ears.
All I could see was a vast blue sky punctuated with clouds against the Catalina mountains.
What absolute nonsense it was that these things existed, for seemingly no reason other than for me to perceive them.
I was awestruck.
I walked away with no answers; instead, a strong conviction that I had been asking the wrong question.
At its core, Ashes Rising is a song about this exact moment in my life.
More generally, it’s a song about the miraculous and utterly transient phenomenon of existence:
how improbable that it began, and, conversely, how absolutely certain that it will end.
There’s an underlying theme of reversal in nearly every aspect of this song.
You might have noticed that its YouTube video plays in reverse,
the “ashes” falling upward and the background slowly panning towards the sky.
If you haven’t connected all the dots yet, I encourage you to listen to the song itself backwards and see if you notice anything!
The secret follows (in reverse, naturally, to avoid spoilers):
esrever ni deyalp dna ,esion yb devlovnoc ,nwod dewols gnoleB I erehW si gnisiR sehsA ni ynomrah eht
Maybe it was obvious for some listeners, but no one has outright pointed it out yet, so it’s hard to say for sure.
In any case, the relationship implied here is complicated, and you could probably draw some reasonable conclusions from the title and cover art.
Truthfully, I haven’t thought it all out myself, so it doesn’t matter too much.
On a musical level, my goal here was to create the largest physical space I could.
This was achieved through a combination of reverb and convolution filtering, plus copious amounts of EQ and panning.
Despite how short the song is, I don’t think it has any reason to be longer – everything I wanted to express is in there.
The other side
I decided to release Voyage for free, with no option to pay / donate.
This has nothing to do with any merits of the music itself – I think it would be a release worth paying for.
But at this point in my life, I don’t feel comfortable accepting money from people on the Internet.
My job pays me enough to live comfortably, which is more than I can say for a lot of my friends’ situations.
If you can relate to this position, I encourage you to use the money with which you would have bought my EP to help out a friend in need.
As far as supporting me goes, you can always spread the word about this release to anyone who you think would enjoy it.
Nothing has brought more joy to my day than hearing from a friend that one of their own friends enjoyed my EP.
Otherwise, just tell me your thoughts!
Getting honest feedback on your music is harder than it sounds, and there’s a great deal of value in a fresh pair of ears.
I made a “Back Cover” for my 100% digitally distributed EP.
It turns out the concept of a “back cover” doesn’t make much sense unless you’re doing a physical run of your release.
Here it is anyway:
The background is a depth map of the artwork I commissioned from Kavaeric.
The faint line segments behind each song title aren’t meaningless – see if you can decode them!
(Hint: each line is cut into 12 segments, 7 of which are visible.)
I don’t know where my music will go from here.
I’d like to take some time to do single releases, remixes, and other smaller projects before I attempt anything on this scale again.
But, until I figure out what’s next, I just want to thank you for listening, and for reading this far.
This release was hugely important to me, and the positive reception has filled me with the determination to keep improving my craft and keep pushing my limits.
I hope you’re ready for whatever comes next.
It’s been two months since I published the EP that will likely remain my magnum opus for at least a few years. Alongside every upload on streaming / download sites, I attached the following note:
Voyage EP is a story about the uncertainty of life, and what awaits us beyond the horizon.
I wanted to take some time to write at length about this story, as well as the story of this EP’s creation over the nine months that it was in development. It’ll be long, so don’t feel obligated to take in every word. Nonetheless, for the curious, here is all the lore you could possibly ask for.
Watch It Burn
the fire inside you will guide the way
Watch It Burn is a song about moving on, focusing on your passions, and taking control of what consumes you.
The original vision for this song was a lot different from where it ended up – it started out as a song about burning bridges, using anger to fuel one’s journey. But in the six months it took me to write this song, my feelings shifted away from the resentment that sparked this idea. The fire I felt was no longer made of spite. It feels weird to grow up halfway through the creative process like this, but I think the end result is far better off for it.
As I tried to figure out what this song was about, I ended up writing and even singing lyrics for it. I won’t be publishing the full lyrics (and certainly not the vocals themselves); they were never finished, and they don’t reflect the final message of the song. There was one line in particular at the end of the chorus that I couldn’t shake:
don’t watch it burn, just let it go
There’s something about writing lyrics that directly contradict the title that doesn’t sit right with me. I was uncomfortable with my own narrative; it wasn’t true to my emotions any longer. In the end, I abandoned the lyrics and allowed the song to speak for itself. However, the choir-like vocal pads you hear in the bridge are my own heavily-processed and Paulstretched voice, recorded in the same session as the discarded lyrical vocals.
This is by far the most emotionally-charged track on the EP to me, and it went through the most revisions of any song I’ve ever made. It also stands out as the song where I made the most use of the music theory I spent the last year learning. It’s written in the Dorian / Aeolian modes, and the recurring melody (the one that finally comes to the foreground at 3:24) is shared between the two modes, touching every note but the 6th. I make use of harmonic scope, modal switching, and minor-major sevenths at various points throughout the song. I personally consider this to be the best song I’ve ever released, even knowing that most people prefer the next song on the EP.
The song’s length displays as 4:20 on YouTube, which, in conjunction with the word “Burn” in the title, looks like a really good/bad joke on my part. This is unintentional but wonderful.
Vanishing Point
what lies beyond the horizon is unknowable
If Watch It Burn was about letting go of the past, then Vanishing Point is about looking towards the future.
This song was originally demoed as part of #MIXTOBER, a project I took on last year as a music-oriented parallel to “Inktober”. I made one 8-bar loop every day of October as an effort to develop a stronger workflow and get back into the creative process. Vanishing Point started out as day #8, labeled “psychedelic DnB”. How this core concept of a psychedelic drum & bass track would evolve from an 8-bar loop to a full track proved to be a much longer story. There was a lot of trial and error involved in the process of fleshing out the loop, and the number of ideas I had to scrap was discouraging, to say the least. As a consequence, this track took the longest to finish out of the four on the EP.
Vanishing Point is the only song on Voyage to feature any lyrical content in the end result. At the end of the bridge, there’s a quote from the 2014 movie Interstellar:
“If we see beyond the horizon…”
“We can’t.”
“There are some things that aren’t meant to be known.”
There’s some context to this excerpt in the film that isn’t relevant to the song – the conversation is specifically about the event horizon of a black hole. I encourage the listener to take a more liberal interpretation of “horizon” here. This bridge is noteworthy in the wider scope of the release for two reasons: it marks (roughly) the halfway point through the EP’s length, and it perfectly divides the drum & bass content from the other genres featured on the EP. You could draw some parallels between this divide in genres and the past / future theme, if you wanted to. Who am I to say otherwise?
I used this song as an opportunity to hone my skills with frequency modulation. The most obvious use of FM synthesis is the abundant psytrance squelches, which turned out to be really fun to design; there are some more subtle uses scattered throughout the track. Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the end result, and relieved that I figured out how to execute the drum & bass / psytrance fusion after so many failed attempts. My advice to you if you ever get stuck on an idea for a song: keep trying things, don’t be afraid to rewrite anything that doesn’t fit, and take breaks to develop other concepts. Your biggest barrier is giving up.
Valley of the Void VIP
don’t lose yourself
In September 2015, I released the original mix that led to Valley of the Void VIP. It was so far ahead of my past work that I rebranded my musical output under the moniker “EXAQT” in anticipation of EDM fame… sadly, that’s not a joke. I’ve already written about this subject under the post EXAQT is Dead: A Postmortem. Rather than rehashing that post, let’s walk through the valley and see how it was reshaped over a year and a half.
Be warned that the following section contains some relevant discussion of mental health.
To be frank, I was not in the best of mental states when I wrote the original Valley of the Void. Circumstances that don’t warrant going into detail about had put me into the worst bout of depression I’ve ever gone through. I stopped playing videogames, I didn’t talk to anyone outside of work, and my creative output had slowed to a halt. The last track I had produced was a remix for a contest back in May, before I moved cities. The feedback I received on it was generally positive, with a few constructive bits of criticism that I felt I had the technical prowess to address. It was something actionable, and that was all I needed to grasp onto.
Once I found the spark of inspiration, music became not just my primary focus, but my sole focus for a month. Every day I would come home from work, immediately open my DAW, and only close it to sleep. It was arguably an unhealthy obsession, but still an improvement over the prior state of affairs. The title “Valley of the Void” was a summary of my feelings at the time about my newfound life in the Phoenix metropolitan area, otherwise known as the Valley of the Sun.
I shared the finished product with the same community that provided me with feedback on my remix from earlier in the year. The response was like nothing I had ever seen before. Valley of the Void became my first song to break 500, 1000, 5000 plays. I was happy that so many people enjoyed what I made. Music hadn’t solved my problems, but it was a constructive outlet that could briefly pull me out of my dissociative state of mind, and so I kept at it.
My mental condition started to improve around the start of the following year, and I channeled this into making even better songs. By summer I had fully recovered from my depressive state.
Thoughts on a VIP mix started to formulate around the end of 2016. Valley of the Void began as a demonstration of my improvement as an artist, and I had yet more actionable feedback from fellow producers that I could stand to work on. In the original mix, my focus was on developing a fuller sound, in terms of both dynamics and frequency, as well as finding a more original sound. For the VIP mix, I wanted to elevate my percussion and synthesis skills: the drums in the original mix were reasonably well-designed but weak, and the synths were passable but uninteresting.
I learned a lot about the finer details of mixing in the process of writing this VIP mix. I refrained from heavily layering the drum samples this time around, instead opting to pick better, punchier samples and giving them room to breathe in the mix. As for the synths, I made heavy use of ring modulation to introduce anharmonic, dissonant overtones – a technique I neglected in the original mix, having just discovered the wonders of wavetable synthesis. Another one of my favorite techniques in this song is the way negative space is carved out by cutting off reverb tails. In terms of production quality, I think the end product is as great of a leap from the original mix as the original mix was from my past work.
Ashes Rising
words can’t describe the miracle i saw
In the summer of 2010, sixteen-year-old me went for a walk in the wash near my family’s house in Tucson. It was a walk filled with existential contemplation, fueled in equal parts by the drudgery of teenagehood and a newfound belief in agnosticism. It was a lot for a kid to take in. Why was I here? Why should anything be here, instead of the far more reasonable prospect of nothing being here? I looked to the sky for answers. All I could hear in the middle of the desert was the wind against my ears. All I could see was a vast blue sky punctuated with clouds against the Catalina mountains. What absolute nonsense it was that these things existed, for seemingly no reason other than for me to perceive them. I was awestruck. I walked away with no answers; instead, a strong conviction that I had been asking the wrong question.
At its core, Ashes Rising is a song about this exact moment in my life. More generally, it’s a song about the miraculous and utterly transient phenomenon of existence: how improbable that it began, and, conversely, how absolutely certain that it will end.
There’s an underlying theme of reversal in nearly every aspect of this song. You might have noticed that its YouTube video plays in reverse, the “ashes” falling upward and the background slowly panning towards the sky. If you haven’t connected all the dots yet, I encourage you to listen to the song itself backwards and see if you notice anything!
The secret follows (in reverse, naturally, to avoid spoilers):
esrever ni deyalp dna ,esion yb devlovnoc ,nwod dewols gnoleB I erehW si gnisiR sehsA ni ynomrah eht
Maybe it was obvious for some listeners, but no one has outright pointed it out yet, so it’s hard to say for sure. In any case, the relationship implied here is complicated, and you could probably draw some reasonable conclusions from the title and cover art. Truthfully, I haven’t thought it all out myself, so it doesn’t matter too much.
On a musical level, my goal here was to create the largest physical space I could. This was achieved through a combination of reverb and convolution filtering, plus copious amounts of EQ and panning. Despite how short the song is, I don’t think it has any reason to be longer – everything I wanted to express is in there.
The other side
I decided to release Voyage for free, with no option to pay / donate. This has nothing to do with any merits of the music itself – I think it would be a release worth paying for. But at this point in my life, I don’t feel comfortable accepting money from people on the Internet. My job pays me enough to live comfortably, which is more than I can say for a lot of my friends’ situations. If you can relate to this position, I encourage you to use the money with which you would have bought my EP to help out a friend in need.
As far as supporting me goes, you can always spread the word about this release to anyone who you think would enjoy it. Nothing has brought more joy to my day than hearing from a friend that one of their own friends enjoyed my EP. Otherwise, just tell me your thoughts! Getting honest feedback on your music is harder than it sounds, and there’s a great deal of value in a fresh pair of ears.
I made a “Back Cover” for my 100% digitally distributed EP. It turns out the concept of a “back cover” doesn’t make much sense unless you’re doing a physical run of your release. Here it is anyway:
The background is a depth map of the artwork I commissioned from Kavaeric. The faint line segments behind each song title aren’t meaningless – see if you can decode them! (Hint: each line is cut into 12 segments, 7 of which are visible.)
I don’t know where my music will go from here. I’d like to take some time to do single releases, remixes, and other smaller projects before I attempt anything on this scale again. But, until I figure out what’s next, I just want to thank you for listening, and for reading this far. This release was hugely important to me, and the positive reception has filled me with the determination to keep improving my craft and keep pushing my limits. I hope you’re ready for whatever comes next.
