SITARI - For tomorrow is dark, is our path forsaken
By george bowles on March 22, 2016 6:53 am
Wow! this track tried to and did go in many different directions. it still seems a little "unwrapped up" compositionally, but that is where it seemed to want to go. this one turned out to be rather mercurial, any time i tried to pin it down it did something else. quarky!
the idea began with continuing a series of tracks that began a couple of weeks ago with Sitari - Solace in Lunacy... basically use world music drums and very organic percussion and pair it with the most alien sounding synths i have and other virtual instruments and then process it all together using various filters and idm-styled processors.
i then added some speech synthesis to it, a plugin that would read aloud in a male robot voice whatever you typed in to it. to figure out what I wanted it to say, i used a random lyric generator website and came up with a few phrases:
the main phrase and title of the track ended up being "for tomorrow is dark, is our path forsaken" a line from a lyric sheet that was generated (i ran it a few times before i landed on something that i wanted, much like using many generators). the other two lines which are harder to pick out are "three glowing triads lead me into the night" and "stalking executives playing the ended" which was actually a trimmed part of a lyric line which made it sound almost political (isn't everything political these days?).
the melodies were also generated by an ai, this one was based on notes in the phrygian mode. i programmed the drums and percussion, but there were liberal use of vst's applied as well, so this is a pretty random thing.
so after i got the contraption put together it ended up taking on a number of different forms. there was the original idea render, the one with the robot voice, a really slowed down and drowned out version that almost ended up being the final version, then I started applying ableton live to it and it went in even more different ways.
there is now a "bitter crunch mix", an "alien apparatus mix", a "musique concrete mix" which actually used tape manipulation and musique concrete-ish techniques, and the one I used for weeklybeats is based on something called the "smooth pb&j mix". so 6 mixes! hope to have a single/ep with all of them up on bandcamp before i go out of town for the weekend.
i think the mix i ended up picking really shows a lot of layers and represents the idea i was going for in techno-organic sounding futuristic music. all the generations of banging on the drums has amassed into a sum of who-knows-what.
if you want or have the time, let me know which version on this extended single mini album is your favorite. after doing all of that, i think the stripped down original version is my fav, but i like them all in certain ways. my second favorite is the "prolonged remix". enjoy!
https://sitari.bandcamp.com/album/for-tomorrow-is-dark-is-our-path-forsaken
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
