I’ve always dreamed of creating the soundtrack to a racing games. This genre has played a big role in my life since I was a kid. When I was asked late last year about doing the soundtrack, I of course jumped on it without hesitation. This was truly a dream come true.
A special thanks to Gabriel Morin and Edouard Beauchemin of Nadeo in Paris.
Album Artwork by Sam Kiss – sickmass.tumblr.com
These are all the tracks that I composed for the soundtrack to “Athene’s Theory of Everything”. Some of the material was used, some of it wasn’t, but this is the collection of everything I recorded and programmed. It’s been a dream of mine to compose music for something that I honestly and truly believed in, and they’ve definitely made that come true. The exposure that’s come from this documentary and my work with them has been absolutely priceless, and I thank them for that as well. This is my first stab at an almost completely ambient body of work. I’ve always wanted an excuse to participate in that realm of electronic music – and what better way than to do a score for a documentary about neuroscience.
This entire body of work is dedicated to Athene and especially Reese for the superb level of communication and the sincerely good vibes that came from the entire project. I’ve been spoiled by them on this project and I’ll remember it always.
“All Control” somehow garnered some popularity over the years on its own, the original track not being on any album, but a relatively obscure netlabel compilation called “Of Men And Machines” between rec72 and Audiovisual Theorem. Some friends from here in Chicago and across the pond were kind enough to offer their own virtuosic and imaginative takes on this strange track, coming together to make this EP – all organized by Marko Medkour at Rec72.
This includes my third self-remix of this track. I really shouldn’t remix it anymore…
A year into art school, after my move into the city and away from the suburbs, growing pains and emphatic, celebratory anger cultivated this collection of hard dance pieces to be performed live. It’s a reflection of the shift in focus both musically and in taste. Inspired by the growing movement in electro-clash and electro house, I found myself slipping into this genre. I stopped early on, however, as I didn’t want to completely devote myself to this style of electronic music. It remains at EP length for this very reason.
Album artwork by Sam Kiss
I was living at home in a suburb of Chicago a few years after high school. Like so many kids where I grew up, my future was uncertain and was likely to stay that way as I was shrouded in apathy. Boredom slowly turned to frustration, this frustration quickly turned to inspiration. I knew it was time to leave, it was time to move on, to follow something – a dream of some kind. Before I left, however, I wanted to document where and who I was. This album is a documentary of exactly that.
Immediately after high school, I had a craving to start crafting music that had more energy; a place to create something with greater intensity and tell fictional stories instead of documenting events and emotions in my life. In a sense, it’s an attempt at a kind of expressionist dance music, but ended up being a blend of all my favorite kinds of hard music, from hip-hop to rock to disco. This album marks a checkpoint of both fear and excitement.
I finished this album the year I graduated high school. This was the transformation from slower, darker and melancholy trip-hop to more aggressive and spacier breakbeat & big beat sounds. This was before I had any MIDI controllers or digital equipment… this was made on a Pentium 4 machine with a mouse and QWERTY keyboard.
My very first original album; it’s pretty short and very simple. I had an obsession with hip-hop, trip-hop and ambient music. DJ Krush, DJ Shadow, DJ Cam, Aphex Twin and Radiohead were all I listened to at the time. All of this was made on a Pentium II machine with no MIDI controllers – but I did have access to a Moog Rogue that my brother gave to me as a gift, and I still have to this day. I used ACID Pro and ReBirth 2.0 for everything else.
I was an angsty, depressed teenager (not unlike most at that age) and this was how I dealt with all of it: music. The only therapy that’s ever worked.