Just in time for Halloween, Caustic Reverie would like to unveil its fourth album. Drawing from elements of dark ambient, noise, and drone, Word Salad Surgery is by no means an Emerson, Lake & Palmers styled keyboard etude, but rather a nightmarish attack of Apophenia.
1. Prelude (3:08)
2. Word Salad Surgery (18:55)
3. Intermède (3:06)
4. Pareidolia (28:59)
5. Postlude (6:16)
Karmakanic – “Let In Hollywood”
Marillion – “Living With the Big Lie”
Daylight Dies – “…And a Slow Surrender”
Simon Says – “The Chosen One”
Fromuz – “Crashmind”
Porcupine Tree – “Every Home is Wired”
Aghora – “Dual Alchemy”
Camel – “Seperation”
Evergrey – “Broken Wings”
In the Woods… – “Kairos (live)”
Warrel Dane – “Messenger”
The libretto of this piece comes from the poetic nonsense used to throw off spam filters and the like. The song consists of processed voice with some synthesized accompaniment.
Anti-Depressive Delivery – “End of Days”
we are jupiter – “Dichotomy”
Peter Sinfield – “A House of Hopes and Dreams”
Vanden Plas – “Healing Tree”
Dark Suns – “Thornchild”
Goblin – “Aquaman”
Lunatic Soul – “The New Beginning”
Zombi – “Orion”
Unifaun – “A Way Out”
Emerson, Lake & Palmer – “Time and a Place”
Figure of Six – “Dark Side 5”
otiose : Ineffective; futile.
Changing the windshield wipers on Danielle’s Keys Cruiser was at best an otiose gesture, as the windscreen itself was cracked in so many places that both passenger and driver usually had to stick their heads out the side windows to see where they were going.
A track from Stochastic Resonance was played on Dj Ichabod’s Out ov the Coffin radio show on WRVU out of Nashville. For the show’s playlist, click here.
My first two Caustic Reverie albums have had a strong element of the improvisational rather than the tightly structured, step sequencer-based compositions that I have done as TheForgotton. Caustic Reverie has been a chance for me to break out of my writing ruts, and this album was to be an experiment in generative music.
For Stochastic Resonance, I used a program called FMusic as a skeleton for the tracks. It is a composition tool that uses fractals and cellular automata to pick the notes, durations, etc. for a song. I messed around with some scales and key changes until it gave me something I liked. FMusic spits out a midi file which I then imported into FL studio. For example, here is the midi used as a basis for In Vacuo.
I made some synth patches using vsts like the Cameleon 5000, Crystal, and a couple of Krakli synths including Karnage and Etequet. I put some fairly wild sounds for each patch and when I went to play it back, it was compete chaos. See below for what this part of the process sounded like.
I then dragged the tempo down and dumped each track individually, doing some additional time stretching using paulstretch with different edge-case settings for each to get some nice artifacts and glitches throughout.
The tracks were reassembled in Cubase and I started to mix it down. The mixing phase was interesting, as I was working with it more like a sculpture than a song, muting tracks here, and fading them and out there. I added some ambiance recorded at night on the dock near my place, some pitch shifted cymbals, and even a couple of household appliances here and there.
quondam : former, sometime
Norton, a quondam vibraslap virtuoso sidelined by a tragic wrist injury, practiced for months to get back into playing form enough to join his nephew’s Ozzy Osbourne tribute band “Crazy Train”.
Moongarden – “Emotionaut”
Van der Graaf Generator – “Killer”
Suspyre – “Possession”
Ephrat – “Haze”
Gentle Giant – “Cogs In Cogs”
Kamelot – “Edge of Paradise”
Tinyfish – “Motorville”
Neal Morse – “Leviathan”
Nosound – “Places Remained”
Vintersorg – “Stralar”
Rush – “Anagram (for Mongo)”
Jamendo user Ivan1984 had some nice words to say about the Caustic Reverie album Mute. Here’s a snippet:
Mute is deafening, roaring silence and this is the closest I think you could get to that kind of transcendentalism, its’ allocative form is thus. What it represents is open to interpretation with infinite variables. For me, it feels very religious but that might be more to do with my subjectivity and not the intention or thought behind this massive track. At 41 minutes, something substantial happens, something is changing. Is this the link pin, that tenuous thread of ethereal substance? God spoke.
Read the full thing here, and while you’re at it, you can download the album in VBR mp3 or ogg.
