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.