OCTAVE
released AUGUST 7, 2020
ALBUM 33, RELEASE 91
I felt like I hadn't written anything in a while, so I decided I was going to write/record/finish 1 song every day for 2 weeks, each song is an ascending key center. Day 1 was in E, Day 2 was in F, you get the idea. Although this was the next album released after Atlantic Witchcraft, I actually wrote everything on Hole of Infinity next. That album required other people, so it took the rest of the year and watched as two other albums came out before it was ready (this being one of them).
"Did It Decay" is a killer opener. It feels unfair for this to be track 1. It's too good. "Expire" is an improvement of the still-fairly-new "You Look Like Spring". I didn't mess around a ton with microtones after this. There's a song I released later in 2020 that has a whole chord in the quartet step zone, but after 2020 I don't think I did a whole lot with microtonality. This is bad writing. Who cares? Not you. "Monuments" is incredible. When I first put this out as a Bandcamp exclusive, a friend of mine said it ruled. When I put it on streaming, I changed all the song titles to be anagrams, in the hopes that people would recognize something was wrong and they weren't getting the full experience. That same friend said "Monuments" ruled, not realizing it was the same song. I guess it's good that he listened to it twice and loved it both times. We don't talk a lot anymore but we're still in touch. I think "Grand Prize Winner" drags its feet too much but there's something incredible in there. When the album came out, I think "Explanation Of Days" might have been my favorite. Songs that sound like this are more common now on HW albums. The outro to "Cold Empty Stare" came about when I slowed down the song to 0.25x with Reaper's varispeed. It did something crazy to the effects. I liked how it sounded. It pairs well with the awkward intro to "Mental Crawl". "I Am An Island" is so bare because it was actually my second attempt at recording a song that day. The first one wasn't much of a song so I scrapped it. "Synthesis" is the first HW song to feature my twin, Dan (from Signal Valley), on it. I just asked them to scream the lyrics into the mic to the best of their abilities. Goofy song to end goofy album. It's not my favorite album but the high points are really high and that's good enough for me.