Detailed Tracklist

1. Not Actually FFIV (11:05) [DR12]
   1. Not Actually ‘Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV’ (0:00-2:52) [DR12]
   2. Not Truly ‘Another World of Beasts’ including Not Really ‘Infiltrating Shinra Tower’ and excerpt of Almost but Not Quite ‘Fracture’ (2:52-7:08) [DR12]
   3. Technically Not ‘Clash on the Big Bridge’ including Legally Distinct from ‘J-E-N-O-V-A’ (7:08-11:05) [DR12]
2. 7:6:5:4 (A Study in Musical Proportions) (9:40) [DR17]
   1. Pythagorean Blues (0:00-2:24) [DR18]
   2. Euclidean Prog (2:24-6:00) [DR16]
   3. Newtonian Counterpoint (6:00-9:40) [DR16]
3. Ambiēns aquātica (6:40) [DR13]
4. Disco Apocalypse in 5/4 (co-starring the delicious talents of Logic Pro) (12:27) [DR15]
   1. Side A (0:00-6:00) [DR15]
   2. Side B (6:00-12:27) [DR16]
5. Persōnificātiō mālī (10:42) [DR14]
   1. Dōnā eī requiem (0:00-5:17) [DR14]
   2. Pfhor Pfhōrī lupus (5:17-10:42) [DR13]
6. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (8:05) [DR13]
   1. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (τᾰρᾰχώδης) (0:00-4:00) [DR13]
   2. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (γαληνός) (4:00-8:05) [DR14]
7. Ritratto in grigio (10:20) [DR15]
   1. Ritratto in grigio (elettrico) (0:00-5:05) [DR16]
   2. Ritratto in grigio (acustico) (5:05-10:20) [DR15]
8. Ludo mortale (11:00) [DR17]
   1. Danza frattale (0:00-5:22) [DR17]
   2. フラクタル・ジャズ (5:22-11:00) [DR17]
9. Tempus tempestātum (11:40) [DR16]
   1. Tempo tempestoso (elettrico) (0:00-5:44) [DR18]
   2. Tiempo tempestuoso (acústico) (5:44-11:40) [DR15]
10. You Wanted To (4:20) [DR15]
    1. You Wanted To (metal) (0:00-2:00) [DR14]
    2. You Wanted To (jazz) (2:00-4:20) [DR17]
11. Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ (ft. Chris Christodoulou) (19:37) [DR15]
    1. Ὁ ζῐ́γγος αὔξεται μέγᾰς (0:00-5:41) [DR14]
    2. Ὀνειροπολεῖς βῐαίᾱν αὔξησῐν (5:41-10:36) [DR13]
    3. Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη (5:41-10:36) [DR15] [musical commentary, lyrical commentary, lyrics]
    4. Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς (15:31-19:37) [DR15] [musical commentary, lyrical commentary, lyrics]
12. Tempestās īrae (5:12) [DR15]
13. Pende siccāre (16:00) [DR15]
    1. Tūtēla (0:00-8:00) [DR14]
    2. Impetus (8:00-16:00) [DR17]
14. Cauda toxica (10:20) [DR15]
15. Īra temporis (8:19) [DR16]
    1. Ex tempore, ex locō (0:00-4:00) [DR16]
    2. Nōn omnia in suā locō corrēctō erant (4:00-8:19) [DR16]

Appendices

1. Ambush in Rattlesnake Gulch (metal version) (ft. Brian Boyko) (8:12) [DR15]
2. La fille qui volait les astres (9:48) [DR16]
   1. La fille qui volait les astres (acoustique) (0:00-4:48) [DR15]
   2. La fille qui volait les astres (électrique) (4:48-9:48) [DR17]

Quick Reference to Foreign-Language Titles

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Credits

Compositions

• «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» in­ter­po­lates several songsseveral songs by Chris Chris­to­dou­lou, with his kind per­mis­sion:
  • “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” (Risk of Rain 2, 2020-08-11; song release: 2019-03-28)
  • “They Might as Well Be Dead” (Risk of Rain 2: Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01)
  • “Mois­ture De­fi­cit” (Risk of Rain, 2013-11-08; song release: 2013-09-04)
  • “Once in a Lul­la­by” (Risk of Rain 2: Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01)
• brief interpolations of “Diēs Īrae” (author & date unknown) on 4, 5a, 9, 11δ, & 15, plus:

Lyrics

• «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» takes its lyrics from the Trisagion, a traditional prayer of unknown origin.
• «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» and “Ambush in Rattlesnake Gulch” both take their lyrics from “Diēs Īrae” (ca. 13th century CE, author unknown).

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Arrangements

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Performances

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Artwork

(front cover: Sagittarius A*)

(back cover: Messier 87*)

Front Cover

(click to embiggen)

The European Southern Observatory composited the front cover image (released 2024-03-27 ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2406a⟩) from an Event Horizon Telescope photo (released 2022-05-12 ⟨eso.org/public/news/eso2208-eht-mw⟩); its CC-BY 4.0 ⟨creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en⟩ license allows its reuse and adaptation so long as the ESO and the EHT are: (a) credited, and (b) not implied to directly endorse the group or work in question.

Its subject is the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*⟩ (or Sgr A*, “sadge a star”; the asterisk signifies a galaxy’s central body), with superimposed polarized light corresponding to the magnetic field around Sgr A*’s “shadow”. The underlying photo took some five years ⟨aasnova.org/2022/05/12/first-image-of-the-milky-ways-supermassive-black-hole⟩ to process. Also perhaps of interest: this video zooming into a view of Sagittarius A* ⟨eso.org/public/videos/eso2406bbh⟩.

But how did we photograph an object no light escapes? Well, the moniker “black hole” turns out not to be strictly accurate: while light can’t escape an event horizon, electromagnetic radiation bends around its edges, causing iridescent light around its “shadow”. Astronomer Heino Falcke explained this in depth ⟨skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/m87-black-hole-photograph-how⟩ to the Brit­ish Broad­cas­ting Cor­por­a­tion’s Sky at Night magazine.

We can thank/blame Endless Sky ⟨endless-sky.github.io⟩ for inspiring me to look up Sagittarius A*; I immediately knew I had my album cover image the instant I saw it.

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Back Cover

(click to embiggen)

The back cover’s subject, Messier 87* ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:A_view_of_the_M87_supermassive_black_hole_in_polarised_light.tif⟩, is the centre of the Messier 87 galaxy ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_87⟩. The provenance is otherwise identical: EHT released its photograph on 2017-04-11 ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso1907a⟩, and ESO released its polarized light version on 2021-03-24 ⟨eso.org/public/images/2105a⟩. Messier 87 refers to French astronomer Charles Messier’s ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Messier⟩ catalogue of 110 astronomical objects ⟨en.wikipedia.org/Messier_object⟩; M87 is also called Virgo A, NGC 4486, and the Smoking Gun Galaxy. M87* is thousands of times larger than Sgr A*, and its angle makes it far easier to photograph. To date, these are the only two photographs of black holes.

Incidentally, this image’s similarity to the cover of Sound­gar­den’s Superunknown (1994-03-08), which includes their biggest hit “Black Hole Sun”, did not escape notice. Coincidence? Well, probably. But it’s an eerie one.

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Interior gatefold & exterior tray liner (may be described on next page)

Interior Gatefold

(click to embiggen)

Interior Gatefold

(may appear on previous page)

Artist’s conception of the jet rising out of M87* by S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF), released 2023-04-26 ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2305b⟩. Like both covers, it was produced under the ESO’s auspices and is licensed as CC-BY 4.0.

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Exterior Gatefold

(click to embiggen)

Combined front & back covers, in case anyone wants to print them. The front cover is on the right so that the inner booklet spine will align with the inner part of the CD tray.

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Tray Exterior

(click to embiggen)

(may appear on previous page)

The tray liner is an impression of the SDSS J103027.09+052455.0 quasar by the ESO’s L. Calçada (released 2020-10-01) ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2016a⟩ ⟨eso.org/public/images/eso2016a⟩. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope enabled astronomers to find a cluster of six galaxies around a supermassive black hole, seen here shining brightly as it engulfs surrounding matter. It felt somehow fitting that this image has almost the polar opposite of the front and back covers’s color scheme. I left 0.125” (0.3175 cm) of extra room at the edges in case the tray prints out misaligned – the correct dimensions of a CD tray liner are 5.906” (15 cm) wide by 4.646” (11.92784 cm) high, with creases 0.25” (0.635 cm) from the edges.

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CD Labels

(click to embiggen)

Unsurprisingly, the CD labels also use alternate versions of the front and back covers. I haven’t left any extra space around the edges; I’ll create versions that are more suitable for printing later.

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Album Commentary

On Stravinsky and Musical Freedom

On Musical Anachronisms

My music for Tempus Irae Redux is deliberately anachronistic. For instance, «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» mix:

1. the vocal style of Gregorian chant (ca. 9th century CE-now)
2. the words of a famous Medieval Latin poem (ca. 13th century CE)
3. harmonies inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach’s four-part chorales (ca. 17th-18th century CE)
4. a jazz/soul/funk-style backing (ca. 1950s-1980s)
5. a rhythmic focus inspired by minimalists ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_music⟩ like Philip Glass and Steve Reich (ca. 1960s-now)
6. a guitar solo inspired by more than 50 years of heavy metal (ca. 1968-now⁽²⁾)
7. a hypnotic atmosphere inspired by zeuhl ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeuhl⟩ bands like Magma and Kōenji Hyakkei (ca. 1970s-now)
8. a crescendo inspired by post-rock ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-rock⟩ bands like Talk Talk and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (ca. 1980s-now)
9. arpeggiation inspired by game composers like Tim Follin and Nobuo Uematsu (ca. 1980s-now)
10. cavernous production inspired by ’80s pop acts like Genesis and Tears for Fears (1980-1989)

Track Commentary

1. Not Actually FFIV (11:05) [DR12]

   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2022-12-29 to 2023-11-30
   primary inspiration:	Nobuo Uematsu

   Reviewing the file creation dates on my hard drive led me to realize this album’s name was inadvertently a lie: I started writing this track in late December 2022. I’d have to change the title in too many places to count (including the URL of this very file) to fix it, but nonetheless, I regret the error.

   1. Not Actually ‘Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV’ (0:00-2:52) [DR12]

      inspired by:

      “Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV” (Final Fantasy IV, 1991-07-19; OST 1991-06-14)

      While writing this movement, I briefly thought I’d rewritten “Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV”; then I played it back and realized I hadn’t, which resulted in this song’s admittedly bizarre title. At this point, writing a pastiche of Nobuo Uematsu’s music felt inevitable, so I leaned into it and gave what became its three movements cheeky titles based on their obvious inspirations.

      Since I hadn’t fully settled on this being a Final Fantasy pastiche when I wrote it, this movement probably has the most distinct identity. Despite its relative melodic and harmonic simplicity, its arrangement goes through several major changes that hopefully will keep it engaging. The transition at the end is probably this movement’s most complicated and unexpected aspect.

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   2. Not Truly ‘Another World of Beasts’ including Not Really ‘Infiltrating Shinra Tower’ and excerpt of Almost but Not Quite ‘Fracture’ (2:52-7:08) [DR12]

      inspired by:		“Another World of Beasts” (Final Fantasy VI, 1994-04-02; OST 1994-03-25) “Infiltrating Shinra Tower” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10)
      briefly interpolating:		King Crimson, “Fracture”, by Robert Fripp (Starless and Bible Black, 1974-03-29)

      The first thing I’ve ever written entirely in a whole-tone scale. I planned for this movement to be a pastiche of “Another World of Beasts”, which has a very surreal, dreamlike feeling; a whole-tone scale felt perfect to replicate that. (And since “Another World of Beasts” is in 7/8, so is most of this movement.) A segment inspired by “Infiltrating Shinra Tower” snuck its way in while I was writing it – I hadn’t planned on that. (Neither “Another World of Beasts” nor “Infiltrating Shinra Tower” use whole-tone scales, I should note.) The brief quote from King Crimson’s “Fracture”, on the other hand, was entirely planned (and naturally shifts to 6/4).

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   3. Technically Not ‘Clash on the Big Bridge’ including Legally Distinct from ‘J-E-N-O-V-A’ (7:08-11:05) [DR12]

      inspired by:

      “Clash on the Big Bridge” (Final Fantasy V, 1992-12-06; OST 1992-12-07) “J-E-N-O-V-A” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10)

      This movement wears its influences on its sleeve far more conspicuously. It initially sounded even more like them, but I changed several notes and chords because I felt it was too close. It’s still closer than I’d feel comfortable using in a commercial game, but hellpak’s entire OST is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike, and I think it’s distinct enough for noncommercial use.

      Incidentally, as great as “One-Winged Angel” is, “J-E-N-O-V-A” is low-key the best track in Final Fantasy VII. But Uematsu’s best composition – and (with all due respect to Chris Chris­to­dou­lou, Mi­na­ko Ha­ma­no, Hi­ro­ki Ki­ku­ta, Kō­ji Kon­dō, Ya­su­no­ri Mit­su­da, Marty O’Donnell, Michael Sal­va­to­ri, Yōko Shi­mo­mu­ra, Kenji Yamamoto, and countless other great game composers throughout history) likely the greatest song in the history of video game music – is and always will be⁽³⁾ “Dancing Mad”. I haven’t even begun to try writing a pastiche of that. (Uematsu, an entirely self-taught musician, has written dead-on pastiches of Johann Sebastian Bach; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Igor Stravinsky; and several other infamously complex artists. That level of musical genius is beyond my ken.)

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2. 7:6:5:4 – A Study in Musical Proportions (9:40) [DR17]

   composer: Aaron Freed, 2023-09-23 to 2024-01-03

   Believe it or not, I merely intended this to be a study in 5:4 polyrhythms (which are distinct from, though in this case coincidentally linked to, 5/4 time signatures). However, the bassline I wrote for the first movement steadfastly refused to work in anything except groups of seven (yes Hamish); the Oblique Strategies ⟨stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html⟩ suggested keeping it that way, so I began this song with the extraordinarily unusual 7:5 polyrhythm. Groups of six and four naturally worked their way in as I wrote additional instrument parts, hence the song’s title.

   For those curious, I actually notated this as 4/4 in Logic, so much like Meshuggah, I could truthfully claim the mind-warping polyrhythms I’ve created here are entirely in 4/4. However, time signatures are really products of feeling rather than of mathematics, and I don’t actually feel this song as 4/4; I usually feel it either as 5/4 or as 7/4, depending on whether I’m focusing more on the drums or the bass.

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   1. Pythagorean Blues (0:00-2:24) [DR18]

      briefly interpolating:

      Alex Seropian, “Fat Man” (Marathon, 1994-12-21) Nobuo Uematsu, “Those Who Fight Further” (Final Fantasy VII, 1997-01-31; OST 1997-02-10)

      I hadn’t planned on writing a blues track here, but I soon realized harmonic simplicity served ideally to introduce such extraordinary rhythmic complexity. (While neither usually work in what we could call blues idioms, I was effectively following Tool and Meshuggah’s examples in this regard.)

      I don’t believe in concealing my influences, so I quoted “Fat Man” and “Those Who Fight Further” for eighteen seconds each near the end of this movement because I felt I’d been melodically aping them throughout it.

      Pythagoras of Samos (Greek: Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος, romanized: Pythagóras ho Sámios, literally meaning Pythagoras the Samian) worked his way into this movement’s title because he’s credited with discovering the relationship between mathematics and music. (He’s also a little bit famous for studying the proportions of triangles. You may, after all, recall his theorem.)

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   2. Euclidean Prog (2:24-6:00) [DR16]

      semi-interpolating:

      Alex Seropian, “Chomber” (Marathon, 1994-12-21)

      The Mellotron introduces this new movement’s chords before the bass enters, followed by the organ and two different guitar parts. The bass line repeatedly suggests “Chomber” from Marathon – since I was writing this for a Marathon scenario and had by this point settled on using groupings of seven for the bass parts throughout the entire track, the reference felt obligatory. However, I always throw some additional notes into the mix.

      I’m not entirely pleased with this guitar part & may rewrite it. The organ solo is delectable, though.

      Euclid (Greek: Εὐκλείδης, romanized: Eukleídes, derived from εὖ-, eu-, meaning well, and -κλῆς, -klês, meaning fame, thus renowned or glorious) wrote the most famous studies of geometry in history.

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   3. Newtonian Counterpoint (6:00-9:40) [DR16]

      Guitar and bass rarely engage in counterpoint in rock music. I love counterpoint and would love to hear more of it, so I wrote the guitar part as a counterpoint to the bass line. I’m extremely pleased with the effect; it almost sounds like a rock fugue.

      Midway through this movement, I add strings and some ethereal Dark Side of the Moon-style choral vocals that end up being the song’s final elements as the others stop playing. (Before adding the strings, I’d begun writing a fourth movement that I yeeted after noticing that it was virtually identical to Chris Christodoulou’s “Coalescence” [Risk of Rain, 2013].)

      Sir Isaac Newton, while probably most famous for studying gravity, also independently invented calculus (he and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, unaware of each other’s work, developed it around the same time). In short, the movements are named for central figures of trigonometry (Pythagoras and Euclid), geometry (also Pythagoras and Euclid), and calculus (Newton).

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3. Ambiēns aquātica (6:40) [DR13]

   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-06-11 to 2024-06-19; 2024-10-14 to 2024-10-16
   briefly interpolating:	unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date)
   inspired by:	David Wise, “Aquatic Ambiance” (Donkey Kong Country, 1994-11-18) (OST; fan restoration)

   I’ve never played a Donkey Kong Country game and, to my knowledge, hadn’t heard any of its brilliant music until 2024-06-11. I note this because any Donkey Kong Country fan will immediately peg “Ambiēns aquātica” as an unapologetic tribute to its most famous track, “Aquatic Ambiance”. (Right down to its title, in fact: “Ambiēns aquātica” is Latin for “Aquatic Ambiance”. I see little point in concealing my influences.)

   I grew up listening to David Wise’s music; I played the NES Marble Madness ad nauseam as a child, plus California Games and likely Battletoads and maybe a few other games he worked on as well. But Wise’s reputation primarily rests on his Donkey Kong Country soundtracks, and with good reason: they use the Super Nintendo’s limited sound chip as virtuosically as Square’s greatest 16-bit composers (Hiroki Kikuta, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yōko Shimomura, Nobuo Uematsu, etc.) did. They’d be the absolute upper echelon in this category if Tim & Geoff Follin hadn’t existed – on which note, R.I.P. Geoff :(

   I first heard “Aquatic Ambiance” in a video jazz pianist Charles Cornell ostensibly made about Kōji Kondō’s (also brilliant) music for Super Mario 64’s “Dire, Dire Docks”. Cornell actually spent more than half its runtime gushing about Wise’s track, and I immediately understood why; it struck a nerve on a primal level. Not only did I know, on first listen, that it was a masterpiece, but I immediately wanted to write a more energetic track with an otherwise similar mood – which is not an urge I frequently get.

   So, having heard Wise’s piece probably no more than twice, I sat down and put its first two chords (which Cornell had analyzed in detail) into Logic Pro’s arpeggiator. Overnight, going entirely by what felt natural, I wrote chords, melodies, and a basic arrangement; I already had a rough mix by sunrise of 2024-06-12. I’ve since added a few background embellishments, but its fundaments are unchanged.

   It’s rare (get it? because Donkey Kong Country’s developer is… ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_(company)⟩ never mind) for a song to emerge almost fully formed so quickly for me; usually, something about my first attempt doesn’t work, but this (if you’ll allow an obvious water metaphor) just flowed out as an expression of my contemporary emotional and mental state. I felt particularly alienated by certain individuals within the Marathon community: one of my closest friends (who’s seriously ill) had poured eighteen months into tutoring me for seemingly fruitless ends. (I’ve withheld names and further specifics to protect the innocent guilty, but we ultimately forked the engine ⟨github.com/Aleph-Bet-Marathon/alephbet⟩.) Reading this song as a reflection of the existential despair I felt at the time is not strictly incorrect.

   “Aquatic Ambiance” is obviously one of the best game tracks of all time, and in no way do I think I’ve duplicated its quality – especially because, again, Wise was doing all of that on a Super Nintendo! To avoid plagiarism (a famous Russian mathematician’s advice aside), I didn’t listen to Wise’s piece again until I finished writing mine – and when I did, I was pretty astonished at how closely I’d approximated its mood and atmosphere. But I can hardly consider myself an unbiased source, so I’ll quote one of my early listeners:

   “I think you really captured the spirit of the OG while still giving it a danceable (beat, rhythm, etc. – not sure on the vocab). It’s got more energy than the source material :)”

   So I’ll chalk that one up as a success.

   This track will play on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Gauntlet”.

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4. Disco Apocalypse in 5/4 (co-starring the delicious talents of Logic Pro) (12:27) [DR15]
   1. Side A (0:00-6:00) [DR15]

      composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-06-12 to 2024-10-01
      briefly interpolating:	unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date) Genesis, “Supper’s Ready”, written by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, & Mike Rutherford (Foxtrot, 1972-09-15)

   2. Side B (6:00-12:27) [DR16]

      composer:

      Aaron Freed, 2024-06-12 to 2024-08-03

   This song was an experiment in two different ways:

   1. I was experimenting with Logic Pro’s new session bassist and session keyboardist (thus the subtitle)
   2. I was seeking to answer a question no one had asked, “Does disco need a 4/4 time signature to feel like disco?” (The answer, surprisingly, is no.)

   Logic’s session keyboardists are… well, they’re quite good at coming up with jazzy accompaniments, but you couldn’t rely on them to come up with the main melodies of a track. The session bassist, though, is unbelievably good – the performance is full of realistic-sounding slides and unbelievable hooks. I’d already relied heavily on the session drummer in my previous arrangements – I’m not a drummer, and whenever I write drum parts myself, they feel less natural to me than the parts I’ve created with Logic’s session drummer. The bassist is even better than that.

   Logic’s session players all require substantial user input to get the kinds of performances found here; users must, at the bare minimum, specify chords and performance styles. There are also parameters for the rhythmic patterns the session players use; the complexity, intensity, and dynamic range of their performances; how much swing they use; how much they deviate from the metronome (“humanize”); how far in front of or behind the beat they play (“feel”); the frequency and complexity of their fills; the bassist and keyboardist’s melodic range; what kinds of arpeggiation the “arpeggiated” keyboardist performs; the kind of voicings the keyboardist plays with each hand; how many grace notes the keyboardist plays; how many ghost notes the drummer plays; how many notes, slides, blue notes, and dead notes the bassist plays; the kind of grooves the bassist plays; and more beyond that. I always customize all of these; in particular, I usually crank “complexity”, “fill amount”, and “fill complexity” all the way up.

   The first half of this song features a steadily building arrangement that I wrote for the OST, but the structure heard here will not necessarily match what players hear in the game exactly. As players complete mission objectives in the level this track will appear in, the game will add melodic layers to the existing arrangement. Thus, the music will get louder and more complex as players progress through the level.

   That said, I was impressed enough with Logic’s session musicians that I decided to feature them without my added accompaniments for the second half of the song – it feels like a modern structural equivalent of extended 12” disco mixes that used to feature lengthy instrumental breakdowns towards the end.

   The song title is a take-off on a movement of Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready”, namely “Apocalypse in 9/8 (co-starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)”. I began using this title semi-ironically, but the more I con­sid­ered it, the more it felt appropriate. For starters, its chord progression strongly resembles one I used in a song I performed on my album Demos 2014 ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/music/demos2014.html⟩, called simply “Love”, that I habitually used to perform after I covered an excerpt of “Supper’s Ready” that doesn’t strictly belong to either “Apocalypse in 9/8” or to its preceding movement, “Willow Farm”; in fact, it appears on Demos 2014 in that exact form. So, effectively, if “Love” used to take the place of “Apocalypse in 9/8” when I covered a segment of “Supper’s Ready”, then it feels appropriate to name a track with a similar chord progression after “Apocalypse in 9/8”.

   So, in part, this track’s title is a tribute to one of my favourite bands. And of course, any self-respecting disco fan is aware of tracks like the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” and David Shire’s “Night on Disco Mountain” (which in turn is a disco version of Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain).

   The other major inspiration on this feels too obvious to note, but I’ll point it out anyway: Nobuo Uematsu’s “Prelude” from the Final Fantasy series. I’m noting it because, until I began watching Studio Ghibli’s filmography from start to finish in 2024, I didn’t realize how large an influence Joe Hisaishi had so many Japanese composers. I’d liken the experience to that of a person who’d only listened to Western pop music from the last 50 years for their entire life finally hearing the Beatles. None of the composers I’d listened to bothered mentioning Hisaishi as an influence because – well, wasn’t it obvious? As it turned out, not to people who hadn’t heard him. So, while the influence of Uematsu’s “Prelude” is no doubt obvious to those familiar with the Final Fantasy series’ music, I’ll point it out anyway.

   Because I named this track after a movement from “Supper’s Ready”, I subsequently felt it incumbent upon myself to feature a brief quote of the aforementioned flute solo (especially since flutes are a near-mandatory element of disco). Additionally, I quoted the famous Gregorian chant setting of “Diēs Īrae” (whose words and music are both of uncertain authorship, albeit traditionally attributed to Thomas of Celano [b. ca. 1185, d. 1260-10-04]), which I plan to make a recurring motif throughout the soundtrack (it is, after all, the scenario’s namesake). It also feels quite fitting for the “Apocalypse” part of this song’s title.

   I tentatively plan to use this on the Tempus Irae Redux level “La fine di innocenza”.

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5. Persōnificātiō mālī (10:42) [DR14]

composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-06-19 to 2024-08-03
briefly interpolating:	Kōji Kondō, “Lost Woods” (The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, 1998-11-21) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Lacrimōsa” (Requiem, 1791)

1. Dōnā eī requiem (0:00-5:17) [DR14]
2. Pfhor Pfhōrī lupus (5:17-10:42) [DR13]

Two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same song, writ­ten in Phry­gi­an mode, which has an in­trin­sic Span­ish feel­ing to it due to the flat sec­ond note of its scale. Most of it’s in 7/4, but it chan­ges to 5/4 (on two se­pa­rate oc­ca­sions) for rough­ly half a min­ute of chords that I ba­sic­al­ly lif­ted ver­ba­tim from Mo­zart’s Requiem – which is the­ma­tic­al­ly ap­pro­pri­ate, giv­en the ev­ents of the sto­ry in the game le­vel I’ve writ­ten this song for. The fi­nal four meas­ures of the Mo­zart quote are in 4/4. (Ad­di­tion­al­ly, I threw in a few brief quotes of the Lost Woods theme from The Leg­end of Zel­da: Oc­a­ri­na of Time, ow­ing to it us­ing the same key sig­na­ture as this song.)

“Dōnā eī re­qui­em” is a sof­ter ar­range­ment of “Pfhor Pfhō­rī lu­pus” with the gui­tar and el­ec­tric cel­lo re­placed with flute and o­boe, re­spec­tive­ly; most oth­er in­stru­ments ex­cept the string quar­tet stripped away; a fret­less bass re­pla­cing the el­ec­tric; and a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent drum track. The for­mer is La­tin for “Grant Him Rest”, and the lat­ter for “Pfhor [Is] a Wolf to Pfhor”. (I brac­ket “[Is]” be­cause est, La­tin for is, is mere­ly implied by the sen­tence struc­ture; this lin­guis­tic de­vice is called a zero co­pu­la ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula⟩.)

I plan to use these on the Tempus Irae Redux level “…evil so singularly personified…”, hence the name “Persōnificātiō mālī”, which means “Personification of Evil” in Latin.

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6. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (8:05) [DR13]
   1. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (τᾰρᾰχώδης) (0:00-4:00) [DR13]

      composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-06-24 to 2024-07-24
      briefly interpolating:	Rush, “YYZ”⁽¹⁾, by Ged­dy Lee & Neil Peart (Mov­ing Pic­tures, 1981-02-12) Jo­hann Se­bas­tian Bach, Toc­ca­ta and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 (date unknown)

   2. Λοκρῶν θρῆνος (γαληνός) (4:00-8:05) [DR14]

      composer:

      Aaron Freed, 2024-06-24 to 2024-07-24

   A weird ex­pe­ri­ment that I’ve none­the­less grown quite fond of. It’s an­cient Greek (ro­man­ized: Lokrôn thrê­nos) for “Loc­ri­an La­ment”, so named be­cause it’s writ­ten, to the ex­tent one can man­age to do so, in the Loc­ri­an mode. Of the ma­jor scale’s se­ven modes, Loc­ri­an is the on­ly one with a dim­in­ished root chord; thus, where its coun­ter­parts base their root chords on the con­so­nant in­ter­val of the per­fect fifth, Loc­ri­an’s is based on the tri­tone, an in­ter­val dis­so­nant en­ough to be as­so­ci­a­ted with the phrase di­ab­ol­us in mu­si­cā (Latin: the de­vil in music).⁽⁴⁾ This has some in­ter­es­ting side ef­fects:

   1. Very few songs that use Loc­ri­an stay in Loc­ri­an for their en­ti­re run­ning time; this is like­ly no ex­cep­tion.
   2. As a re­sult of this, Loc­rian is great for es­tab­lish­ing not just an un­sett­ling at­mos­phere, but a sense that we’re ne­ver tru­ly at “home”, or at least don’t stay there for long.

   Which both feel the­ma­tic­al­ly ap­pro­pri­ate for a le­vel in which an­ta­go­nis­tic al­i­en sla­vers at­tack the ship of their for­mer slaves (also al­i­ens) and the play­er helps the lat­ter fight off the for­mer. (This track is ten­ta­tive­ly in­ten­ded for the Tem­pus Ir­ae Re­dux level “Po­ly­go­num op­us”, which is Latin for “po­ly­gon work”.)

   That’s not ev­en get­ting in­to the time sig­na­ture she­na­ni­gans: the first mea­sure is 1/8, the sec­ond is 2/8, the third is 3/8, the fourth is 4/8, and so on, down to mea­sure 21, which is 21/8. Then the cy­cle re­peats. So if you thought this track was in­ten­tion­al­ly rhyth­mic­al­ly dis­o­ri­en­ting… you’re right. It is.

   For all of that, this track’s sec­ond move­ment is sur­pri­sing­ly chill. Loc­ri­an mode is full of pa­ra­dox­es. The first move­ment is sui­tab­ly fran­tic, but I had to work har­der than I ex­pec­ted to get it to sound that way.

   The Loc­ri­an mode rough­ly eq­uates to the an­cient Greeks’ di­a­to­nic Mi­xo­ly­di­an to­nos; our Mi­xo­ly­di­an mode rough­ly equ­als their di­a­to­nic Hy­po­phry­gi­an to­nos. Sev­er­al of our oth­er mode names are al­so his­to­ric­al­ly in­ac­cu­rate; I go into mu­ch great­er de­tail on my website ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/musicalmodes.html#etymology⟩. (I brief­ly con­si­dered re­nam­ing this to some­thing in­vol­ving “Mi­xo­ly­di­an”, but I quick­ly el­ec­ted not to be­cause I sus­pec­ted that being his­to­ri­cal­ly ac­cu­rate would lead to me re­pea­ted­ly feel ob­li­ga­ted to give TEDx talks on why our names for modes are his­tor­ic­al­ly in­ac­cu­rate, which might’ve an­noyed me ev­en more than it would’ve an­noyed ev­er­y­one else.)

   This feels re­la­tive­ly close to fin­ished now. Af­ter players finish the mis­sion, I’ll strip aw­ay se­ver­al lay­ers, hence the OST mix’s sub­dued out­ro. (The game mix, by ne­ces­si­ty, us­es two com­plete­ly se­par­ate au­di­o fi­les.)

   The guitar in the first movement’s left channel quotes Rush’s “YYZ”⁽¹⁾. The guitar in the right channel quotes the opening of the fugue from Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565. This is actually the second time I’ve quoted both these compositions in the same track; my arrangement of Alex Seropian’s “Fat Man” (Marathon, 1994) does the same thing. I’d like to claim that I did this on purpose, but it didn’t occur to me until after I’d already done it. The Bach quote, incidentally, is one of the few times I broke from strictly adhering to the scale of B Locrian – it sounded wrong without the accidentals.

   For the record, “τᾰρᾰχώδης” (romanized: tarakhṓdēs) means approximately chaotic in ancient Greek, while “γαληνός” (romanized: galēnós) means peaceful.

   Additional note for you math nerds out there: the pitch ratio of a perfect fifth is approximately 3:2, and the pitch ratio of a perfect fourth (the interval needed to complete the octave above a perfect fifth) is approximately 4:3.⁽⁵⁾ The tritone, meanwhile, has a ratio of exactly √2:1.

   Finally, a few notes on Bach (undoubtedly still my biggest musical influence): this Wikipedia paragraph on Toc­cata and Fugue in D minor’s reception might as well open Charles Dic­kens’ A Tale of Two Cities:

   “The composition has been deemed both ‘particularly suited to the organ’ and ‘strikingly unorganistic’. It has been seen as united by a single ground-thought, but also as containing ‘passages which have no connection whatever with the chief idea’. It has been called ‘entirely a thing of virtuosity’ yet also described as being ‘not so difficult as it sounds’. It has been described as some sort of program music depicting a storm, but also as abstract music, quite the opposite of program music depicting a storm. It has been presented as an emanation of the galant style, yet too dramatic to be anything near that style. Its period of origin has been assumed to have been as early as around 1704, and as late as the 1750s. Its defining characteristics have been associated with extant compositions by Bach (BWV 531, 549a, 578, 911, 914, 922 and several of the solo violin sonatas and partitas), and by others (including Nicolaus Bruhns and Johann Heinrich Buttstett), as well as with untraceable earlier versions for other instruments and/or by other composers. It has been deemed too simplistic for it to have been written down by Bach, and too much a stroke of genius to have been composed by anyone else but Bach.”

   In short, it was a composition very much like present-d I’m sorry; I can’t even type that with a straight face.

   For the record, I’ve performed the toccata in its entirety on both piano and pipe organ and didn’t find it especially difficult (this was 25 years ago, so I don’t have a recording; sorry). I also find it far too ingenious to not be by Bach, but then, I was taught Christian Petzold’s Minuet in G, BWV Anh. 114,⁽⁶⁾ as a Bach piece and was shocked to learn the attribution to Bach was spurious (and was known to be when I was taught it – pedagogy took a long time to catch up with scholarship). Here’s a brief but solid overview of why Petzold’s work was misattributed for so long (followed by a lovely acoustic guitar performance). Enciende subtítulos cerrados si no entiendes español. (Lo siento; turn on closed captions if you don’t understand Spanish.)

   I tentatively plan to use the chaotic version of this track on the Tempus Irae Redux levels “Repository Four” and “Polygonum opus”, before you complete the mission; the latter will switch to the calm variant, which I also intend to use on other repository levels (except “The End”).

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7. Ritratto in grigio (10:20) [DR15]
   1. Ritratto in grigio (elettrico) (0:00-5:05) [DR16]
   2. Ritratto in grigio (acustico) (5:05-10:20) [DR15]

   composer: Aaron Freed, 2024-07-24 to 2024-08-24

   I stole this song’s rhythm from the Allman Brothers Band’s “Whipping Post” (studio: The Allman Brothers Band, 1969; definitive live recording: At Fillmore East, 1971), likely the most famous use of 11/8 in rock history (despite its composer Gregg Allman apparently not understanding this⁽⁷⁾), so if it feels slightly off-kilter rhythmically, that’s entirely intentional. A few of its chords may be similar to those of “Whipping Post”, too. Another big influence is undoubtedly Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” (Led Zeppelin, 1969).

   However, it sounds quite different from either – despite the fairly metal-influenced (synthesized) guitar solo towards the end, it has a major jazz fusion/progressive electronic vibe, despite paradoxically having virtually no blue notes and sticking fairly strictly to the D Dorian scale. It’s also quite a bit more unpredictable and even chaotic than what I set out to make. A friend described it as sounding like Final Fantasy boss fight music, which feels entirely accurate. My mother also compared it to Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love” (album mix: The Seeds of Love, 1989; the music video is a minute shorter), which also feels accurate (The Seeds of Love, a lost classic of the late ’80s, has been one of my favorite albums for 35 years).

   The title (Italian for “Portrait in Gray”) is a pun on the Dorian mode by way of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – a sort of song title equivalent of Cockney rhyming slang.

   I feel almost certain that I’ll write at least one more movement of this track (perhaps preceding the first one, perhaps following the last), and I have absolutely no idea where it’s going. I’ve had it suggested to me to use an ABB’A’ structure for this track, which I’m currently contemplating; if I do so, it’ll be entirely safe to wager money on me throwing in at least one brief reference to “Mamma Mia!” or some other ABBA banger. (“Mamma Mia!” is the likeliest due to its Italian title.)

   The acoustic movement is currently a very early work in progress and does not qualify as the B’A’ section – it’s an early attempt at the “mission complete” music.

   I tentatively plan to use this track on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Theatre of Pain”.

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8. Ludo mortale (11:00) [DR17]

   The first Tempus Irae Redux song I started writing, though it didn’t actually turn into a song until roughly between “Ritratto in grigio” and “Tempo tempestuoso”. (In fact, I originally sequenced it between them, but ultimately decided placing it as track three was truer to the chronological approach I wanted this album to take.) I’d started writing it as an experiment with no particular idea what I would use it for, then forgot about it for several months until I went through old Logic projects. As a result, a case could be made that “Ambiēns aquātica” is the first proper Tempus Irae Redux song.

   “Ludo mortale” is Italian for “Deadly Game” – I tentatively plan to use both movements of this track on the Tempus Irae Redux level “Game of Death”. For the OST (and for this release), I’ve merged them into a single track; in-game, “Danza frattale” will crossfade into 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 once the platforms necessary to leave the level are all active and the Juggernauts are all dead. This typifies my compositional approach to Tempus Irae Redux – more than half the tracks I wrote can respond in some way to players’ actions as they progress through a level, and I usually combined multiple versions into a single track for the OST mix.

   Danza frattale (0:00-5:22) [DR17]
   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-02-18 to 2024-08-25
   briefly interpolating:	Edvard Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (Peer Gynt, 1876-02-24)
   “Danza frattale” (Italian for “Fractal Dance”) evolved from a mathematical pattern, hence the name. I began with a series of notes whose lowest note plays twice as often as the second-lowest note, thrice as often as the third-lowest note, four times as often as the fourth-lowest note, and so on. I ar­ranged these into chords and threw a disco beat and bass line over them. It goes kinda hard, tbh. About mid­way through, “Danza frattale” switches to 5/4 without actually becoming any less disco (see below for further experiments in this – note that I actually made “Disco Apocalypse in 5/4” before writing the 5/4 part of this song, or 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 for that matter). This track’s guitar solo remains a work in progress, but it quotes Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (Peer Gynt, 1876-02-24), very likely the most famous Norwegian composition in history and – more to the point – the most famous use of a continually increasing tempo in musical history. For that exact reason, I did something unexpected: I slowed down the second half of my quote. (This was partly to fit the existing chord progression, but it was also pure contrarianism.)
   フラクタル・ジャズ (5:22-11:00) [DR17]
   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-08-02 to 2024-08-25
   As I was mixing “Danza frattale”, its solo keyboard parts captivated me enough to isolate them and use them as the basis of a new movement, which I ultimately named 「フラクタル・ジャズ」 (Japanese for “Fractal Jazz”, romanized “Furakutaru jazu”) for presumably obvious reasons. I’d originally named it the same thing in English, then Italian, before finally settling on naming it in Japanese. The reason is simple: from the moment I decided to make this its own movement, I felt it’d feel right at home in a late-’90s/early-’00s Japanese role-playing game soundtrack – indeed, that might be half the reason I did so. If I didn’t know better, I could probably be persuaded this was a Ya­su­no­ri Mitsuda track from Chrono Cross or a Motoi Sakuraba track from Star Ocean: Till the End of Time – two woefully underrated soundtracks that have undoubtedly influenced my approach to game composition.

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9. Tempus tempestātum (11:40) [DR16]

   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-07-30 to 2024-08-19; 2024-10-16 to 2024-10-19
   briefly interpolating:	unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date)

   1. Tempo tempestoso (elettrico) (0:00-5:44) [DR18]
   2. Tiempo tempestuoso (acústico) (5:44-11:40) [DR15]

   I wrote most of this song while Hurricane Debby was passing overhead. Logic Pro’s Latin percussionist, which I used on this track, has a preset called “Stormy Weather”; the movement titles were inevitable. However, I titled the first movement in Italian due to Tempus Irae Redux’s Italian setting, and the second in Spanish due to the piece’s substantial Latin jazz influence; this created a nice pun in both languages. (Since the titles were so similar, I also ultimately added “elettrico” to the Italian title and “acústico” to the Spanish one; they mean exactly what you think.) I subsequently renamed the piece as a whole to “Tempus tempestātum” (Latin for “Time of Storms”) as Hurricane Milton approached Florida.

   Overall, this is an experiment in tonality. Several tracks above deviate from the diatonic scale’s modes rarely, if ever; here, I took a more chromatic approach, aiming to seesaw between harmony and exceeding Loc­ri­an’s dissonance. I’m satisfied with the results. I considered it a work in progress for a while, but I’m increasingly convinced that the arpeggiation carries the track almost by itself. The 6/8 rhythm also helps a lot; its ebb and flow feels quite oceanic, which is appropriate for a level in which water plays such a major part.

   I wrote this track for the Tempus Irae Redux level “Towel Boy”. The level script actually shifts through several arrangements of increasing intensity as players progress through the level; once the Juggernaut dies, it switches to the jazz version. (The stem release contains each electric variant in its entirety; this mix amounts to a condensed preview of the effect.)

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10. You Wanted To (4:20) [DR15]

    composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-08-07 to 2024-08-16
    inspired by:	System of a Down, “Chop Suey!”, by Daron Malakian & Serj Tankian (single, 2001-08-13; Toxicity, 2001, 2001-09-04) Ra­di­o­head, “In Limbo”, by Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, & Thom Yorke (Kid A, 2000-10-02)

    1. You Wanted To (metal) (0:00-2:00) [DR14]
    2. You Wanted To (jazz) (2:00-4:20) [DR17]

    I may be the only person that actually hears this, but this song is vaguely inspired by System of a Down’s “Chop Suey!” (Toxicity, 2001). The biggest tells are that, like its inspiration, it’s in G minor and makes heavy use of start-stop dynamics. (It’s also titled after a recurring line from “Chop Suey!”; it’s one of the few Tempus Irae Redux track titles I haven’t translated into a foreign language because neither Italian nor Latin have split infinitives.) It turned into something quite different, though.

    The other vague inspiration I can name is Radiohead’s “In Limbo” (Kid A, 2000), another song that lives rent-free in my head (actually, most of that album does). Whenever I hear a Fender Rhodes play a fuguelike melody, that song immediately comes to mind.

    I didn’t even try to make this song’s jazz version resemble its metal version, besides their chords – in fact, they have no instrument parts in common. I don’t think that’s a problem: the transitions within the metal movement are meant to be jarring, so why shouldn’t the transition to jazz also come out of nowhere?

    This is likely to remain the shortest track I write for Tempus Irae Redux; stretching it out too long would spoil the effect. I’ll likely use it for a short secret level like “Beyond the Black”.

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11. Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ (ft. Chris Christodoulou) (19:37) [DR15]

    This track’s name is Ancient Greek (romanized: “Kataibaté hélix”) for “Downward Spiral”, the name of the level I wrote it for. I’ll explain why I used Ancient Greek below, but I can’t stress enough that this song ex­ists purely be­cause Chris per­son­al­ly en­cour­aged me to make it. I’m not sure I can ac­tu­al­ly ex­press how personally mean­ing­ful and re­war­ding that is to me – especially because this has become one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever worked on (hence its almost twenty-minute length).

    The central architectural feature of the level “Downward Spiral” is a cathedral ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/cathedral.html⟩. This is crucial to understanding almost every artistic choice I made for its soundtrack.

    Incidentally, the etymon of cathedral is the ancient Greek κᾰθέδρᾱ (kathédrā: chair, column’s base, sitting posture, throne, etc.), derived from κᾰτᾰ́ (katá: down) and ἕδρᾱ (hédra: seat). Καταιβᾰτή is derived from κᾰτᾰ́ and βαίνω (baínō: I go). The level wasn’t named for a Greek pun, though; it’s named for Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 classic. As a bonus, the player literally starts on the cathedral’s roof before descending a spiral staircase. (And yes, our word helix traces its etymology directly to ἕλῐξ.)

    1. Ὁ ζῐ́γγος αὔξεται μέγᾰς (0:00-5:41) [DR14]

       composers:	Chris Christodoulou, 2019 Aaron Freed, 2024-08-08 to 2024-10-07
       interpolating:	“The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” (Risk of Rain 2, 2019-03-28)

       A few days be­fore I be­gan wor­king on this track, I’d sent Chris a mash-up I’d made of wow­bob­wow’s ar­range­ment of Al­ex Se­ro­pi­an’s “Lan­ding” (Ma­ra­thon, 1994) with his own “The Rain For­mer­ly Known as Pur­ple” and “A Gla­cier E­ven­tu­al­ly Farts (and Don’t You Lis­ten to the Song of Life).” (Chris’ song ti­tle game puts mine to shame.) Chris liked it and pro­vi­ded se­ve­ral con­struc­tive sug­ges­tions that I’m sure will im­prove the song im­mense­ly the next time I get around to wor­king on it. I also men­tioned that I wan­ted to at­tempt a few further mash-ups; he seemed to find that idea mo­der­ate­ly in­ter­es­ting, but he di­rect­ly en­cour­aged me to try to write some­thing en­tire­ly new based on the OST stems. (Just the fact that he re­leased the OST stems at all is awe­some, I have to add.)

       I’d con­si­dered that idea se­ve­ral times be­fore then, and ev­e­ry time I’d done so, I’d felt too in­ti­mi­da­ted to try. But since Chris had per­son­al­ly en­cour­aged me, I put that a­side and load­ed four stems from “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” in­to Logic: the lead me­lo­dy, the drum and per­cus­sion tracks, and the bass guitar. I then at­temp­ted to write my own chords and ac­com­pa­ni­ment and was shocked at:

       1. how na­tu­ral­ly I came up with sub­stan­tial­ly dif­fer­ent chords for most of the me­lo­dy
       2. how com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent its mood felt
       3. how in­com­pre­hen­sib­ly sub­lime the result felt

       To be fair, part of this is be­cause Chris’ work is on another level. (I al­rea­dy men­tioned in an end­note for “Not Ac­tu­al­ly FFIV” that “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” is now tied with No­bu­o U­e­mat­su’s “Dan­cing Mad” as my fa­vor­ite piece ever writ­ten for a vi­de­o game.)

       I did find my­self stumped when I got to what, for lack of a bet­ter word, I’ll call the break­down about four min­utes into the piece. I’ve ef­fec­tive­ly co­pied the or­ig­in­al chords, be­cause ev­en af­ter trans­crib­ing the me­lo­dy and har­mo­ny for that seg­ment by ear, the the­o­ry be­hind it con­founds me. Every chord I’ve tried there be­sides the or­ig­in­als has felt com­plete­ly off. I don’t un­der­stand how or why it works, but the re­so­lu­tion it provides, both in Chris’ original and in my va­ri­a­tion, is off the charts – which is es­pe­cial­ly re­mar­kab­le be­cause, un­til it hits, nei­ther piece even feels like it’s been buil­ding ten­sion.

       I’ve also tweaked the notes of the original song’s bass line. I’m actually quite proud of this – in particular, I managed to change the interval between a pair of connected notes at around 4:24 in a way that sounded natural. This actually took some rather precise sound editing: I wound up cross-fading quickly between a version pitch-shifted up three half-steps and one pitch-shifted up four half-steps.

       This move­ment’s ti­tle (if I haven’t made any mis­takes, which is quite pos­si­ble) is An­cient Greek (ro­man­ized: “Ho zín­gos aúx­e­tai mé­gas”) for “The Whir­ring Grows Loud”, the phrase Risk of Rain 2 dis­plays just be­fore the op­tion­al boss Al­loy Wor­ship Un­it spawns (which, in the un­mod­ded game, can on­ly oc­cur on Si­ren’s Call, whose BGM is “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky”). I trans­la­ted it to Greek part­ly be­cause the name Ma­ra­thon is it­self Greek (μά­ρα­θον means fen­nel in ancient Greek; the to­po­nym re­fers to the plant’s pre­val­ence in the ar­e­a), part­ly as a tri­bute to Van­gel­is (a mas­sive in­flu­ence on both Chris and me – why else do you think we both use so much CS-80?), and part­ly as a tri­bute to Chris him­self.

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    2. Ὀνειροπολεῖς βῐαίᾱν αὔξησῐν (5:41-10:36) [DR13]

       composers:	Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022 Aaron Freed, 2024-08-09 to 2024-10-07
       interpolating:	“The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” (Risk of Rain 2, 2019-03-28) “They Might as Well Be Dead” (Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01) “Mois­ture De­fi­cit” (Risk of Rain, 2013-09-04) “Once in a Lul­la­by” (Survivors of the Void, 2022-03-01)
       bağlama, bongos:	Petros Anagnostoupoulos
       guitar, keyboard, vocals:	Chris Christodoulou
       oboe, English horn:	Christos Tsogias-Razakov
       violin, vocals:	Kalliopi Mitropoulou

       This tran­si­tion is jar­ring, and I’m not ev­en sure I want to fix it. In fact, I’m fair­ly sure I don’t. There’s a ma­jor e­mo­tion­al shift be­tween these two move­ments, and I think it’s even more ef­fec­tive if it’s sud­den.

       I’ve experimented before with Frank Zappa’s concept of xenochrony (from ξένος [xénos; strange, alien] and χρόνος [khrónos; time]; thus, strange time), wherein a musical part is extracted outside its original context in one song and placed in another (which Zappa claimed was the only way to achieve certain rhythmic effects). Good examples include Eternal’s extended “Flippant” and “Fat Man” remixes and the Marathon/Risk of Rain 2 mash-up I mentioned in my commentary for movement α of this very track. But I think this is the furthest I’ve taken the concept to date.

       From the very start, I’d intended this move­ment to mash up mul­ti­ple Risk of Rain songs. In ad­di­tion to fur­ther “Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” stems (i.e., the vocals), I worked in some stems from “They Might as Well Be Dead” that, after I pitch-shif­ted them from D mi­nor to C mi­nor and slowed them from 100 to 88 bpm, dove­tailed beau­ti­ful­ly with the for­mer song’s syn­the­si­zer so­lo, just according to keikaku⁽⁸⁾. (“The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” is ac­tu­al­ly 110 bpm, but it’s also 5/4, while “They Might as Well Be Dead” is 4/4; thus, lin­ing the meas­ures up re­qui­res mak­ing the lat­ter’s tem­po 80% of the for­mer’s.)

       But while I’d ex­pec­ted the two songs to fit to­geth­er, I was ab­so­lute­ly flab­ber­gas­ted at how well they fit. I’d ex­pec­ted to have to fi­nag­le the har­mo­ny of the “They Might as Well Be Dead” segments at least a lit­tle bit, but my in­stincts had been dead-on: ev­e­ry­thing fit per­fect­ly as soon as I lined it up. It’s not that the chord pro­gres­sions are i­den­ti­cal – far from it, in fact. The me­lo­dy of Chris’ solo in the back half of “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” simp­ly hap­pens to work per­fect­ly over the chords from the back half of “They Might as Well Be Dead”.

       Since that worked so well, I also added stems from “Mois­ture De­fi­cit” and “Once in a Lul­la­by”. “Moisture Deficit” was ob­vi­ous: “They Might as Well Be Dead” is a re­make of it. Most of “Once in a Lul­la­by”’s stems al­so fit flawlessly, but Kal­li­o­pi Mit­ro­pou­lou’s harmonies are slightly out of phase with the other songs’ chord progressions during the climax – which I like, since the sensation of something being out of place feels appropriate for a game wherein alien slavers attack Renaissance Italy.

       This movement contains some complex polyrhythms: “The Raindrop That Fell to the Sky” is in 5/8, while “They Might as Well Be Dead” is in 4/4. “Moisture Deficit” switches between 7/4, 4/4, and 5/4, while “Once in a Lullaby” uses 4/2 and 7/4, according to the PDF included with the stems. This gives us 5:4, 7:4, and 7:5 polyrhythms in places, though 5:4 is the most prominent by far. Most of this song predominantly feels like 5/8, but once the drums from “They Might as Well Be Dead” dominate the mix (starting at 9:51), it predominantly feels like 4/4 – in short, a classic example of time signature modulation (although, for my own convenience, I notated everything as 5/8 within Logic).

       This ti­tle (again, if I haven’t made any er­rors) is Ancient Greek (ro­man­ized: “On­ei­ro­po­le­ís tḗn bi­aí­ān aux­í­sin”) for “You Dream of Vi­ol­ent Growth”, Risk of Rain 2’s description of Sun­dered Grove (the stage that plays “They Might as Well Be Dead”) when it is selected as the next stage at the Lu­nar Seer.

       I’m not totally sure I’ve gotten the grammar right – in fact, I’ve already changed it twice. I first incorrectly used the uncontracted form of the verb (-έεις instead of -εῖς); then I used «Ὀνειροπολεῖς τῆς βῐαίᾱς αὐξήσεος» (Oneiropoleís tês biaíās aúxēseos), which uses the Koine genitive case of the noun phrase ἡ βῐαίᾱ αὔξησις (hē biaíā aúxesis, the violent growth), since genitive is the equivalent of an English possessive (i.e., of violent growth. I specifically used Koine declensions because New Testament Greek’s dialect felt thematically appropriate for the level with the most memorable cathedral ever constructed in the Marathon engine.) However, I later confirmed that ὀνειροπολέω (oneiropoléo), when used to mean I dream of, governs the accusative case (the equivalent of an English direct object). Finally, I yeeted the definite article; it’s apparently unnecessary, and I wanted to match the original text more closely.

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    3. Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη (15:31-10:36) [DR15]

       composers:	Aaron Freed, 2024-09-14 to 2024-10-07 Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022
       interpolating:	Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral motif, written by Trent Reznor
       lyrical source:	Τρισάγιον (author and date unknown)

       Title Commentary
       Title Commentary

       Ancient Greek for “A Love Supreme” (romanized: Mía agápē anṓtate), named for John Coltrane’s masterpiece. I hasten to note that ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη, often denoted in English as agape or agāpē, refers to a very specific kind of love (the Greeks had numerous words for love ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love⟩ that don’t map precisely to English words), which lexicographers Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott define as “unconditional love, charity; the love of God for person and of person for God”. This is, beyond question, the kind of love that Coltrane meant, and it was the only appropriate term to use.

    4. Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς (15:31-19:37) [DR15]

       composers:	Aaron Freed, 2024-09-14 to 2024-10-07 Chris Christodoulou, 2013-2022
       interpolating:	“Diēs Īrae” (ca. 13th century, author unknown)
       lyrical source:	“Diēs Īrae” (ca. 13th century, author unknown)

       Title Commentary
       Title Commentary

       Ancient Greek for “Day of Wrath” (romanized: “Hēmérā orgês”), which in turn is English for “Diēs Īrae”, whence the lyrics of this section. Tempus Irae Redux had been sorely lacking in quotations of its namesake; it didn’t even have any ominous Latin chanting. This movement is my attempt to rectify that.

       Musical Commentary on «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς»

       «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» (conceived as a single movement, but split up when they broke the nine-minute mark) share most of the previous movement’s two primary chord progressions, but they go in a very different direction. Although they return to the 5/8 that most of the previous two movements were using, it often feels like 6/8 here. I must confess that I don’t fully understand why.

       In any case, I took a Minimalist ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_music⟩ approach here, reasoning that a mixture of rhythmic complexity and harmonic repetition would serve to create a sense that the surrounding structure had already exited for centuries and will undoubtedly stand for centuries if not millennia more. This also creates a steadily building tension, and when the chord sequence finally switches, the resolution is unbelievable.

       This is turning into one of my favorite pieces of music I’ve ever (mostly) composed – and incidentally, one of my early listeners gave me undoubtedly one of the most flattering comparisons I’ve ever received on a work of music: she compared it to the work of Quincy Jones, who produced literally, not figuratively, the first album I ever fell in love with, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982-11-29) – it couldn’t be more correct to say I’m a lifelong fan of his work. (Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon (1973-03-01), to no one’s surprise ever, was the second such album.)

       And that isn’t even all; another early listener compared «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» to the work of Tim Follin (known for going way harder than he has to, e.g., Solstice [just wait for it…] and Pictionary) and «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» to Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy soundtracks, which, among game soundtracks, are probably the single biggest influence on how I compose for games.

       A third listener, meanwhile, compared it to Magma, one of my favorite bands ever. Magma’s work feels so alien that I never expected to receive comparisons to it, but now that they’ve made one, I totally hear the semblance to “Köhntarkösz” in particular. If a single track earns me four comparisons as varied and flattering as those, I can only figure I must be doing something right.

       In the service of not concealing influences, I’ll also point out that both these movements are heavily influenced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s works and Maurice Ravel’s Boléro. Anyone who’s ever heard either won’t need me to explain how, but for the poor souls that haven’t: it’s the crescendo.

       Other influences on «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη»: Ravi Shankar, George Harrison, Miles Davis’ fusion period (especially 1969-07-30’s In a Silent Way and 1970-03-30’s Bitches Brew), John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Pink Floyd’s lengthy instrumentals, and the Doors (partly by osmosis, since it derives its chords from “They Might as Well Be Dead”, which is also influenced by the Doors – it switches repeatedly between D minor and D major, a technique they used throughout tracks like “The End”. I transposed it down to C, but its first half still switches repeatedly between minor and major).

       Meanwhile, «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς», even more than everything else I’ve written for this collection, is profoundly influenced by Johann Sebastian Bach, to the extent that I tried to make its harmonies indistinguishable from something Bach might’ve written. They aren’t: there are nowhere enough surprises per minute for it to be a Bach piece. Or, as Pat Metheny has put it, “compared to Bach… man, we all suck.” I’m humble enough to agree completely with him, but not so humble that I haven’t tried anyway.

       I felt it would’ve been wrong not to include a reference to the album this level (and therefore song) is named after, so at 14:29, the sitar starts playing a quote from Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. This motif is used not just in the title track but also in “Closer”, “Piggy”, and “A Warm Place” (backwards).

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       Lyrical Commentary
       Lyrical Commentary on «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη»

       I hadn’t actually planned for this section to have lyrics until I’d been working on it for almost a month. It wasn’t so much that I felt something was missing without lyrics as that the Trisagion (from Τρισάγιον, Byzantine Greek for Thrice Holy) added a mystery to the piece that felt appropriate for the atmosphere and tension I was trying to create. The fact that a traditional Catholic performance would have switched between Ancient Greek and Latin felt especially fitting.

       I took a slight historical liberty here: usually, each Greek line is followed by its Latin equivalent. I left the first three lines in that order, but I swapped their order in the final line: the pacing felt more appopriate that way. This is, of course, far from the largest historical liberty I’ve taken with this soundtrack. On the other hand, the triple recitation of the Trisagion I employed is very much in keeping with tradition.

       Beyond that, nearly everything I can think to say about “Diēs Īrae” (the lyrical source and namesake of «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς») applies equally well to the Trisagion, so for the sake of avoiding redundancies, I’ll cut this section comparatively short.

       Lyrical Commentary on «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς»

       I could probably be fairly described as almost aggressively agnostic, even ignostic (i.e., gods are too unclearly or inconsistently defined for taking a stance on their existence or lack thereof to be worthwhile). Regardless, before I even began writing «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς», I knew I wanted to end it with a choral segment with lyrics from “Diēs Īrae”, a medieval hymn of uncertain authorship (sometimes attributed to Thomas of Celano). Tempus Irae is literally named for it: its splash page ⟨nardo.bungie.org⟩ even excerpts it. (Such a ’90s thing, splash pages.) Even today, it also ranks among the most recognizable works that might’ve been sung in a Renaissance Italian cathedral; I intentionally stuck to its best-known verses for that precise reason.

       I did take some historical liberties, though. The chorus deviates from its traditional melody; still, it repeatedly quotes its famous four-note opening (just not, ironically, for the actual words “Diēs īrae”), and most of its traditional melody also appears more slowly and quietly in the background, first on rhythm guitar, then on violin. More importantly, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) codified the four-part polyphonic choral style I used here, although he had predecessors such as Guillaume Du Fay (c. 1397–1474), Josquin Lebloitte dit des Prez (c. 1450-55–1521) Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594).

       (I should also note that the level music for Eternal X 1.3’s “Run, Coward!” contains a parody of sorts of “Diēs Īrae”; I wrote its words myself (in Latin, at that), besides a few I simply kept from the original.)

       Despite my agnosticism, I also strongly believe there’s more to this universe than our feeble senses can possibly comprehend; in fact, I’ve held for decades that deities would be incomprehensible to mere humans, which intrinsically would make them all but indefinable. To be clear, though, I’m not saying all religions necessarily have it wrong: for instance, Judaism and Christianity’s frequent presentation of God as ineffable comports exactly with how I’d expect humans to perceive a divinity.

       But let’s set aside what I regard as unclearly defined to discuss some clearly established scientific facts. We have clear evidence that the brain discards sensory signals it regards as irrelevant. This occurs without our conscious involvement, and in fact, it’s a necessary survival tactic: if we perceived every signal our senses gave us, we’d be totally unable to separate signal from noise, or indeed even to function.

       But our brains are, as it happens, far from perfect at this – they rely on memory, which is an imperfect, even self-serving narrator. Memory isn’t read-only (ROM); it’s random-access (RAM), and, to extend the computer metaphor past its breaking point, each time we load a file in our memory, we overwrite our old memory with our current recollection of it. This is, to be clear, why the FBI requires agents to write down notes immediately after conducting interviews.

       This is only one of several ways we fail to perceive everything around us; as another example, our senses of smell are thousands of times worse than dogs’ (and in fact, it’s hypothesized that they’ve gotten worse precisely because our dogs have warned us when something, quite literally, smells off, making our own senses of smell superfluous to our survival). So I’m quite prepared to accept that there’s more to the universe than mere humans can perceive. Indeed, there’s scientific proof of this.

       That said, only a few things make me feel that properties of the cosmos are intrinsically inexplicable in purely materialistic ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism⟩ terms. (To clarify, I’m not referring to acquiring material goods.) One of these is Euler’s identity ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler's_identity⟩, e^iπ+1=0. Twenty-five years ago, I could’ve clearly explained exactly why it was true and why I found it so transcendently beautiful. Unfortunately, some of the requisite knowledge has faded, but my recollection of its sublime beauty remains absolutely vivid (even though, for reasons just outlined, I know my memory of events twenty-five years ago can no longer be considered reliable).

       Music is another – the main one, in fact. Occasionally, a piece of music strikes me so deeply I wonder if its inspiration came from beyond the material realm. If that matches your definition of divine inspiration, I’m not inclined to argue. (To reiterate, I don’t have any personal religious beliefs.) I’d never wondered that about any of my own music – until these movements. Everything I’ve typed out attempting to explain why, or even how, has looked foolish when I’ve read it on the screen, so I’ll leave it at that; if I’ve done what I think I’ve done here, they’ll communicate to listeners why they make me feel that way without the need for any further explanation on my part, anyway.

       Through the entire process of working on this song, I was quite conscious that I was working within an ancient tradition that many people across the globe consider to extend beyond a life-or-death matter. There’s a dimension to this tradition that makes me feel like a dabbler. A trespasser, even.

       That said, much of the world’s greatest music, from Bach’s chorales to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965-01), is explicitly religious and evokes many emotional sentiments that secular music rarely manages to bring out in me. I think, to some extent, this is because it’s religious: it conveys a sense of awe and wonder that non-believers rarely feel comfortable expressing. “Awe” is, to reiterate, exactly what I was aiming for in this piece. Standing within a cathedral, a structure that is already centuries old and that will undoubtedly outlast us and everyone we know by centuries, gives me a sense of personal insignificance next to the scope of history. It makes all our modern squabbles look petty and unimportant. Which, I hasten to add, they mostly are.

       “Diēs Īrae” also conveys several sentiments I relate to, especially within its final few lines (most notably “Huic ergō parce, Deus” and “Dōnā eis requiem”). If I didn’t fully believe this was one of my best works to date, I’d never have used “Diēs Īrae” for its words – those words carry too much significance to too many people for me to treat them lightly. Including me, for that matter: it is, in fact, one of the most beautiful Latin works I have read.

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       Lyrics
       «Μίᾰ ᾰ̓γᾰ́πη ἀνώτατη» Lyrics

       Greek	Romanized Greek	Latin	Translation
       Ἅγιος ὁ Θεός	Hágios ho Theós	Sānctus Deus	Holy God
       Ἅγιος ἰσχυρός	Hágios iskhūrós	Sānctus fortis	Holy mighty
       Ἅγιος ἀθάνατος	Hágios āthánatos	Sānctus immortālis	Holy immortal
       Ἐλέησον ἡμᾶς	Eléēson hēmâs	Miserēre nōbīs	Have mercy on us

       «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς» Lyrics

       [Note: Following Wikipedia’s example, ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dies_Irae⟩ I’ve chosen to print both a poetic translation that replicates “Diēs Īrae”’s rhyme and rhythm (i.e., formal equivalence), and a translation that aims for more literal accuracy (i.e., dynamic equivalence). While I started from Wikipedia’s versions, I’ve made numerous amendments, either for reasons of aesthetics (translating “Diēs Īrae” to any dialect newer than Early Modern English feels like a violation of the Geneva Convention) or accuracy (though, as a perfectly accurate translation is impossible, even the “more literal” translation takes a few liberties for comprehensibility’s sake – e.g., teste on line three translates literally as from the witness). The original poetic translation was by William Josiah Irons; the more literal translation is uncredited. (I can never see Irons’ translation without thinking of this hilarious parody ⟨public-domain-poetry.com/ambrose-bierce/day-of-wrath-2675⟩ by Ambrose Bierce.)

       Since all verses of “Diēs Īrae” except the last two only have three lines, and I didn’t want to stretch out syllables over multiple notes, I elected to repeat the first three stanzas’ first lines after their third. This felt like the most acceptable solution.]

       More poetic (formal equivalence)	Lyrica latīna	More literal (dynamic equivalence)
       Day of wrath and doom impending Heav'n and Earth in ashes ending David's word with Sibyl's blending Day of wrath and doom impending	Diēs īrae, diēs illa Solvet saeclum in favillā Teste Dāvīd cum Sibyllā Diēs īrae, diēs illa	Day of wrath, that day Shall dissolve the world into ashes As David and the Sibyl attestèd Day of wrath, that day
       King of Majesty tremendous Who dost free salvation send us Fount of pity, then befriend us King of Majesty tremendous	Rēx tremendae māiestātis Qui salvandōs salvās grātīs Salvā mē, fōns pietātis Rēx tremendae māiestātis	King of fearsome majesty Who freely savest the elect Save me, O fount of mercy King of fearsome majesty
       Once the damn’d have been confoundèd Doom’d to acrid flames unboundèd Call me with Thy saints surroundèd Once the damn’d have been confoundèd	Cōnfūtātis maledictīs Flammīs ācribus addictīs Vocā mē cum benedictīs Cōnfūtātis maledictīs	Once the wicked are restrain’d Damnèd to acrid flames Call me with the blessèd Once the wicked are restrain’d
       Ah! that day of tears and mourning From the dust of earth returning Man for judgement must prepare him Spare, O God, in mercy spare him	Lacrimōsa diēs illa Quā resurget ex favillā Iūdicandus homō reus Huic ergō parce, Deus	Tearful [shall be] that day When from glowing embers ariseth The guilty man to be judg’d Thus spare him, O God
       Lord, all-pitying, Jesus blest Grant them Thine eternal rest Amen	Pie Iēsū Domine Dōnā eis requiem Amen	O Holy Lord Jesus Grant them rest Amen

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12. Tempestās īrae (5:12) [DR15]

    composer: Aaron Freed, 2024-08-22 to 2024-08-24

    A fast-paced track in 13/8 – a mixture of (5+5+3)/8 and (4+4+5)/8, if you prefer subdivisions of time signatures this complex – that mostly sticks to diminished chords. It wound up a couple minutes longer than I planned it to be, mostly because it turned out far catchier than it has any right to be – every time I listened to the shorter version, I found myself wanting more of it, so I wrote more. I don’t expect to make a “subdued” version of this – I’m planning to use it for “Big Man with a Gun”, which has effectively little to no exploration left once the player clears the most intense segment of the level.

    The title, Latin for “a storm of wrath”, is naturally a pun on Tempus Irae (“time of wrath”) – related is the fact that in most Romance languages, the word for time can also mean weather. This is true in Spanish (tiempo), Italian (tempo), Portuguese (also tempo), French (temps), Romanian (timp)…

    Perhaps coincidentally, this track has something in common with this collection’s other storm-related track (besides a heavy use of diminished chords): I wrote most of it after being awakened by a nasty storm early that morning. At the time, I lived in the stormiest part of the country, so it’s not that coincidental, but I’d thought of the title a few weeks prior, and only after applying it did I notice the connection.

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13. Pende siccāre (16:00) [DR15]

    composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-08-27 to 2024-08-29
    inspired by:	Massive Attack, “Protection” (Protection, 1994-09-26: album mix, music video), by Andrew Vowles, Robert Del Naja, Grant Marshall, & Tracey Thorn The Beat­les, “I Am the Wal­rus” (Ma­gi­cal Mys­te­ry To­ur, 1967-11-24), by John Lennon & Paul McCartney; string arrangement by George Martin

    1. Tūtēla (0:00-8:00) [DR14]
    2. Impetus (8:00-16:00) [DR17]

    I don’t understand what possessed me to start writing what is effectively a Massive Attack track at 7 am, but that’s what happened. (I’ve joked before that if you look up “nocturnal music” in the dictionary, it will play you a sample of Massive Attack’s music to define the term.) “Tūtēla” is Latin for “Protection”, the name of the track that most heavily inspired this – the largest tells are probably that it’s written in a mix of B major and B minor and uses descending chord progressions throughout its entire runtime. (Tūtēlā can also mean tutelage, as one might expect; meanwhile, “Apologiīs Impetuī Immēnsō”, found in the tag comments, is Latin for “With apologies to Massive Attack”.)

    Ultimately, my arrangement isn’t nearly as sparse as Massive Attack’s; this chord progression is very jazzy, so I played that up heavily. I also threw an even heavier emphasis on the dance elements that already dominate Massive Attack’s song. However – and if you’ve listened to enough of the previous tracks or even read my commentary for them, I’m sure you’ve already predicted this – I also wrote the entire song in 5/4.

    “Tūtēla”, unsurprisingly, is the “mission finished” version of this track. For most tracks here, I wrote the more intense ”mission unfinished” version first and then stripped it down or made an acoustic arrangement of it for the “mission finished” version, but here, the contemplative mood felt appropriate for the “mission complete” track. I hadn’t planned on each loop lasting for 7:12, but that’s about the length of “Protection” (the album version, at least), so that seems appropriate somehow.

    I naturally called the metal version “Impetus”, which, beyond its English meaning, also means attack (noun, not verb) in Latin. Interestingly, despite having almost entirely different instrumentation and a very different atmosphere, I feel like it kept roughly the same mood as “Tūtēla”. I’m low-key proud of that.

    An­oth­er in­flu­ence also crept in: the Beat­les’ “I Am the Wal­rus” (Ma­gi­cal Mys­te­ry To­ur, 1967-11-24). George Mar­tin’s string ar­range­ment in­flu­enced both my chord pro­gres­sion (a sub­con­scious in­flu­ence) and my own string ar­range­ment (a similarity I con­scious­ly played up af­ter no­ti­cing it). Then ag­ain, Mas­sive At­tack ex­pli­cit­ly ac­know­ledge the Beat­les as a for­ma­tive in­flu­ence (e.g., the string ar­range­ment in “Un­fin­ished Sym­pa­thy”’s back half couldn’t be more “I Am the Wal­rus” if it tried), so this is un­doub­ted­ly a case where a ma­jor in­flu­ence on a con­scious in­flu­ence, in turn, sub­con­scious­ly in­flu­enced me.

    As a final note, writing this piece really drove home for me how context-dependent our perception of dissonance or consonance is – several of these chords would sound awful in isolation but work fine in the context of the harmonic progression. My favorite example is G♯m7(maj7), which I actually had to enter manually into Logic (Apple apparently can’t comprehend someone wanting to use both a minor 7th and a major 7th in the same chord). It sounded wrong when I listened to it in isolation, and I had to listen repeatedly to the entire progression in succession to feel satisfied that I really wanted that chord between D♯m7(11)/A and Bmaj7. (Trying to replace it with other chords confirmed this – nothing else had the emotional impact I intended.) The entire progression, numbered starting from 0, is printed below. A few notes:

    • An X means a note appears in at least one octave of the chord.
    • This is an oversimplification of the harmony within each chord – two notes that are shown a second apart here may be a seventh or ninth apart in the chord itself. Likewise, two notes that are shown a seventh apart may actually be a second apart.
    • As a result, playing these notes as written will not always sound good – some of the chords only work because of sevenths or ninths spaced above major or minor chords. However, seeing them written like this can serve as a useful tool for harmonic analysis.
    • Highlighted backgrounds correspond to the white notes of a piano. If you’re using dark mode, these will be lighter; in light mode, they’ll be darker. (Try not to think about it too hard.) If you print this page, meanwhile, the background won’t be highlighted at all, and this bullet point will thus be omitted.

    Chord Progression of “Pende siccāre”
    #	Chord	C	C♯	D	D♯	E	F	F♯	G	G♯	A	A♯	B
    0	Bmaj7				X			X				X	X
    1	Bm7			X				X			X		X
    2	D♯m7(11)/A		X		X			X		X	X	X
    3	G♯m7(maj7)				X			X	X	X			X
    4	Bmaj7				X			X				X	X
    5	A6		X			X		X			X
    6	G♯m7				X			X		X			X
    7	Gaugmaj7				X			X	X				X
    8	Bmmaj7			X				X				X	X
    9	A6(9)		X			X		X			X		X
    10	G♯m7(11)		X		X			X		X			X
    11	Gmaj7			X				X	X				X
    12	D6(9)/F♯			X		X		X			X		X
    13	E7(9)			X		X		X		X			X
    14	Gmaj7/D			X				X	X				X
    15	Amaj7(9,11,13)/C♯		X	X		X		X		X	X		X

    This is thus both one of my harmonically simpler tracks (it contains just one repeating chord progression) and one of my more harmonically complex tracks (it’s a sixteen-chord progression with several convoluted chords that deviate heavily from the key signature – which is B minor, by the way, though it was an effectively arbitrary choice, since my scales rarely conform cleanly to either B minor or B major).

    “Pende siccāre” is Latin for “Hang to Dry”, the Tempus Irae Redux level on which I plan to use this track.

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14. Cauda toxica (10:20) [DR15]

    composed by:	Aaron Freed, 2024-11-17 to 2024-11-22
    brief interpolations:	BBC Radiophonic Workshop, “Doctor Who”, by Ron Grainer & Delia Derbyshire (1963-11-23) Britney Spears, “Toxic” (In the Zone, 2003-11-15), by Cathy Dennis, Christian Karlsson, Pontus Winnberg, & Henrik Jonback
    also inspired by:	Daft Punk, “Get Lucky” (single, 2013-04-19; Random Access Memories, 2013-05-17), by Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Nile Rodgers, & Pharrell Williams Berlin, “Take My Breath Away” (Top Gun, 1986-05-15), by Giorgio Moroder & Tom Whitlock Genesis, “The Carpet Crawlers” (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1974-11-22), by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett, & Mike Rutherford

    I really wasn’t planning to write any more tracks for Tempus Irae Redux when I made the mistake of watching two videos explaining the harmony behind Britney Spears’ 2003 banger “Toxic”, one by Charles Cornell and one by 12tone. Its use of tritones and tritone substitution still sounds fresh and arresting, and I began writing what I initially intended as a simple pastiche of it. As often occurs, it metamorphosed during its creation; the result is one of my favorite tracks I’ve ever composed. There was nothing for it but to use it for my own level, “Il grande silenzio” (Italian: The Great Silence, named for Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western); it will be the second part of a medley with a rearranged version of Alexander Nakarada’s “Apex”.

    Like a few other tracks I’ve made recently, this is a 5/4 disco song. It borrows a few chords from “Toxic”’s chorus, but it inevitably wanders off into space, so the overall sound wound up somewhere between Britney and Random Access Memories-era Daft Punk. Which is not a bad place to be, come to think of it.

    Meanwhile, the synth bass is inspired by the Yamaha DX-7 bass sound in Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away”. I don’t have a DX-7, so I instead substituted the “Doctor Who Bass” preset from Cherry Audio’s GX-80 (a hybrid GX-1/CS-80). At the very end of the piece, as a nod to this, I twice quote the first three notes of the Doctor Who theme, which was composed by Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire, who remains uncredited, against the wishes of Grainer himself, who repeatedly tried to credit her as his co-composer. However, she’s only ever been credited as an arranger, and even that didn’t occur until 2013-11-23’s “The Day of the Doctor”, long after both were dead. Per Wikipedia:

    “Grainer was amazed at the resulting piece of music and when he heard it, famously asked, ‘Did I write that?’ Derbyshire modestly replied, ‘Most of it.’ However the BBC, who wanted to keep members of the [Radiophonic] Workshop anonymous, prevented Grainer from getting Derbyshire a co-composer credit and a share of the royalties.”

    As this quote implies, royalties very likely factor into this: were the BBC to credit her officially, they’d likely have to pay her estate a large royalty for so doing.

    Finally, the song’s synth arpeggiation often brings to mind the piano from Genesis’ “The Carpet Crawlers”, one of those rare songs that feels too sublime to explain in words.

    The title is a pun on a common Latin phrase, “In caudã venēnum” (meaning “poison in the tail”), and, well, “Toxic”. It means “toxic tail” or “poisonous tail”. (“In caudā toxicum” would also mean “poison in the tail”, but I felt like a terser title would be appropriate.)

    I ordered this set mostly chronologically, but this track is newer than “Īra temporis”, which I placed last because it feels more climactic and bookends Tempus Irae Redux’s Earth levels. I’m very particular about endings, so I felt comfortable letting each disc of this album deviate from chronology for its final track.

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15. Īra temporis (8:19) [DR16]

composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-08-31 to 2024-09-02
inspired by:	Radiohead, “Everything in Its Right Place”, by Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O’Brien, Phil Selway, & Thom Yorke (Kid A, 2000-10-02)
briefly interpolating:	unknown author, “Diēs Īrae” (unknown date) Alex Seropian, “Flowers in Heaven” (Marathon, 1994-12-21)

1. Ex tempore, ex locō (0:00-4:00) [DR16]
2. Nōn omnia in suā locō corrēctō erant (4:00-8:19) [DR16]

One lesson Bungie learned from the design process for Marathon (1994-12-21) was not to make the opening levels before the rest of the game: you won’t have even figured out the game’s vibe yet, much less crucial aspects like its core gameplay loop. I suspect this applies equally well to soundtracks, so naturally, Tempus Irae Redux’s first few levels were among the last I tried writing music for – I wanted a solid grasp on the style and overall vibe, and I knew that, no matter how solid my plans were, they would inevitably change. (I didn’t know when I started out, for example, that roughly half the songs I wrote for it would be in 5/4.)

Almost as soon as I began writing “Ex tempore, ex locō” (Latin for “Out of Time, Out of Place”), I knew I wanted to use it for Tempus Irae Redux’s second level (and first Earth level), “Gates of Delirium”. Its rather dreadful mood feels appropriate: alien slavers have followed you back in time to Renaissance Italy, leading to potentially disastrous results. It also feels quite mysterious, which is equally appropriate, since the reason you’ve gone back in time is to recover a series of ten manuscripts by Leonardo da Vinci.

This may not be apparent to anyone else, but this track began life inspired by Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place”. Its first three chords are quite similar, and as Charles Cornell notes, “Everything in Its Right Place” uses a grand total of four chords across its entire four-minute running time (this is another case of a Charles Cornell video inspiring me to write a song). Ultimately, however, I wound up changing the chords (and the overall vibe) substantially.

Below is one possible way (among several) to notate this track’s chord progression, numbered from 0-7. As with my similar table for “Pende siccāre”, an X denotes a note that appears in at least one octave; the highlighted backgrounds correspond to a piano’s white keys (again, they’ll be lighter in dark mode, darker in light mode, and nonexistent when printed). Bold, blue notes correspond to a pattern involving the C Locrian scale that I’ll explain below.

Chord Progression of “Īra temporis”
#	Chord	C	D♭	D	E♭	E	F	G♭	G	A♭	A	B♭	B
0	C(♭6,11)	X				X	X		X	X
1	C7(♭9,11)	X	X			X	X		X			X
2	A♭maj7(9,13)/C	X			X		X		X	X		X
3	G♭dimmaj7/C	X					X	X			X
4	B♭6sus2/C	X					X		X			X
5	A♭/C	X			X					X		X
6	Cdim7(♭9)/C	X	X		X			X			X	X
7	Cm	X				X		X				X

What’s absolutely wild to me is that half these chords are technically major, yet it sounds amazingly dark. And what key signature is it in? I believe the correct answer to this question is “Yes”. (If forced to pick, I’d say C Locrian: although the opening and closing chords aren’t diminished, the upper notes travel down the C Locrian scale, while, with one exception, its lower notes above the drone on C travel up it – this is the pattern I’ve highlighted in blue in the above table.) I used to think I didn’t understand jazz. I still don’t think I understand jazz, but clearly, I somehow learned how to write it.

At any rate, while this began life as a set of three borrowed chords from Radiohead, I quickly tweaked them and knew immediately that I was headed somewhere much different. (Though I probably don’t even need to tell you by now that I wrote this song in 5/4 – “Everything in Its Right Place” is in 10/4.) I open the track with primarily acoustic instrumentation before adding several synth arpeggiator layers, as one does. Closing the movement with the arpeggiation isolated is meant to emphasize that something is indeed out of place and time – namely, you (and the aliens that followed you).

This track is probably complete, apart from tweaks to the mix. Overall, I wanted Tempus Irae Redux to have a musical identity as distinct from Marathon’s as I was capable of crafting (while still sounding good), but I ultimately couldn’t resist throwing in a single reference to Alex Seropian’s original Marathon soundtrack. The bass flute that harmonizes with the oboe near the end quotes “Flowers in Heaven”, which is probably as close as Marathon has to a main theme (several other tracks, such as “Swirls” and “Splash (Marathon)”, use similar melodies). It feels appropriate for the sole musical reference to Marathon to appear in what’s highly likely to be the first original track in the game that most players will hear.

It occurred to me after completing a satisfactory draft of “Ex tempore, ex locō” that the chords and me­lo­dies I’d written would, with little transmogrification necessary, make a fantastic atmospheric black metal track. It also occurred to me that bookending the original Earth campaign with variants of the same song would help make the soundtrack a lot more coherent and indeed satisfactory: it’ll give players a sense of accomplishment, as though they’ve come full circle. Enter “Nōn omnia in suā locō corrēctō erant” (Latin for “Not everything was in its right place”), which will start to play once the player picks up the manuscript on “Mt. Ve­su­vi­us”. This track proved to be a massive pain to export, but I’m satisfied with the results.

“Īra temporis” is Latin for “Wrath of Time” – so, effectively, Tempus Irae (Time of Wrath) flipped on its axis. It is highly likely to be this collection’s last track: I’ve given it a strict limit of two CDs, and «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» is likely to expand still further. I’ve started writing new pieces since this one, but they’re all very early drafts, and apart from “Cauda toxica”, I’ve set them to the side while I finish Tempus Irae Redux.

A final note: As with “What About Bob?”, the closing track of my earlier album See You Starside (2023-02-04), this song’s length is an entirely deliberate tribute to Marathon’s Story page maintainer Hamish Sinclair: the eighth and nineteenth letters of the alphabet are his initials. One might say hats off, as it were.

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Appendices

The following thematically related tracks exceeded my self-imposed limit of two audio CDs for this album:

1. “Ambush in Rattlesnake Gulch (metal version)” appears in Tempus Irae Redux, but I never considered it for inclusion here on the simple basis that I didn’t originally write it: it’s a remake of a song by Brian Boyko.
2. I originally intended «La fille qui volait les astres» for this album, but I couldn’t find an appropriate place for it in Tempus Irae Redux, and I ultimately had to bump it from this album after deciding to include a later track, “Cauda toxica”, in Redux as part of the soundtrack for my level “Il grande silenzio”. I’ll instead include it on my next album, and likely also in my forthcoming game Marathon Chronicles (if I ever complete it).

1. Ambush in Rattlesnake Gulch (metal version) (ft. Brian Boyko) (8:12) [DR15]

   originally composed by:	Brian Boyko
   additional composition by:	Aaron Freed, 2023-03-16 to 2024-11-06
   lyrics excerpted from:	“Diēs Īrae” (author unknown)

   Although this song was the first song I began working on for Tempus Irae Redux, it was never in serious contention for inclusion on this album for the simple reason that I didn’t write it. I began remaking it as a one-off in tribute to Dr Devon Belcher, the creator of the level “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”, who had recently passed away. I unfortunately never got the chance to interact with Dr Belcher, but every tribute I could find to the man suggested that I’d have gotten along great with him, not least because we shared a love of heavy metal. I felt there was nothing for it but to remake the music we’d selected for his biggest level in a metal style.

   I didn’t actually have the source files for this track, so I had to remake it from scratch. While doing so, I took some liberties with some of the existing parts and wrote new ones. The most obvious changes are the drums and bass line, which have a lot more variation, particularly in the newly Latin-influenced midsection, and the new Fender Rhodes solo in the same section, not to mention the addition of the choral vocals.

   This track’s lyrics consist of «Ἡμέρᾱ ὀργῆς»’s first four stanzas repeated twice, so in the interest of brevity, I shan’t repeat them here. I’m sure I was subconsciously influenced to use lyrics from “Diēs Īrae” for this track by its introductory riff literally consisting of the Gregorian chant’s first four notes, repeated dozens of times in different keys. I’d like to claim I did that on purpose, but I only noticed the connection recently.

2. La fille qui volait les astres (9:48) [DR16]

   La fille qui volait les astres (acoustique) (0:00-4:48) [DR15]
   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-08-29 to 2024-10-11
   inspired by:	Yasunori Mitsuda, “The Girl Who Stole the Stars” (Chrono Cross, 1999-11-18; OST 1999-12-18)
   La fille qui volait les astres (électrique) (4:48-9:48) [DR17]
   composer:	Aaron Freed, 2024-10-10 to 2024-10-11

   A very early work in progress that I doubt will actually fit into Tempus Irae Redux – instead, I’ll probably use it for my unfinished scenario Marathon Chronicles and include it on my next album. I’ve been subconsciously ripping off Yasunori Mitsuda for so long I felt he was long past due an outright tribute. I named this after a horrifically underrated track from Chrono Cross. I have mixed feelings about Chrono Cross as a game and especially as a Chrono Trigger sequel⁽⁹⁾, but its OST is third only to Final Fantasy VI and Risk of Rain 2 on my “favourite game OSTs” list, and it’s a defensible pick for the greatest of all time.

   Although the main melody is pretty much written by now, I haven’t yet finished orchestrating this track, nor are all the instrument choices final; I plan to make it feel more “Renaissance” overall by adding instruments like viole da gamba and lutes. I think its atmosphere would be better served by just having it loop in-game, so I haven’t written a proper ending. Instead, it leads into the electric version, which I arranged around a month and a half after the acoustic one.

   I actually barely changed the melodies for the electric version – I used a different bass line (more for the sake of variety than necessity), and I transposed a few of the instruments either up or down an octave, but the chord progression and the main melodies are all the same. It came together rather quickly, and I’m quite pleased with it, especially for an early draft.

   The name is French for, well, “The Girl Who Stole the Stars” – again, I’m not one to be coy about my influences. (Astres apparently implies all the stars or an entire galaxy of stars; étoilles suggests a smaller number, but I prefer the former connotation.) Why French, rather than Italian or Latin? Honestly, pure aesthetics: I just preferred the French translation’s sound. 「光田さんに御免なさい」, found in the song tags, means roughly “With apologies to Mitsuda-san” (rōmaji: “Mitsuda-san ni gomen’nasai”).

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Acknowledgements

I’ve acknowledged and thanked many people above. However, I feel I owe further thanks to:

Those Without Whom

• James Hastings-Trew, director of Tempus Irae Redux, who didn’t complain even once when I mentioned that I wanted to delay its release by spending a few months writing original songs for it when it already had a perfectly serviceable soundtrack. Every aspect of working on Redux has been an unmitigated joy; I only recall us arguing once in some four years working on the project, and I can say that of few people.
• Sue Colvert and Donald Fabisiak, my teachers in classical piano performance and composition. My musical instincts would be far poorer if I hadn’t had their guidance to draw on.
• Apple Computer, East West, Cherry Audio, and Native Instruments, makers of this album’s technological foundations. If I’d possessed a DAW as powerful as Logic Pro ⟨apple.com/logic-pro⟩ or an instrument set as powerful as Composer Cloud+ ⟨soundsonline.com/composercloud⟩ back in 1997, I’d probably never have stopped composing. The GX-80 ⟨cherryaudio.com/products/gx-80⟩ more than makes up for the fact that I’ll never own the best analog synthesizer ever made. And iZotope RX ⟨izotope.com/products/rx⟩ is the best audio repair software I’ve ever used. Without these products, you’d probably at best be listening to bleeps and bloops – if I’d even felt compelled to write this music at all.

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Artistic Influences

A complete list of my influences would double the length of this document, but I feel I must single out a few, either because I didn’t directly mention them above, or because their influence on me was more profound than those mentions suggested. With the caveat that not being mentioned here doesn’t preclude you from being a profound influence on me (my memory is notoriously spotty, and I’m trying to keep this from being mere name-dropping), I wish to mention in particular:

• Johann Sebastian Bach. Biologist Lewis Thomas, when asked what humanity should send to outer space in Voyager, said, “The complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach… but that would be boasting.” He’s not wrong. Bach was incomprehensibly prolific, and I’ve never heard or performed a bad work by him (and I’ve performed dozens or even hundreds: for years, I used his four-part chorales as sight-reading practice).

All Western music of the past two centuries exists in Bach’s shadow, due either to his harmonic influence or to trying to escape his harmonic influence. I’ve studied and performed works by too many composers to recount, and Bach still surprises me more than all the others. His four-part harmonies are the pinnacle of the form: not merely do they sound genuinely divine together, but each part also sounds fantastic in isolation. The Well-Tempered Clavier remains a foundation of modern piano pedagogy because it has never been bettered. His masterful use of counterpoint was so revolutionary that, largely due to his influence, eighteenth-century counterpoint barely resembles sixteenth-century counterpoint. (I chose not to emulate sixteenth-century musical idioms partly because writing music without Bach’s harmonic guidance breaks my brain.) He uses chords, progressions, and other harmonic ideas that don’t reappear again in music for centuries.

I could go on, but this quote from Pat Metheny sums up what I’d have said in far fewer words: “Compared to Bach… man, we all suck.” Bach will forever remain my profoundest musical influence.
• Brian Eno. No one has aided my understanding of creativity more than Eno did with the Oblique Strategies ⟨stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html⟩; only Igor Stravinsky even comes close (see above). That alone would earn Eno the second spot on this list, but his incomparable work as both self-proclaimed “non-musician” and producer has also profoundly influenced me, in ways I’m only starting to comprehend. (The Talking Heads album and song I mention below? Eno produced and cowrote them.) And how many other living people can claim to have invented entire genres of music ⟨en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_music⟩? One of the few living musicians I’d, without question, label a genius.
• Pink Floyd. Hon­est­ly, they’re pro­bab­ly why I be­gan wri­ting and per­for­ming music. Richard Wright’s soundscapes and David Gilmour’s lyrical guitar playing haunt my dreams, and what­ever one might say about him now, Roger Waters’ lyr­ics pro­bab­ly did as much to for­mu­late my world­view as any­thing I read in school.
• The Beatles. All Western popular music from the past 60 years owes something to their work, whether it’s “trying to emulate the Beatles” or it’s “trying desperately not to sound like the Beatles”. Their impact was lightning in a bottle: most groups would kill for one composer as skilled as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, or George Harrison, and the Beatles had three; Ringo Starr was a drummer of immense technical skill, musicality, and restraint; George Martin was perhaps the greatest producer in the history of pop music; and they came at the exact right time in the zeitgeist to revolutionize the world’s consciousness.

  (Full disclosure: I’ve technically performed with Ringo; as a child, I sang the chorus of “Yellow Submarine” at an All-Starr Band concert⁽¹⁰⁾, which probably gives me a closer musical association with the Beatles than anyone who has even a remote chance of reading this except Marty O’Donnell, who still undoubtedly has better things to read than my rambling.)

• Nobuo Uematsu. If the eleven-minute pastiche of his work didn’t clue you in, I’ll just add that I’m not sure I can overstate how much I learned about writing for games simply by obsessively listening to his music. I listened to tons of game music when I was younger purely because I spent so long playing games, but Ue­mat­su convinced me game music was an artform worthy of consideration on its own merits, and had I not studied his soundtracks for so long, I’d never have felt confident that I knew enough to start writing my own.
• Marvin Gaye. The sound of What’s Going On, especially its title track and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)”, has lived rent-free in my head since I first heard them as a child; if any of these bass lines are even a tenth as smooth as the one James Jamerson laid down for the title track, I’ll be immensely pleased. Kurt Von­ne­gut, a major literary and philosophical influence on me, wrote in Breakfast of Champions, “All music is [sacred].” I still think of that quote often; whenever it does, only Bach precedes Gaye as proof.
• John Coltrane. The next example on my list after Gaye, although by rights, he should probably come first: I have yet to hear music more spiritually stirring than A Love Supreme. In the history of jazz, perhaps only his mentor Miles Davis (an equally large influence on me) outdid him for stylistic diversity, but even that’s debatable: Giant Steps set a new standard for technicality in jazz compositions, Ascension redefined the entire concept of harmony in jazz, and countless metal acts would sell their souls for an album as heavy as The Olatunji Concert. Even 500 years from now, we’ll probably still be trying to catch up to Trane.
• Magma. I originally wrote, “I doubt anyone will hear their influence in my music,” but my doubts were quickly disproved when a friend wrote of «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ», “Zeuhl go brr.” Zeuhl, for the uninitiated, is what Magma called their music – it means celestial in their invented language, Kobaïan. They sing mostly in Kobaïan, and their entire corpus is a space opera set after a future ecological and spiritual catastrophe. Their sound is so esoteric I’ve only ever heard two other acts successfully mimic it: Kōenji Hyakkei and Chris Christodoulou (“Tlālōcān”, a tribute to “De Futura” especially). Magma mastered the art of creating utterly alien-sounding music that’s nonetheless immensely catchy, likely aided by their impeccable rhythmic sense (bandleader and main songwriter Christian Vander is also their drummer; it’s surely no coincidence that Christodoulou and Kōenji Hyakkei’s leader Tatsuya Yoshida are also drummers). They are, in turn, among the few artists I’ve heard to approach Coltrane’s spirituality – little surprise, since he’s their biggest influence. (Bandcamp ⟨seventhrecordsmagma.bandcamp.com⟩)

• Frank Zappa. The 20th century’s back half had few finer composers or sharper minds, musical or otherwise. Not all his jokes have aged well, but when he got serious, as on “Trouble Every Day”, he wrote songs that are more relevant now than they were when he wrote them. That’s not even getting into the musical complexity and sophistication of his best compositions, and let’s not forget that with Absolutely Free, he basically invented progressive rock. The only twentieth-century musicians I can compare to him in terms of both musical influence and compositional genius are probably Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Beatles, but none of those acts worked in nearly as many genres as Zappa did. And somehow he did them all well.

  Beyond his music itself, Zappa’s concept of xenochrony, the act of extracting a musical part from one work and placing it within another, has profoundly influenced me; «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ», especially its movement «Ὀνειροπολεῖς βῐαίᾱν αὔξησῐν», is my most in-depth use of the technique to date. «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» is without question my favourite track I’ve ever worked on, and while I might’ve had the idea to combine parts from disparate tracks even if Zappa hadn’t put it into my head, I don’t know if I’d have had as solid a sense of how to do it if he hadn’t shown the way all those years ago.

  For those puzzled by his cult following, I have an odd recommendation: Läther (1996-09-24). Yes, it’s a four-LP set that was only officially released posthumously, and it contains a lot of material that was released on other albums. However, it’s the presentation Zappa actually intended to give this material, and I’d argue it showcases his stylistic diversity and brilliant compositional skills better than any other work in his discography. It certainly changed me from a casual fan into a devotee.

• Shīna Ringo. One of those completely bonkers, off-the-wall, indescribable musicians. The correct answer to “What genre of music does Shīna Ringo perform?” is “Yes.” Kalk Zāmen Kuri no Hana genuinely feels like it came out of nowhere and couldn’t possibly have been made by a mere human; I’ve joked before that its final track “Sōuretsu” proves she’s secretly a Time Lord. The equally exquisite orchestral pop album Heisei Fūzoku followed, and on Sanmon Gossip, no two songs sound remotely alike: she performs probably every major genre except reggae, country, bluegrass, or metal without any of it feeling misplaced. I doubt her influence is at all obvious in my own music, but I strive to emulate her adventurousness at all times. If at least this aspect of her music shines through in mine to at least some extent, I’ll be satisfied.
• Joanna Newsom. An immensely skilled songwriter, arranger, and lyricist, and probably at least 25% of why I love the harp. I could write an entire essay just about “Colleen”’s symbolism, I could get lost in “Divers”’ sound, and I could listen to Ys hundreds more times without uncovering everything its arrangements have to teach me. Her discography is one of the few I could be persuaded to rank as flawless. (Bandcamp ⟨joannanewsom.bandcamp.com⟩)
• Steve Albini. Given that my workflow is entirely digital, it may seem strange that I list one of the last four decades’ most noted proponents of analog technology as a profound influence. But I try to mimic analog sound as much as I can: I limit my use of dynamic range compression to instruments like drums and bass guitar, keep the overall dynamic range high, favor recreations of analog synthesizers like the CS-80, and deplore modern technologies like pitch correction. Even more importantly, Albini was a tireless advocate for the artists he worked for, continued to grow as a person into his twilight years, and kept working literally until the day he died. An irreplaceable giant in the music industry; his death will hurt for a long time.
• Talking Heads. I only realized earlier this year that my heavy use (some would say overuse) of arpeggiation has been an attempt to mimic “Once in a Lifetime”. Remain in Light remains one of the most perfect albums I’ve had the pleasure of hearing, and I feel like I learn something new from it every time I return to it.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor. My use (several would say overuse) of crescendi is due above all else to my love of their music, which has brought me more comfort in dark times than I can put into words – ironically, without any at all on their part. Alongside Uematsu and one other artist mentioned below, they’re most responsible for convincing me my music wouldn’t need words to speak directly to listeners, and they’re tied for my favorite rock act of all time. (Bandcamp ⟨godspeedyoublackemperor.bandcamp.com⟩)
• Genesis. Phil Collins is why I use (many would say overuse) gated reverb on the drums of every song I ever make; Tony Banks’ skill at modulation is a constant reminder that I haven’t mastered every aspect of composition, but his keyboard-centric approach to songwriting has inspired me at every turn since I was a wee lad. The whole band, better than any other act I’ve ever heard, manages the impossible feat of balancing sophistication and catchiness, and, contrary to popular misconception, did so throughout its entire career – the progressive rock sacred cow Selling England by the Pound includes the pop songs “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)” and “More Fool Me”, and their “pop sellout” album Invisible Touch includes the progressive rock songs “Domino” and “The Brazilian”. The second part of the tie.

• Death­spell O­me­ga. Sure­ly my least ob­vi­ous (and like­ly most con­tro­ver­si­al) pro­found mu­si­cal in­flu­ence: try as I might to mi­mic their com­po­si­tion­al style, it’s in­im­it­ab­le, or at least re­qui­res far bet­ter grasp of mu­sic the­o­ry than mine – but I’ve ne­ver heard an­y­one else con­vin­cing­ly im­it­ate it, ei­ther, so I’m con­vinced it’s the for­mer. In any case, songs like “Tem­pes­tās īr­ae” and “Nōn om­ni­a in su­a lo­cō cor­rēc­tō er­ant”, at least in part, rep­re­sent my attempts to emulate their peculiar mix of dissonance and melody.

  I’ve re­viewed their work at great length ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/deathspellomega.html⟩, partly because I think it’s of­ten mis­in­ter­pre­ted: I read it not as prescription (i.e., “this is how things should be”) but diagnosis (i.e., “this is how things actually are”). In this, I find they resemble another widely misunderstood writer, the Marquis de Sade, who follows only the novelist and antifascist philosopher Georges Bataille on their list of literary inspirations. (Not only have they cited Bataille as such for over two decades, but 2005’s “Diabolus absconditus” and 2007’s Fas – ite, maledicti, in ignem aeternum quote him at length.) And as long as we’re discussing Bataille’s influence, The Fur­na­ces of Pa­lin­ge­ne­si­a is one of the most el­o­quent mu­si­cal ca­ta­logues I’ve encountered of modern political follies (rivalled only by Ash­en­spi­re’s Hos­tile Ar­chi­tec­ture, which I’ve also re­viewed at length ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/hostilearchitecture.html⟩).

  Their biggest influence on this album, however, is likely being at least part­ly res­pon­si­ble for my use (most would say ov­er­use) of La­tin, as whi­le Ma­ra­thon’s use of La­tin was my strong­est impetus to learn it, theirs was a not in­sig­ni­fi­cant sec­on­da­ry mo­ti­va­tor. (Please don’t hold this against them.) The fi­nal part of the tie.

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Both of the Above

• Chris Christodoulou. When I started writing game music, I figured there was no way I’d mix or master my own material: if even Mick Gordon doesn’t do it, then who was I to attempt it? But I kept making rough mixes anyway. Learning that Chris mixes and masters his own music – which invariably sounds fantastic, with more layers than a wedding cake – was revelatory: it led me to believe maybe it was possible after all.

  Chris’ stem releases (which I desperately wish more artists would do) have been a Rosetta stone of sorts for me: not merely have they provided material for two fantastic mixes I’ve now done incorporating his tracks – «Καταιβᾰτή ἕλῐξ» interpolates “The Rain­drop That Fell to the Sky” (which I’ve also reviewed ⟨aaronfreed.github.io/reviews/theraindropthatfelltothesky.html⟩), “They Might as Well Be Dead”, “Moisture De­fi­cit”, and “Once in a Lul­la­by” – but it’s shown me his mixes are even denser than they sound and served as a how-to guide.

  (For what it’s worth, I received the following comments on “Ambiēns aquātica” earlier this year: “Man, your mixing is so good; it feels like such a textured track.” I won’t attribute this purely to Chris’ influence, especially since the song is explicitly a David Wise tribute, but I doubt I’d have spent so long trying to get the perfect mix if Chris hadn’t convinced me it was possible.)

  I can’t hope to express how personally meaningful it is to me that Chris personally encouraged me to continue working with his material – the encouragement of such an influential and accomplished composer means more than I can possibly hope to express, but I am eternally grateful for it. (Bandcamp ⟨chrischristodoulou.bandcamp.com⟩)

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…but Not Least…

Thank you for reading (and, I hope, listening). I hope you find something you enjoy here!

—Aaron Freed
—Sarasota/Tallahassee, FL
—2023-01-13 to 2024-10-07