This collection collects my musical works from August 2024 to January 2025 that aren’t part of my previous album, Compositions 2023-2024. By necessity, this makes it something of a musical hodgepodge. I wrote several of these tracks for specific projects; for a few others, it’s still too early to tell what, if anything, I’ll use them for.
Several of these are still sketches - for a few months, I put most of my musical effort into finishing up the pieces I wrote for Tempus Irae Redux, so those are among the most developed tracks here, but throughout that time, I occasionally got ideas I felt I had to write down that didn’t feel like they’d have fit Tempus Irae Redux at all.
I wrote several other songs for Endless Sky, some of which are equally if not even more developed; furthermore, I poured my heart and soul into a few additional pieces («Οἶκος κεκλεισμένων θῠρῐ́δων, ᾰ̓κρόπολῐς σῑγῆς», I’m looking at you), owing in large part to the titular disasters.
This album is free to listen to or download online, and I’ve made it available in both audio CD image format and individual track format. Nonetheless, please ask before using its material for your own projects – I’ll probably grant most noncommercial uses, but I’d like to know who’s using it and why. (I’m also open to commercial uses if offered fair compensation.)
The front cover is an image of the Crab Nebula produced by the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, the European Space Agency, and Arizona State University’s J. Hester and A. Loll, using the Hubble Telescope, and released on 2005-12-01. The release page contains much more information about the nebula itself, how the image was produced, and what its colors represent.
The Crab Nebula’s existence has been recorded for almost a millennium; it is now approximately 11 light-years in width. It is the remnant of a violent supernova explosion. However, life as we know it simply couldn’t exist without supernovae; the elements necessary to constitute it formed in their explosions.
I wanted this album’s artwork to continue my previous album’s space theme, since I wrote many of their songs for the same game and mostly composed them within a few months of each other. As soon as I saw this image of the Crab Nebula, I knew I’d found my cover. It’s gorgeous, and supernovae tie in perfectly with my title’s message: disasters may present opportunities.
An alternate composite of the front cover’s Crab Nebula photograph, also released on 2005-12-01. The sources credited for the front cover also contributed to this image, as did the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, the University of Minnesota’s R. Gehrz, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
(I rotated the source image 180° in both covers to make the tracklist cover up less of the supernova in this one.)
(front cover: Crab Nebula) |
(back cover: Crab Nebula (alt)) |
«La fille qui volait les astres» (9:48) [DR16]
French: “The Girl Who Stole the Stars”
French: “The Girl Who Stole the Stars (acoustic)” |
|
| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-08-29 to 2024-10-11 |
| inspired by: | Yasunori Mitsuda, “” (Chrono Cross, 1999-11-18; OST 1999-12-18) |
French: “The Girl Who Stole the Stars (electric)” |
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| composer: | Aaron Freed, 2024-10-10 to 2024-10-11 |
An early work in progress that I’ll probably use for my unfinished scenario Marathon Chronicles. 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 , 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”).
«Σῠ́γχορδαί Κρόνου» (ft. Saturn) (2:16) [DR11]
Attic Greek: “Saturn’s Chords”
Romanized: “Súnchordaí Krónou”
So called because one of my friends who uses the moniker Saturn wrote the first few chords. I wrote a few more chords and the arrangement. It’s still an early work in progress (thus its relatively short length).
“Trēs unius paris perfectī in vītā” (5:00) [DR16]
Latin: “Three of a Perfect Pair in the Life”
Inspired by King Crimson’s “Three of a Perfect Pair” and the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”; I started writing it the morning after seeing the group Beat in concert and still having the former track in my head. I’m not sure I’m sold on the progression towards the end of the track yet but haven’t decided what to do with it instead.
“Sclopētum ostentātum caput ūniversī” (2:18) [DR12]
Latin: “The Gun Pointed at the Head of the Universe”
Interpolating:
A work in progress which I’m putting together for Eternal – it’ll be used as the second half of the level music for “Echoes of Eden”, after Nicholas Singer’s arrangement of “Chomber / A Walk in the Woods”. The track it’s named after will be interpolated later in this arrangement.
«Χαῖρε Μᾰρῐ́ᾱ» (3:46) [DR17]
Attic Greek: “Avē̆ Marīa” (Latin: “Hail Mary”)
Romanized: “Khaîre Maríā”
Vaguely inspired by Ukrainian/Russian composer Igor Yakovlevich Krutoy’s (Cyrillic: Игорь Яковлевич Крутой) “Avē̆ Marīa”, which he wrote for the virtuosic Kazakh singer Dimash Qudaibergen (Cyrillic: Димаш Құдайберген). The overall chord progression is ubiquitous, but I specifically borrowed Krutoy’s upwards modulation. As a nod to this, I titled my composition the Greek equivalent of the same phrase.
Despite its title, Krutoy’s composition has no lyrics and is intended as a hymn for everyone; Krutoy, who is Jewish, wrote it without words at the request of Qudaibergen, who is Muslim. Krutoy in turn drew inspiration from Vladimir Fyodorovich Vavilov’s (Cyrillic: Влади́мир Фёдорович Вави́лов) composition of the same title (ca. 1970). Vavilov released his “Avē̆ Marīa” anonymously due to the Soviet Union’s prohibition on religious music; it is frequently misattributed to Giulio Caccini as a result.
“Blood on the Sequencer” (8:19) [DR13]
A 5/4 disco track with a vaguely mysterious-sounding chord progression. No idea why I gave it this name; it was just the only title I could think of when I saved it. It feels vaguely watery, so if I end up using this for Endless Sky, I may end up using it for Successor space. I’m pretty pleased with this one’s vibe.
“Cursor sīcārum” (4:10) [DR11]
Latin: literally “Runner of Daggers”
An early work-in-progress tribute to Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack that I’ll probably end up using for Endless Sky.
(See also .)
“Lamento latrōnis” (3:16) [DR12]
Latin: “The Mercenary’s Lament”
This 6/8 track was intended to be another CS-80-heavy track – and it still is, but it unexpectedly turned into a folk song while I was writing it. I decided not to abandon the CS-80-heavy instrumentation, though, and it somehow still works. I may expand this track slightly, but I’m already pretty happy with it – it’s got a pretty melody that feels like it could have existed for hundreds of years, and its arrangement’s simplicity really works to its favor in a lot of ways.
Lamento (lament) and latro (mercenary or highwayman) are, by some etymologies, cognates to each other, hence the song title. This track appears on Tempus Irae Redux’ level “The Revealing Science of God”.
“Lurkers in the Deep” (6:24) [DR12]
An attempt at writing a dark ambient/old-school industrial piece, featuring extraordinarily heavy use of CS-80 voices; in fact, apart from the bass drop (which is actually sampled from the game Risk of Rain 2), the TR-808, and the Hans Zimmer-style brass stab, everything in the track is CS-80 (though I bitcrushed some of it to add some additional distortion). It’s used in the level “Big Man with a Gun”. Thanks to hypersleep (Apotheosis X, Where Monsters Are in Dreams, etc.) for some mixing help with this one.
It’s probably a stretch to say this track has a time signature, but to the extent that it does, I’d count it as 2/4.
“Dēsīderāta” (2:44) [DR11]
Latin: “Things Desired”
A blatant pastiche of Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” written for the level “This Is the First Day”, which uses “Wish”’s lyrics on its overhead map and is named after its first line. It came together very quickly. The in-game mix won’t use the guitar solo – it may be an OST-only thing, or I may yeet it to a completely different track. (I like the solo; I just don’t think it fits this track at all.)
This the only Tempus Irae Redux song I’ve written that exclusively uses 4/4 (unless you choose to count “Lurkers in the Deep” as 4/4), and I expect it to stay that way.
“Melōdia hōrae ūndecimae” (3:00) [DR12]
Latin: “Melody of the Eleventh Hour”
“Mārtiī hōrae ūndecimae” (3:00) [DR14]
Latin: “March of the Eleventh Hour”
Two tracks with related melodic and harmonic elements. I created the first as a candidate for the repository levels in Tempus Irae Redux, and the second as a candidate for the level “Polygonum opus” (which it will in fact be used for). To be honest, I wasn’t sure “Mārtiī hōrae ūndecimae” had the vibe we needed for the latter level, but James Hastings-Trew and Chris Borowiec convinced me to continue working on it, and I’m glad they did – I’m becoming quite satisfied with it. It’s probably not finished yet, though; in particular, the mix needs some work.
“Fīliī Bombayānī” (7:20) [DR11]
Latin: “Children of Bombay”
First off, allow me to state the obvious: I took this track’s bass lick from Deep Purple’s “Child in Time” (Deep Purple in Rock, 1970-06-05). What’s less known is that they themselves took it from It’s a Beautiful Day’s song “Bombay Calling” (It’s a Beautiful Day, 1969-06). (In turn, It’s a Beautiful Day reworked Deep Purple’s “Wring That Neck” [The Book of Taliesyn, 1968-10] into “Don and Dewey” on their second album, Marrying Maiden [1970-06].) This track’s title, naturally, alludes to both “Child in Time” and “Bombay Calling” (hence my use of the archaic “Bombay” instead of its current form “Mumbai”).
For a song that’s effectively an extended vamp on two chords, this turned out surprisingly dynamic. It probably helps that I used a good variety of instrumentation, and that several of these instruments (harpsichord, pipe organ, viola da gamba, dulcimer) rarely if ever show up in popular music.
In-game, I wasn’t planning to play this song’s dramatic ending until the player reaches the final area with the Juggernaut, but at this rate, I’m not sure I’m going to get around to that. In any case, I included a few minutes of the dramatic ending for the OST mix. We plan to use this track in the level “Towel Boy”, in which it will loop seamlessly.
“Lavā, ēlue, repete” (14:15) [DR14]
Latin: “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”
A sludgy doom metal track in tribute to Dr Devon Belcher (1967-2020), creator of the level “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”, whose taste tended toward doom metal. A couple of its riffs are heavily inspired by Candlemass’ “A Sorcerer’s Pledge”, and another by the same band’s “Solitude”. (Also, bearing in mind that every metal riff is really just a rewritten Tony Iommi riff, Black Sabbath is inevitably a huge influence on this track; a chord progression used in its intro is also influenced by Metallica’s “Fade to Black”, largely as an in-joke on the similarity between its intro and that of “A Sorcerer’s Pledge”; and the drums in the first 4/4 section after the intro are influenced by Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks”.)
The intro is meant for the level “Epicus Doomicus Metallicus”, a cathedral level that serves as a sort of intro to “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”; the remainder was meant to be used on “Lather, Rinse, Repeat”. This is still a work in progress; I expect the finished version to last over fifteen minutes.
The choral section’s soprano melody (but not its alto, tenor, or bass parts) and its lyrics are from “Diēs Īrae” (Latin: “Day of Wrath”), a medieval hymn of unclear authorship (though traditionally, it was attributed to Thomas of Celano). I already included the lyrics in my previous album’s commentary, so to save space, I won’t reprint them here. (Note that this song does not include the final stanza of those lyrics.)
Unfortunately, I suffered a major breakdown while writing this track (a mix of factors such as extreme stress and inconveniently timed medication refill trouble led me to decompensate), so as a result, it may be one of the last tracks I complete on this album: it was one of my favorite tracks on the album, but its surrounding context renders me unable even to listen to it right now, so I probably won’t go back to it for a while.
“Malizia premeditata” (10:00) [DR12]
Italian: “Malice Aforethought”
A dark ambient track I made for the level “…evil so singularly personified…”, in the same vein as “Lurkers in the Deep”, but even more chaotic. To the extent that this song has a time signature, it’s in 7/4… sort of. The skittering TR-808 pattern that fades in and out throughout most of the song is the clearest hint at this, but even there, I engaged in some substantial misdirection to make it even more disorienting – the second bar of each four-bar loop skips half a beat, and the tom fill in the fourth bar adds it back. (It’s actually easier to count as a bar of 7/4, a bar of 13/8, a bar of 7/4, and a bar of 15/8.)
“Above Cloud City” (5:00) [DR12]
Of course, in the scene everyone remembers, Luke was hanging below Cloud City, but this doesn’t have that kind of vibe, does it?
This is a fairly simple track, and it’s a rare case of me settling on a 4/4 time signature. When I started writing it, I didn’t know what I was going to use it for, where I was going with it, why I found this CS-80 synth drone voice so compelling, or why I felt the need to stick this specific kind of electronic beat over it. I still don’t have answers to a couple of those questions. I also don’t know what it is about the TR-808’s sound that makes its drum loops so effective, but I’m glad I have it at my disposal.
Owing to various other commitments, I wrote this track’s melody around a month after I wrote its backing – I wrote its melody after «Πλέοντες ἐν τῷ αἰθέρῐ»’s, if that’s any indication. I find it to be weirdly hypnotic, and I think it might be a fit for Endless Sky’s Paradise Planets.
(See also .)
“Terminī initiaque” (3:24) [DR15]
Latin: “Endings and Beginnings”
A piece written for “La fine di innocenza”, so named because it is really, for real, the final song I wrote for Tempus Irae Redux. In a sense (excuse the pun), it is thus an ending; it is also a beginning, since I will shortly be able to devote attention to other endeavors. It’s also an opportunity to reflect over what I’ve learned from the project, what I’ve done well, what I’d do differently if I had the chance to do things over. I’ve written over an hour of music just in the last month, of which over fifty minutes were for Tempus Irae Redux, and I’m happy with it, especially given the pace at which I wrote it.
For some reason, I feel compelled to mention that I’ve written these words while listening to the end of the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East performance of “Whipping Post”, and I feel an unexpected sense of serenity from Duane Allman’s guitar and Gregg Allman’s vocals. I don’t think I’ve reached that level of transcendence in my music yet, but I feel I’ve done pretty well, all things told.
«Κοιμητήρῐον» (Ka’het attack) (12:00) [DR12]
Attic Greek: “Graveyard”
Romanized: “Koimētḗrion”
A nightmarish dark ambient piece written as a prototype for the mood of Endless Sky’s Graveyard. I envision the underlying synth drone (which I exported by itself as a bonus track; see “” below) playing throughout as the player explores the area; the percussive elements in the album version, including the TR-808 pattern and the synth stabs, would appear in rough proportion to the Ka’het’s attacks on the player.
My fellow composer Talashar compared this to the works of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and called it “actually upsetting” and “brilliant”, so I think I may have succeeded in evoking the atmosphere I wanted. (It may be relevant to mention that I wrote this during one of my most hellish weeks in years.)
I was going to shorten the drone for the in-game version, but the more I listen to it, the more I feel it derives much of its power from its slow, subtle evolution. The drone elements getting slowly but continually higher-pitched actually makes the song feel like an ascension towards hell, which is an extremely strange feeling to get from a piece of music, but one that feels appropriate for a perilous region of a space game. I don’t think the effect would be so strong if I shortened the length of time it takes to happen.
I plan to write an entire album of dark ambient pieces. This track will definitely appear on it.
(See also .)
“Adronal” (10:30) [DR11]
Given how well «Κοιμητήρῐον» turned out, I quickly decided to start composing more tracks for the aforementioned dark ambient album. This one remains in its early stages, but it’s showing promise. I may or may not use this one for Endless Sky – right now, it’s tonally fairly similar to its predecessor, but I’m sure I can do several things to distinguish it more. I’m vaguely planning to use this for Predecessor space in Endless Sky; very likely, I’ll overlay a warped version of “Blood on the Sequencer” (or whatever we end up using for Successor space) over parts of it as well.
(See also .)
Attic Greek: “House of Closed Windows, Castle of Silence”
Romanized: “Oîkos kekleisménōn thŭrĭ́dōn, ăkrópolĭs sīgês”
Vaguely inspired by:
Japanese: Yoshitaka Hirota, “House of Closed Windows”
Official English title: “Castle of a Silence”Rōmaji: Hirota Yoshitaka, “Toji rareta mado no yakata”
Japanese: Nobuo Uematsu, “Anxious Heart” (Final Fantasy VII)
Rōmaji: Uematsu Nobuo, “Fuan na kokoro” (Fainaru Fantajī Sebun)
(John Lennon/Paul McCartney; string arrangement by George Martin)
Channeling my gloomy mood into music, as one does. A brilliant, heartbreaking Yoshitaka Hirota track for Sacnoth’s 2001 alternate history/Lovecraftian horror-themed RPG Shadow Hearts inspired this track’s harmonic direction, so its name is an Attic Greek translation of Hirota’s track’s Japanese and English titles, which, perhaps surprisingly, mean different things. (In modern Greek, it’d be «Σπίτι κλεισμένων παραθύρων, κάστρο σιγής», romanized as “Spíti kleisménon parathýron, kástro sigís”.)
I took some additional inspiration from Nobuo Uematsu’s masterful Final Fantasy VII track “Anxious Heart” for the arrangement – likewise, though I’m sure this goes without saying, the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” (a strong match for this song’s overall mood, if I do say so myself).
This remains a work in progress, though I’m getting increasingly close to the buildup I envisioned. It’s based on a 42-measure chord loop, incidentally; I just wish I knew the question to the answer “42”.
«Πλέοντες ἐν τῷ αἰθέρῐ» (6:24) [DR14]
Attic Greek: “Floating in the Aether”
Romanized: “Pléontes en tôi aithérĭ”
Another electronic piece along the veins of “Above Cloud City”. I’m quite pleased with how its overall atmosphere has taken shape (its title refers to the feeling I get from its opening), and, if I do say so myself, its beat goes hard. (I’m self-admittedly fascinated with dance music in time signatures other than 4/4 or 3/4 – 7/4, in this case.)
I’m not entirely sure what it is about the Roland TR-808 that makes it feel so effortless to create great beats, but I’m inclined to rate its overall lo-fi feeling as a major point in its favor. In my opinion, a drum machine should sound like a drum machine, and there has arguably never been a drum machine that sounded more like a drum machine than the TR-808 (except maybe the CR-78).
Latin: “The Final Frontier”
Attic Greek: “Spaceflight”
Romanized: “Ptīsis en diástēmătĭ”
Attic Greek: “Republic Navy”
Romanized: “Nautĭkón polīteíās”
Attic Greek: “Decisive Battle”
Romanized: “Krísimi mắkhē”
Written as a proof-of-concept for a (beware of spoilers) I’m developing for , an open-source spiritual successor to Ambrosia Software’s beloved Macintosh space exploration franchise Escape Velocity. As such, several of its major traits – its heavy use of CS-80, the synth drone underpinning the entire track, the layers of arpeggiation underpinning the second half of the piece, the simple but memorable melody, the blatant inspiration by Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack – are emblematic of traits I intend the entire soundtrack to have.
This track’s first iteration track took me no more than eighty minutes to write, and I wasn’t actually planning to write a title theme for my proof-of-concept, but I think I may have accidentally written a title theme for my proof-of-concept. I’ll undoubtedly tweak the arrangement further (though it’s well along the way to what I envisioned, too), but the basic melody sounds exactly how I wanted it to.
I may retitle this track to mean “Endless Sky”. In Latin, the sense of boundless would be “Aethēr īnfīnītus”; the sense of timeless would be “Aethēr aeternus”. However, I may also rename it to Greek due to Vangelis’ strong influence on it. With the sense of boundless, this would be «Ᾰ̓́πειρος αἰθήρ» (“Ápeiros aithḗr”) in Attic Greek and «Άπειρος αιθήρ» (romanized: “Ápeiros aithír”) in modern Greek. For timeless, we’d use «Αἰώνιος αἰθήρ» (“Aiṓnios aithḗr”) in Attic and «Αιώνιος αιθήρ» (“Aiónios aithír”) in modern. (In Ancient Greek, αἰθήρ also refers specifically to the upper air, as opposed to Ἔρεβος (Érebos), the lower or dirtier air. For the sky as a whole, we’d use οὐρᾰνός (ouranós), whence the name of the deity and thus the planet.)
(See also .)
chord progression shamelessly stolen from:
The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” (Beggars Banquet, 1968-12-06)
(Mick Jagger/Keith Richards)
Created as a demonstration of time signature modulation for a . This track shifts through the following repeating pattern:
| # | BPM | Meter | Chords | Key | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 120 | 5/4 | E-D-A-E | E Mixolydian | 0:00 | - | 0:10 | 1:02.5 | - | 1:12.5 | 2:05 | - | 2:15 | 3:07.5 | - | 3:17.5 |
| 4 | 96 | 4/4 | E-D-A-E | E Mixolydian | 0:10 | - | 0:20 | 1:12.5 | - | 1:22.5 | 2:15 | - | 2:25 | 3:17.5 | - | 3:27.5 |
| 4 | 72 | 3/4 | E-D-A-E | E Mixolydian | 0:20 | - | 0:30 | 1:22.5 | - | 1:32.5 | 2:25 | - | 2:35 | 3:27.5 | - | 3:37.5 |
| 5 | 48 | 2/4 | E-D-A-E-E | E Mixolydian | 0:30 | - | 0:42.5 | 1:32.5 | - | 1:45 | 2:35 | - | 2:47.5 | 3:37.5 | - | 3:50 |
| 4 | 168 | 7/4 | B-B-E-E | E major | 0:42.5 | - | 0:52.5 | 1:45 | - | 1:55 | 2:47.5 | - | 2:57.5 | 3:50 | - | 4:00 |
| 4 | 144 | 6/4 | B-B-E-E | E major | 0:52.5 | - | 1:02.5 | 1:55 | - | 2:05 | 2:57.5 | - | 3:07.5 | 4:00 | - | 4:10 |
Those numbers may look arbitrary, but the key point behind time signature modulation is that the ratio of the tempo to the time signature’s numerator stays constant on either side of the modulation. Thus, 168/7 = 144/6 = 120/5 = 96/4 = 72/3 = 48/2 = 24. As a result, throughout the song, no matter the tempo or the time signature, the number of measures per minute remains constant at 24, or, put another way, a measure's duration is constant at 2.5 seconds.
This is the sort of thing I could only imagine working in a DAW (or at least in a studio). Time signature modulations this complex are almost impossible for humans to pull off in a live setting (and I’d like to be able to talk to the ones who can) – even using a click track probably wouldn’t help much, since you’d have to be able to keep track of both the current tempo and the upcoming one.
As this is more an academic exercise than an actual song, I shamelessly stole the chord progression of the last song I’d listened to at the time, the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”, which felt like an especially salient commentary on human nature at the time.
Not actually a song; as its name implies, it’s a demonstration of polyrhythms. I created it for . It features the following polyrhythms:
| Start | End | Ratio | Start | End | Ratio | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | 0:16 | 3:2 | 1:36 | 1:52 | 7:2 | |
| 0:16 | 0:32 | 4:3 | 1:52 | 2:08 | 7:3 | |
| 0:32 | 0:48 | 5:2 | 2:08 | 2:24 | 7:4 | |
| 0:48 | 1:04 | 5:3 | 2:24 | 2:40 | 7:5 | |
| 1:04 | 1:20 | 5:4 | 2:40 | 2:56 | 7:6 | |
| 1:20 | 1:36 | 6:5 | 2:56 | 3:12 | 7:6:5:4:3:2 |
In all segments except the last, the kick drum plays the higher number, the snare plays the lower one, and the hi-hat plays their multiple, serving as a metronome of sorts. All except the last segment are also, at least theoretically, playable by a single human being on a drum kit. In the final case, the kick plays 7, the snare plays 6, the hi-hat plays 5, the floor tom plays 4, the middle tom plays 3, and the high tom plays 2.
Attic Greek: “Graveyard”
Romanized: “Koimētḗrion”
See for commentary on this track.
As noted above, Mūsica ex tempore malōrum is Latin for Music from a Time of Disasters. I’ll primarily leave interpreting this phrase as an exercise for the reader –
However, I do feel obligated to mention some trivia. On my discography page, I call this album “an anthology of loose ends”, a take-off on legendary mathcore group Botch’s final EP, An Anthology of Dead Ends. Their final album, meanwhile, is called We Are the Romans. Knowing this might make the Latin title seem a bit less random.
In English, the phrase ex tempore means carried out without preparation or impromptu. This is not an unjustifiable reading of its Latin etymon: ex may mean immediately after, and tempus may mean opportunity. I didn’t literally improvise any of this album, but I did write most of it unusually quickly: I wrote some seventy minutes of it in December 2024 alone. Thus, reading the title as Music Immediately After the Opportunity of the Disasters isn’t precisely wrong, and its suggestion that disasters can present opportunities strikes me as entirely correct (Rebecca Solnit’s magisterial A Paradise Built in Hell presents several case studies). This all pleases me.
I’d tentatively named this album Mūsica ex tempore cladis, which means almost the same thing (cladis is genitive singular, so it translates as of the disaster rather than of disasters). However, I decided to pluralize disaster midway through an absolutely rotten January 2025, and as long as I was going through the trouble of renaming the album, I also decided I liked several of and its alliteration.
Failure is a necessary step to personal growth, but our culture doesn’t recognize that; in fact, we’re outright terrified of failure. This is one of the . By embracing the lessons our failures present us, we become more effective in our endeavors, and we become better human beings.
Whenever we start a new creative discipline, we have to practice before we become any good at it. The old saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” drives me (figuratively) nuts for that exact reason: that’s also a correct definition of practice.
In all my creative endeavors, from game design to writing to music to programming, I had to fail before I succeeded. This is true of everyone else, too. Skilled musicians have to practice. Many of them undoubtedly have innate natural talent, too, but untrained talent is still untrained. Practice – years, even decades of practice – is what gives you skill.
My 2025 has had a disastrous start. This album name is, in part, a way to remind everyone, not least of all myself, to search for the opportunities that disasters and failures present us.
—Aaron Freed
Tallahassee, FL
August 2024—January 2025
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I like Chrono Cross overall, but among all works I’ve ever experienced across all media, I suspect the only work whose ending has infuriated me more is La La Land (2016, dir. Damien Chazelle) – though to be fair to Chrono Cross, and to explain my complaints in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, La La Land’s ending is flawed due to a writing misstep I still find incomprehensible (my stock comparison is to a mystery that ends immediately after introducing the killer, without providing a single hint as to their motives or even their personality traits), while Chrono Cross’ is flawed because its devs literally ran out of time to finish it and had to relegate several planned plot twists to an end-of-game infodump. I still contend that the ending is a major reason La La Land infamously lost the 89th Academy Award for Best Picture to Moonlight (2016, dir. Barry Jenkins). To this day, even though I greatly enjoyed the rest of La La Land, I’ve been unable to sit through it again or even listen to its soundtrack – I found its ending’s aftertaste that bitter. (Full disclosure: I went to school and worked on several plays with one of Moonlight’s producers, and incidentally, it’s my favourite film of all time – though not for that reason.) My fix to La La Land’s ending is quite simple: cut the time-skip epilogue. The questions it resolves didn’t need to be resolved, and it raises vastly more questions than it answers – which would’ve been fine for a second-act scene of a film like this, but not for its final scene: we’re not exactly talking about Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan) here. Unfortunately, my brain won’t allow me to simply pretend the epilogue doesn’t exist – as I alluded to in the previous paragraph, I’ve tried. My fix to Chrono Cross’ ending is potentially much more complicated, but the simplest plausible solution can be succinctly summarized as “Hire back the original devs and give them the resources they need to tell the story they wanted to tell in the first place” (which would be enormously expensive by “1999 game dev” standards, but is a drop in the bucket by “2024 game dev” standards). Despite my complaints with its ending, though, I still think Chrono Cross is a great game, and I’m sure I could replay it without issue – it’s just not the 10/10 classic Chrono Trigger is. Cross definitely feels tonally quite different, too, which is one reason I have complaints about it as a Chrono Trigger sequel. The other reason is delving into spoiler territory, but again, in as spoiler-free a manner as I can manage, it has to do with how Cross handles Trigger’s characters – or doesn’t, as the case may be. |
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OK, fine, it’s actually Cherry Audio’s GX-80. What do I look like, Uncle Moneybags over here?
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| I’ve already left enough clues about my personal beliefs elsewhere for people to formulate reasonable hypotheses regarding some of the titular disasters, anyway, though I’ll note that my title also encompasses several disasters of a more personal nature. | |
| Malōrum’s other meanings include of adversities, of miseries, of misfortunes, of diseases, of wrongdoings, of evils, and even of bad words. To be clear, I don’t consider all of these to present opportunities. | |
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Off the top of my head, the others include:
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I’m aware of a single exception to most of what I’ve written here, who comes not from the arts but from the sciences, though his discipline still relates directly to music in the end: Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), the greatest mathematician you’ve never heard of (unless you’ve seen The Man Who Knew Infinity [2015; directed by Matthew Brown; starring Dev Patel, Jeremy Irons, Stephen Fry, Devika Bhise, & Toby Jones]). Over the course of his tragically short life (cut short by an illness at age 32), Ramanujan independently derived some 3,900 mathematical results, including proofs, equations, identities, and theorems, many of which were completely novel. He solved problems previously considered insoluble and opened entire new lines of work within mathematics. Of his thousands of results, the vast majority have been proved correct; his notebooks continue to be analyzed over a century after his death, as what had been taken as passing comments have turned out to contain profound insights on number theory. What makes Ramanujan completely unique in mathematical history is that, until his correspondence with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics. German-British psychiatrist Hans Eysenck attributed this in part to Ramanujan’s work being “too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways” to interest most other mathematicians of his day. As a result, Ramanujan was very nearly entirely self-taught, and he arrived at his proofs through processes of intuition that even he found himself hard-pressed to explain. When Hardy received a nine-page mathematical paper from Ramanujan, Hardy initially suspected it to be a possible fraud, since it came from an unknown mathematician and contained completely unknown formulae that “seemed scarcely possible to believe”. Hardy wrote that some of Ramanujan’s proofs “defeated me completely; I had never seen anything in the least like them before,” but by the time he read the final page of Ramanujan’s paper, Hardy concluded that they “must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.” Recognizing Ramanujan’s genius, Hardy arranged for his travel to Cambridge. Owing to his family’s initial trepidation over the offer, Ramanujan did not accept it for over a year, but once he did, he finally received formal training in areas of mathematics where he’d previously been entirely self-taught. This was not always an easy process, since their personalities and beliefs were in some ways polar opposites: Hardy was an atheist who believed deeply in mathematical rigor and proofs, while Ramanujan was a quietly religious Hindu for whom intuition and insight were major inspirations. To both their credit, Hardy recognized the need to balance rigor and inspiration, and while neither of them found this easy, the formal training made Ramanujan, if possible, even more productive. According to mathematician Paul Erdős (whom you perhaps have heard of, if only because he shares a number with Kevin Bacon), Hardy rated several mathematicians by pure talent: he ranked himself 25, David Hilbert 80, and Ramanujan 100. Hardy also wrote that he had “never met [Ramanujan’s] equal, and [could] compare him only with [Leonhard] Euler or [Carl Gustav Jacob] Jacobi.” (Remember the name “Euler” if you don’t already recognize it; it will come up again.) Hardy also wrote: His insight into formulae was quite amazing, and altogether beyond anything I have met with in any European mathematician. It is perhaps useless to speculate as to his history had he been introduced to modern ideas and methods at sixteen instead of at twenty-six. It is not extravagant to suppose that he might have become the greatest mathematician of his time. What he actually did is wonderful enough… when the researches which his work has suggested have been completed, it will probably seem a good deal more wonderful than it does to-day. This is entirely correct, except that a strong case could be made that Ramanujan was the greatest mathematician of his time; modern mathematicians and physicists have begun to recognize his genius and to rank him as one of the greatest ever. Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson (whom you probably know from his sphere) wrote, “We’re always hoping. That’s one reason I always read letters that come in from obscure places and are written in an illegible scrawl. I always hope it might be from another Ramanujan.” Exceptions such as Ramanujan don’t even come about once in a generation, though. There has arguably never been another comparable mathematician. But as great as his work was, his increase in productivity at Cambridge suggests that he could’ve produced even greater and larger quantities of work had he been formally trained earlier. Moreover, biographers suspect that we may have lost large quantities of Ramanujan’s work due to the mere fact that he initially could not afford paper in sufficient quantities to preserve all of his work permanently, so he may have worked out intermediate results on slate. This is all well and good, I hear you ask, but how does any of this relate to music? My response is simple:  Both pitch and rhythm are fundamentally mathematical. Harmony is founded on superparticular ratios: the higher pitch in an octave has twice the frequency of the lower one (i.e., A4 is 440 Hz and A3 is 220 Hz – a 2:1 ratio). The Pythagoreans are the first known people to have established the link between geometric ratios and harmony, some twenty-five centuries ago. They also established that a perfect fifth has a 3:2 ratio, a perfect fourth a 4:3 ratio, a major third a 5:4 ratio, and a minor third a 6:5 ratio. The 12-tone equal temperament (12-TET) used to tune nearly every modern Western instrument provides a slight twist on the Pythagorean understanding of harmony’s relationship to ratios, since it only duplicates the Pythagorean octave exactly, but harmony and mathematics remain inextricably linked: every note in 12-TET has a pitch of exactly 2(¹/₁₂) (≈1.05946309436) that of the next-lowest note. (As it happens, 12-TET also provides near-exact approximations of the Pythagoreans’ perfect fifth and perfect fourth and acceptable approximations of their major third and minor third.) Harmony and ratios are inextricable. That sums up half of it, but what about rhythm? Well, you only need look at a score of music to see numbers: tempi are expressed in numbers, time signatures are expressed as ratios, and the durations of notes and rests are expressed in symbols that serve as shorthands for those ratios. Measures are divided into durations of equal length; notes represent those durations. As I said, music has always been applied mathematics – which is why early training in one directly improves students’ ability at the other. But is the converse also true – is mathematics musical? As it happens, it can be. We encountered Leonhard Euler above. One of Euler’s most revered contributions to mathematics is his eponymous identity: This equation links the two most important transcendental numbers (e and π), the imaginary unit (i), and the integers 0 and 1, which are respectively fundamental to additive and multiplicative identities. It also includes three fundamental arithmetic operations once each: addition, multiplication, and exponentiation. It has an elegance and simplicity to it that can feel positively transcendent to those who understand it. I used to be able to explain exactly why Euler’s identity was true, but I no longer recall all the mathematics behind it. I do clearly recall grasping its significance when I was a calculus student (which, at the risk of dating myself, was some twenty-five years ago, so I can’t fully trust in the accuracy of the memory). I only remember a few comparable moments of serenity and awe in my entire life. It is one of the few works of art in human history that I would compare to the works of Bach and Shakespeare; it is a condensed symphony. |