I produced industrial black metal and "blackened speedcore" before - often in collaboration with vocalists, such as Nullentropy, Countess M, or - gasp - my own voice.
reception was pretty swell, some people lamented the use of "guitar synths" instead of real guitars, though.
but i don't think this was the main problem. to me, the songs felt more like "speedcore" with a black metal fusion to it. like digital, sampler based stuff, that just happened to have elements of black metal too.
of course, a few other ibm bands are like that, and it can still be kickin' sounds.
but i yearned for a more organic, gritty, natural, chaotic sound, instead of clean digitalism.
i also noted that a lot of industrial black metal bands have a very straight-in-your-face, frantic, direct sound. closer to "blackened death", in my opinion, with lots of technical and speed changes in very short intervals.
while black metal, as a genre, has many songs that are monotonous, droning, that "rest" on a loop for a long while.
for example in depressive or ambient bm.
i wanted to put this into my own tracks, too.
part 2
so, on to the production of the album.
its "backbone" are the first three tracks. these tracks have a runtime of over 33 minutes together. so they are "one half" of the entire album.
i wanted to keep these songs very, very simple and straight-forward, but also epic and complex at the same time.
each one has just a few chord progressions as the initial seed, but they undergo a lot of modulations, transformations, mutations, and metamorphoses as the tracks go on.
there was also another idea i had: i wanted to break the genre limits of music, including those of black metal a bit.
remember what i said about the complaint of using "guitar synths"?
and indeed, digital / synthesized guitars have always been the great "sacrilege" in the world of metal.
so i desired to defy and play with this convention a bit.
first, I didn't use pre-build guitar synth apps, i tried to synthesize my own "guitar" sound using a modular software synth.
second, I think I came close to an "organic" guitar sound at times, but i deliberately used sounds that feel very synthetic, artificial, non-human, too. and often this switched within the track.
and i wanted to counterpoint the aggression of blackened speedcore with extremely calm, ambient, almost "heavenly" parts.
so there are many choirs and chants - the "emerald chants".
part 3
apart from these 3 main tracks, there are also 4 more tracks.
these are closer to "traditional" speedcore, hardcore, techno... but also with a bm feel.
and more than that, i tried to break up any regular structure with these tracks.
to introduce them to chaos.
now, the album was finished.
i still had to choose a name for it. i decided on "Emerald Chants in the Hall of Moebius".
part 4
so what are the "emerald chants"?
it's a "play" on words, or rather the attempt to hide various concealed meanings in this... title.
in french, "chants" sounds similar to the word "champs", which means fields, even in the context of science and physics (such as magnetic fields)...
hall, in german language, is a kind of echo, delay, reverb... and the heavy use of "hall" (reverb) effects is a defining thing for black metal, and also for my own electronic music production...
moebius is a kind of twisted loop - it made me think of a temporal loop. and i'm low entropy, and "entropy" is a concept of time in physics ("entropy is the arrow of time"). but entropy is a kind of strange, twisted concept in time. so i see a relation there.
and moebius was also the pen name of a french artist, mostly known for his comics and hollywood collabs, for example on the first, aborted movie adaption of "dune".
a lot of his work was published in a comic mag called "heavy metal", but despite this name, his art often *feels* very black metal.
and virtually every "space-themed" black metal cover art (or any space metal cover, really) feels like it was inspired by moebius.
part 5
so we have emerald screams, forces, fields in the delays and echoes inside the bizarre loops and twists of strange times and the mind of a weird artist... and any other variation of what i said above.
and this is what this album is really about.
https://doomcorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/emerald-chants-in-the-hall-of-moebius
