Fresh out of a short but intense Dream Theater phase (a band which I no longer have any particular interest in) in 2004, I set out to write my most challenging piece of music yet up until that point. What started out as a collection of unrelated ideas strewn about my hard drive turned into a 12-headed monster that eventually reared its ugly head, complete with an allusion to the popular ragtime piece “The Entertainer” (scary!). I’m still fond of some of the ideas in this piece but I laid the track out haphazardly, and as a result it sounds like a showcase of riffs and has no noticeable direction — it picks up rather early in and never lets up, for the next seven minutes or so, going from riff to riff, all largely in the key of (Drop) D.
I tried numerous times since I wrote it to find a proper place for it. It was a MIDI file, and then a “tracked” tune with Garageband instruments, and finally I tried to make it a chiptune. I also tried to fit it onto one of my many attempts at reproducing my first album (The Chronicles of Jammage the Jam Mage, which I still haven’t released yet and will talk about more later on). Three years or so ago I thought it would be cool to take this song that has so many ideas in it, and split it into a couple of tracks, an EP called “The Labyrinth of the Skulltaker”. As of now I have no idea what I’ll do with it. I may try to whittle it down into something more presentable. Though the thought of doing an EP of heavy, instrument based music is still very appealing to me.
In the meantime, here’s the song in question, in all of its questionable glory!
MP3: 
MP3: 
Vault: Marathon
Marathon is a track I wrote in 2007 but was never really sure it was finished. It sat on my hard drive for about a year and then I made a few cosmetic changes and gave it to Pterodactyl Squad for a compilation. The whole introduction and pad sound was heavily influenced by late 70s/ early 80s horror soundtracks such as “Solamente Nero” (1978), composed by Stelvio Cipriani and performed by the Italian group Goblin. I wrote and produced the track in Reason, which I’ve always found lends itself well to writing mechanical sounding music. Reason also has some nice effects that you can automate to do cool things, like the bitcrushed swell-out around 03:30.
There’s also some glitchy drum elements, though those are less prominent. Around this time I was exploring Squarepusher a bit, so I could probably make a connection between the two. The melody was originally vibraphone, but I switched it out with a pulse lead which I think works out better in this case.