Hello again!
I thought I’d take a moment to talk about some of the ideas behind each track on the Dante 1981 Paradiso album, for those who enjoy reading the liner notes.
With Purgatorio last year, I made a concerted effort to write songs based directly on the text, often quoting from it. This time around, I took a looser approach, working faster and selecting specific sounds I enjoyed and then jamming and experimenting with them until I came up with an instrumental soundscape that seemed to capture some element of each section of Dante’s heaven, at least if you use your imagination. A great deal of the synths are played by hand instead of programmed directly, introducing subtle variations and a more human sound. A couple tracks near the end feature live instrumental work from my family and melodies lifted from Bach.
1 - Moon
We start out with the most “spacey” and perhaps man-made sounding of the tracks, featuring a lot of analog bleeps. It’s more Apollo 11 than medieval theology, but oh well! I limited myself to just one synth so quite literally everything you hear is from Arturia’s emulation of the 1971 ARP 2600. I was inspired to make a piece centered around a random-trigger arpeggio after listening to some gorgeous music from Moon Kyoo, a Korean deep house musician.
2 - Mercury
Mercury is quicksilver, so things get faster here with a straight-ahead synthwave instrumental. Everything you hear comes from the modern Pigments synth. I admit to hacking this one out on the keyboard after listening to The Midnight’s Change Your Heart or Die on repeat for several days in a row.
3 - Venus
Love can be dreamy… and confusing. This sleepy piece centers on a couple of alternating chords that are never quite the same due to manual timing and complex delay interactions in Arturia’s Yamaha CS-80 emulation. Something more concrete begins to take shape later on with a key change and the introduction of the great Vangelis Blade Runner horn patch.
4 - Sun
Brightest of all (before Dante’s eyes are bathed in light), we pick up the pace again with another straight synthwave track. Honestly, this tune probably turned out the best of everything on here, as a pure genre piece. You could throw this one on a playlist with some TimeCop1983 or FM-84 and I think it would fit right in. This one features all sounds from the Moog Modular synth.
5 - 21 Martyrs on Red Sands (Mars)
The only planet track with an alternate name, this contemplative piece is named in honor of the 21 Coptic Christians executed by ISIS in 2015. I hope it comes across as sad, but also hopeful. The sound at the end is supposed to be their spirits ascending to heaven, but the idea comes from a heart-breaking beautiful guitar line in Pierre Bensusan’s homage to the tragically late Michael Hedges. I think I might like this one the most.
6 - Jupiter
Taking a much lighter turn (like Holst did), this planet’s track is based on the synth that bears it’s name, the 1981 Roland Jupiter 8. Many permutations of a simple melody that sounds like something from an early Japanese RPG are accompanied by a vast host of percussion loops, mixed and matched with a gritty bass. This one is just kind of fun!
7 - Saturn
The sound design for this track came from an accident while working on mixing Simple Christmas Brass! I was using Eventide’s Split EQ to try to tame some of the harshness of the trumpet attacks, and found that with some extreme adjustments, it produced an otherworldly shimmering sound based on the brass instrument overtones alone. I sampled the sound and turned it into a pad to use as the basis of this track. Halfway through, I attempted to channel Miles Davis with a harmon mute trumpet solo. A lot of what I end up playing is based on the opening lines of Davis’s 1966 recording of the tune Circles.
8 - Spinning Stars
As Dante enters the heaven of the fixed stars, things start to spin quickly! So up goes the tempo to 172 BPM and we have a jungle/drum-n-bass track with some breakbeats! I’m a sucker for some UK liquid drum and bass. I must have been listening to a lot of that back in October. I specifically like how this one (to me at least) overcomes ear fatigue by recording all the tonal parts (chords, melody, and bass) live so they never repeat in quite the same way throughout. Oh, and the (possibly) gratuitous house vocal samples came from Splice.
9 - Primum Mobile
What you hear on this piece (and the final one too) is clearly not something I am capable of writing! It’s part of the prelude from Bach’s cello suite No. 6. It “winds” up and accelerates dramatically to symbolize the crystalline heaven moving everything below it. All the notes you hear again come from a CS-80. A “mobile” could also be a toy found above a baby’s crib, so I imagine God stopping for a moment to wind it up and keep creation sustained. If you think a cooing baby in space is a bit odd… there is some precedent for it as something very similar showed up in Robert Miles’s misunderstood 1997 album 23am, a personal favorite of mine despite having some really weak sections.
10 - Safe at Last
What does music sound like in heaven the closer you get to God? Well, I guess it sounds like J.S. Bach! Soli deo gloria! Electronic and synthetic sounds, as rich and sonorous as they can be, give way to image-bearing hands and breath and orchestral instruments. Over the top of more swirling CS-80 pads is my oldest son Seth playing the euphonium, my daughter Natalie playing the clarinet, and my wife Erin playing the flute! The tune is from Bach’s 1713 aria Sheep May Safely Graze. We fade out in a wash of blackhole reverb and your brief allegorical journey through space and/or the heavenly realm is complete.
So there you have it. Thanks to everyone for your support!
-Matt