I wrote the bulk of the Reality Jockey album in February during the RPM Challenge. Since then, I’ve been integrating choice tracks I composed for my Kaleidoscope project over the past 12 months. As it stands, I’ve got 9 songs with vocals, and 3 instrumentals built using music theory I developed based on the math in nature (specifically the Golden Ratio and Platonic Solids).
At first I was concerned the album would be cluttered, a mish-mosh of pop songs and strange instrumentals. The more I work on the tracks, I see everything fits together perfectly. I ended up trimming two of the three math/nature tracks for time so they would better serve as short interludes between the pop tracks. The instrumental ‘Gansu Station’ (named after the Chinese wind farm) was left at its original length of 5:29 which was necessary to retain the relationship between the ratios I was expressing.
There is something different about Reality Jockey than my previous albums. I’m spending hours and hours making sure each song is mixed to perfection. I’m realizing that in the past, I’d hurry to finish a song and what I’d be left with was a ‘good enough’ mix. This time I’m meticulously going over every part of each song to make sure the levels, EQ, and other effects are, well, perfect.
I’ve got 9 wav files in my ‘totally finished’ folder. I still have to come up with lyrics for a song (music is finished) that may very well end up being the title track. I also need to flesh out the song Clothes of the Devil, which we just began recording last week. I hope to finish the whole album before the end of July. It will probably come in around 45 minutes in length which is a little shorter than I expected, but Reality Jockey has taken on a life of its own and if it wants to be 45 minutes, then that’s what’s meant to be. Good stuff, people. Good stuff.
