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Seamless: https://youtu.be/D01sWTF2V0g?si=WSC6W5r7viCEAVym
All music and lyrics by Johnathan “Joe Nathan” Maki; my favorite songs are Prelude to the Great Awakening, A Life Worth Taking, Cedars, Exordium, and Where Accursed Shadows Remain.
It’s black metal/prog rock, with elements of symphonic, melodic death, post, folk, doom, and ambiance. This is a demo for the first album which I hope to release by the end of 2025, with everything re-recorded; actual drums and bass; a better vocalist, production, and mix. I spent 115 hours working on this demo between November 16, 2023, and March 1, 2024. I started writing the album in July 2018, with the first recordings dating back to December 2020. I reworked lots of old programmed synths/virtual instruments, but all guitars and most vocals were rerecorded, albeit mostly first/second takes, so lots of rough, unedited performances, also doubled/quadrupled. Everything else is programmed.
The guitars were recorded on a PRS Mark Holcomb SVN and Strandberg Boden 8. I used Neural DSP’s Archetype Petrucci, Nolly, and Plini amp simulators, mainly medium-gain tones and split coil, which made me play more aggressively. Cedars is in Drop-A (7-string); A Life Worth Taking, A River of Retrograde, and Where Accursed Shadows Remain are mostly E-standard (6-string) with a Drop-E (8-string) part or two; the other six songs are in E-standard. This is me 7 years into playing.
All the vocals were recorded with a Shure SM7B into a Universal Audio Volt476P, except for The Cosmic Forest into a Focusrite 2i2. I’m not a good vocalist, but I’ve been improving my vocals over the last 4 years. You can hear the progression throughout the demos I uploaded, very rough then, but now I sound way better and more confident.
The music is seamless like one long song but was written as four. I split it into ten tracks because A Tribute to Sacrifice sounds like three different songs, and I can imagine listening to the five Enigma of the Great Beyond movements on their own. There’s an earlier version of the album that was exactly 69:00, now it’s 43:20. At ten tracks, the average length is 4:20, which is still a funny number, so it was fate lol.
It’s a very dark concept album. It’s my take on an H. P. Lovecraft story called Beyond the Wall of Sleep. I changed some plot points, but it's the same story in spirit. Here’s an outline of the story: (Prelude to the Great Awakening) The protagonist starts noticing new scars/bumps, starts experiencing sleep deprivation and amnesia (A Life Worth Taking) They wake up multiple times near dead, bloody bodies with no recollection of the events, even someone close to them, did they kill these people while asleep? (Cedars) They attend their funeral, feel guilty (Exordium/The Tomb of Dissolution) Memories return more vivid, they realize maybe they’re possessed, something else killed all those people, making the protagonist look guilty (Beyond the Wall of Sleep) They get tested at a mental hospital, doctor sees into their mind/dreams via a cosmic apparatus, can’t prove they’re possessed. Still confident they’re possessed, the protagonist vows to destroy it from the source; if they die, the spirit dies with them (A River of Retrograde) They attempt suicide by drowning, fill a backpack with rocks to weigh them down, scream underwater, feel relieved, blacks out. They wake up on the shore, saved by the spirit, confirming they were possessed. The spirit speaks, doesn’t realize harm they caused, as they’re from a different world, vows to leave the host’s body, fulfilling a greater purpose to protect the universe from a greater evil (Where Accursed Shadows Remain) The spirit leaves the host’s body, like an exorcism. The host hopes trauma will cease, but has irreversible damage, stuck with memories. Unsure if any of this happened, the spirit tells them to look in the northern sky for proof (Cosmic Forest) Later they see a sparkle in northern sky proving the spirit was real.
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- Metal
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