Through The Aether

I've never written a song like this before. It's not because I haven't tried, but over the years, I've found writing music for synthesizer to be quite challenging.

First, there's a problem of sound design.

Little chippy square waves are one thing. They immediately channel video game nostalgia which gives you a place to go with it. But fatty super saws and pulsing basses and plonky pads are sounds that don't exist in nature or in video games. They have no real-world analogue and make music that sounds electric, faded, abstract, like a radio transmission from a distant galaxy.

Then, there's a problem of dynamics.

Synthesizers don't sound like real instruments, and they don't play like real instruments. They're loud, crunchy, grainy, squiggly, eerie, and spazzy. They groan and spasm like apoplectic robots. They sizzle and squeal like arcing electrons. Synthesizers tear at the fabric of reality, cast alien contours on the music they inhabit, and take the listener to a world that isn't this one.

So what is this other world? It's a place you can visit if you can dream. It's a mystery unraveled by those who try. It's a sound that you will hear when you believe it's there.

I don't know where the future is, but I know I am connected to it by the present. I can follow the threads where they will take me. How will I know I am there? Because there and here are the same. I am my future and I am where it leads.

The only way is forward. I hear the future through the aether.