Back-Story
After I finished “They Walk Among Us” on REBOOT which was song 3, I started writing a back-story that helped me create an emotional and dynamic flow to tie all the songs together as an album. Song 4 “Infected” marks a transition and an emotional shift as the situation starts getting rather grim for our hero.
Tracks and Tech
“Infected” is made up of 27 tracks using virtual synthesizers, vocal samples, and sliced up elements that were re-sampled from tracks within the song. As with every track on REBOOT, I composed, performed, arranged, mixed, and mastered the track using Ableton Live 7/8 and various virtual synthesizers. For you synth geeks out there I used Live, Vanguard, Synplant, Cypher, Circle, and lots of re-sampling back into Live. I also used Gross Beat for some slicing and re-sampling.
Vox
It’s the only song on the album with my voice. Here are the lyrics:
What's it like to know it all
You seem so different we've got to know
Got to know
Different
Twisted Acoustic Instrumentation and Play-by-Play
“Infected”: Play embedded song
For this song and the next song to work on the album, I needed a way to allude to the original palette, yet move away from heavy drum tracks to get a dynamic shift in the album. I’ve always found certain acoustic instruments to be instantly creepy - you know, like toy piano – so I decided to try and work some in. I also was trying to communicate a departure from reality and loss of control and felt that creating a performance that would start off as an acoustic instrument but then degrade into something quite harsh and out of this world would really do the trick.
I start right away with this concept at 0:10 - with reversed Cello and organic rhythmic elements. If you listen starting at 1:27, you can hear I use a harp, normally perceived to be warm and beautiful, and evolve it into something out of this world and harsh. By 1:37 I start using a hammer dulcimer – which I personally find quite menacing – to add a bigger metallic attack element, and I totally torque it out at the end of each phrase.
I recorded these performances in two passes. One to lay down the original acoustic instrument (using a keyboard and a sampled version of the instrument), then a second pass where I recorded my real-time performance with effects processors to mangle the sound. This performance was captured as an automated envelope allowing me to to go back and tweak performance. I also doubled the acoustic harp with a rather alien sound harp from a fabulous synthesizer called Synplant (pictured blow).
At 1:47 there is a break with only a few elements. Vocals, and a harp that was re-sampled and sliced up from early parts of the song. This leaves plenty of room for the piano part coming up. Note that to draw contrast from other treated acoustic instruments, I just added reverb to the piano.
At 2:12, I wanted to repeat a previous section yet change it up a bit. Rather than doing a more classic filter sweep, I instead vocode the drums – which really means the sound you hear has the rhythmic nature of the original drums, but the voicing is from a synth. This leaves room in the mix for some polyrhythmic high hat like sounds. As I get close to the end of this section of the song, I slowly fade the original drums back which offers a big dynamic build-up.
2:32 I repeat the piano melody from early but now play it as a frequency shifted bell sound with a pad under it with some huge reverb. On the last note I change the delay time on the fly which causes the pitch to radically change.
At 2:46, the original vocal sample is mangled almost beyond recognition and run through a ring modulator and Grain Delay.
Transformation is complete - “Different”.
Mark Mosher
Electronic Music Artist, Composer, Sound Designer
Louisville/Denver/Boulder
http://www.modulatethis.com
http://www.markmoshermusic.com
http://www.twitter.com/markmosher
