What is Further Into The Dark, you may ask? It’s the name of my current musical project, which I’ve been working on constantly on-and-off for nearly a month now. (For the album cover see my blavatar/twitter pic.)
See, this whole project started back in January when I decided to, just for kicks, record random noises and see how I could manipulate them with Audacity. These songs – “Infinity,” “Heatwaves,” “Phobia,” and some others – started out as some things I did to satisfy myself creatively when I was bored, and then I had the idea of assembling them into an EP or album, to release under a name other than the usual Above the Graves moniker I put on all my solo work.
I decided on the name monogram, randomly, and the album was to be titled symbols. I really had no idea what I was doing at the time, how to label it musically, or anything else. So, naturally, after a while, I forgot about the whole project and instead focused on the next Above the Graves release, Days Past, which I tried to keep mostly traditional in the way of just my acoustic guitar and voice. Still, the influence from my monogram project seeped into Days Past. It started out with improvisation of my banging on my guitar and yelling random vocalizations, then mixing it in with other sounds for effect. I originally called that song “Intermission” as it was intended to be a segue between “Trouble” and “Quiet Hours,” which was called “Untitled” at the time. Days Past took three months to fully form; it originally included a (poorly done) acoustic cover of Joanna Newsom’s “Monkey & Bear,” and it was all fairly standard Above the Graves material. That is, it was terrible, poorly produced and ill-thought-out (yes, I’m very critical of my earlier work.) As work on Days Past continued, though, I got far more serious with what I was doing, and “Intermission” got reversed, slowed down, and toyed with until eventually it became “The Labrynth.” I then took more influence from the monogram project for “Intervention,” which wasn’t distorted in anyway to be made ‘electronic.’ It just kept the original ‘shock factor’ “Intermission” would have had, like “This is so awful, but this guy’s doing something all right.”
Anyway, I’m rambling at this point, so I must digress; basically, at the end of the Days Past project I went back to monogram, and I started thinking about what I could do to it to make it more suited to be called an Above the Graves album. I ultimately scrapped every song on it, though I kept one, later addition, “The Ninth Circle,” which I modified heavily to make “Entrance” on Further Into The Dark. To get a good idea of how Further Into The Dark is going to sound, think of this; take the ambient-electronic flair of “The Labrynth” and multiply it by 1000, and add backwards Panda Bear melodies, Radiohead influences and my lo-fi aesthetic. So while I doubt that anyone actually takes my work seriously or has even bothered to listen to all of it, (which I understand, because I often only take my work seriously when I’m making it, then I look back and think how much I screwed it up.) if anyone has, don’t think of Further Into The Dark as a complete change, because it isn’t. It’s merely a refining of the work I’ve made for the past five months.
I don’t even know what I’m getting at here anymore, but believe you me; Further Into The Dark is going to be challenging, varied, and awesome.
