Dark Matter | Dark Energy

At the end of the day
 Darkness consumes
 All I see
 Is red
 
 In the fullness of time
 Light flies away
 All that I feel
 Is cold
 
 So is this how it ends?
 A slow fade to black
 In the darkness
 All alone?
 
 Are we drifting apart
 As the ages pass by?
 Is there not enough substance
 To bind us as one?
 
 Or is there something
 Forgotten out there
 Filling the voids
 And bridging the gaps
 
 All that I ever 
 Wanted to do
 Was hold on to you
 And collapse

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Production Notes:

The lyric and basic melody for Dark Matter dates all the way back to 1992. The main metaphor of likening the (then) uncertain fate of the cosmic expansion of the universe to someone questioning the future of a troubled relationship would have been a purely academic concept to me at the time. The basic piano melody was worked out in the practice rooms in the basement student center at Caltech. And then it got shelved and largely forgotten for a quarter century, until I started writing music again in late 2016, by which time it had gathered some more personal relevance.

For a long time I knew I wanted some sort of instrumental transition between Dark Matter and New Cosmology, which follows the central metaphor to a modern viewpoint. The inspiration for this bridge eluded me for quite some time, ultimately coming from an interview with Michael Beinhorn about the production of Marilyn Manson’s Mechanical Animals album. Specifically, a technique used on Coma White where Twiggy Ramirez’ guitar was patched through the input of a synthesizer to produce a chilling unique sound.

Borrowing this idea, I plugged a St. Vincent guitar into my modular synth and proceeded to mangle the living crap out of the signal. The guitar/synth patch is responsible for not only the broken fuzz sound, but also the chorus of deranged R2D2 noises from multiple LFO modulate filters running hard in self-oscillation.

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Equipment: