Over the years I have made a lot of different music. The idea behind releasing an album was to take things I’ve already made or have begun making and release it. While some songs might get remixed, remade and/or reinterpreted (“Initium Roboticus” is a good example of the latter) there will be no completely new music on Rest in the Arms of Oblivion. But that doesn’t mean that all music I have is suitable for the album.
For example, I recently sat down to see what I could do to with one of my more experimental pieces of music. It was originally recorded while tweaking the knobs of a custom created softsynth and was saved directly as a wave file while performing. I might do a similar thing to some other pieces that I created in the same way, perhaps as part of a live stream.
Anyway, the end result was more interesting than the original, but it is still very experimental compared to my other stuff. At first I thought it should go on the album, but now I’ve decided to put it on a second album. This makes me question my other choices as well. So what should I put on it?
Right now I have four songs I’m fairly confident will end up on the album. The first song I wanted to put on there is a simple synth pop ditty. It’s not really indicative of much else I did back in the day but even though it’s a bit of an outlier it’s a song I completed and really wanted to rerecord using hardware synths. I then played around with a software synth and some distortion and ended up remaking a song I originally intended as an orchestral piece. It has a completely different feel to it. The other two fall in the middle, being more quirky than synth pop but not dark and foreboding.
Perhaps it’s a good mix to have on an album. I’m certainly not ABBA, but they too had a pretty large variety of styles on some of their albums. Take “Waterloo” for instance. The titular song is a rather boring example of swedish popular music at the time, “Sitting in the Palmtree” has a caribbean feel to it, “King Kong Song” is straight up rock, “My Mama Said” is funky disco and “Watch Out” can be described as early metal music. Quite a variety. And it worked. Then again, I very seldom hear anyone play “Watch Out” when they play ABBA.
So this is what I’m thinking at the moment:
“Rest in the Arms of Oblivion” will be an album with music I wrote 15-20 years ago, but I will not put any music on it. I will shy away from the more experimental stuff and try to keep it somewhat cohesive, but with some outliers allowed. I will not write new music for it, although I will rearrange and remake most of it. No covers will be on it, of any kind.
The next album will instead be devoted to experimental music. Both earlier things I made as well as new pieces where I try out different techniques. It will be fairly different from the first album, but more thematic.
After that? Well, I might look into how licensing covers works since I have a few of them sitting on my harddrive, begging for an update. I also have a few other ideas on modern covers as well as some ideas for covers of older music that won’t need licensing. Classical, medieval and folk music all spring to mind. And naturally I want to make some new original music and release that as well. I want to try out orchestration more and at some point I’ll probably start putting together a eurorack synth.
In conclusion, don’t expect the Draugormr project to stick to a single genre or sound, but I’ll try to keep the albums fairly together. Too big surprises might not work in favor of the album. But variety is still good.