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During my pretty random travels around the coast of Aotearoa's south Island I did occasionally sit down to play with some synths and so but it never amounted to much more than a few bars with maybe a good loop over a generic beat, and I was content with that as you can be for a while, but then just as my patience started to wane my meanderings led me first to a huge musical experience and after that to a place where I had the time and peace and quiet to actually sit down and digest the impressions and mold them into ideas.

It was in the beginning of February I went to a pretty old school but still legal rave out in a hidden valley near Nelson, and although I was pretty unsure at first about venturing out from my comfort zone of crisp and clean groves with avantgarde synths I am really glad that I did dare to try something new. I can never say that I've been a huge fan of psy and the whole mushroom worshipping cult thing, but progressive house has always held a sweet spot in my heart. A little bit reluctant at first I was soon enchanted with something totally new to me, namely progressive psy. Or something. I don't know what to label it. It was good though.

Brickwall basslines, repetitive structure, quirky noices, breaks with delayed vocals speaking of various suggestive things (no, not sex you little Bennassi fanboy). 72 hours straight. My accurate and precise taste got hammered blunt by this.

After having recovered from this experience which among other things involved sleeping on the ground in the open, doing my hygien in the river and realising that I had brought with me way too little food I met some people with whom I fled north of Wellington to a little beach community. Here I used to stay up a few hours later than the rest every night to work on a project that had happened to reach further than its embryonic state and was showing promise. I wanted it to start out as a strictly minimal groove with attitude, but soon I realised that it had a lot of progressive house undercurrents in it. I'm a person bad at saying no, and why not try something at least slightly different?

By a chance my father had sent me a copy of the story of Aniara which is an extraordinarly beautyful story about a spaceship full of emmigrants missing its target destination Mars and continuing out of the solar system with no chance of returning back. I realised just how lucky I was having a copy this beautyful epic read out in not only a solemn and sermonal way, but also in Swedish!

I had found my theme for the song.

I sampled the part where the spaceship loses its bearing and applied the standard hi-pass filter and delay chain to it to give it that dramatic science fictiony sound we never grow tired of. It was a pleasant change from all the bitcrushing I've done lately.

Just as the last track I've sort of finished it but not really, it just needs a lot of more work that I can't be bothered with now. I captured the idea and that is enough for me.

But what really bugs me is that when I render it to .mp3-format the mainsynth loses a lot of its body somehow, and what is even more annoying is how unbalancedly strong it becomes as it is being run through a bit crusher. My theory is that the cheap (free) synth either has very crappy algorithms that I've overloaded with various functions or that I've got one nasty case of anti aliasing on my hands. I will deal with the problem when the time comes to master and finish the track. At the moment my plan is to render the synth separately to a .wav and see if it sounds better. Also that solution would free up a lot of much need processing power.