Despite Death Devlog

Despite Death is a combination of a lot of the things I’ve been listening to recently, as well as an outlet for some of the ideas that were covered in When Breath Becomes Air.

It started with a merge of two studies I was working on. The first is Sunnexo & Tanger’s Aimbot. Really loved the rhythm of the drop, especially the way the kick comes in a little early. Some of the original drafts mimicked Aimbot a lot more closely but as the track took form I moved towards a more serious tone.

An earlier draft of the drop

The second study was on the phonk genre. I had recently listened to KoruSe’s Psychogenesis and wasn’t really sure what the craze about it was, so I decided to do some research. The Phonk Wikipedia page was actually immensely helpful, and I built off some of the elements mentioned there to make a sample drop. The key elements that made it into the final track from phonk are the cowbell (which I was told sounds like a vital sign monitor) and the DJ Spanish Fly samples (Distorted bits, it’s more obvious in the draft)

I’ve also been fascinated with Tennyson’s music recently, so I copied a lot of the methods he talks about in his stream (phasing, rhythm layering). Its super cool stuff, would recommend checking his streams out. The frozen reverbs and samples in the beginning owe to his methods.

I actually wanted to push the song towards the statement “the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism” because out of the entire book, that part stood out to me as the most compelling. Eventually, though, I settled for a narrative more about meaning and death, because it was easier to shape into a coherent story with the samples I was able to get. I still wish that there was more recordings of Paul Kalanathi on the internet, but I guess we make do with what we have.

I pulled in some elements from breakcore and dnb to push the chaos and force up a notch. It’s always fascinated me how such dark and angry sounding basses and distorted breakbeats turn into determined, even hopeful sounds when used in songs like Xxtarlit’s Fleeting Frozen Hearts and Sewerslvt’s Goodbye. It’s like you go so negative that the emotion underflows into vibrance. The dnb influence is heavily inspired by SEBB’s Sword And Bow (from the Ashbelt OST). The core bass is referenced off its bass, and some of the background arps are sampled from there.

Final drop is meant to resemble cytus music (see Onoken’s Alexandrite) with orchestral samples, some piano and a super hyped high end. I always thought the combination of piano and electronic drums made a pretty cool sound.

Thanks for listening/actually reading this post :) I’m always happy to talk about my stuff, you can reach me through instagram if you want.