I didn't have a 7 string at the time I recorded the Machinations material , but I do have one now. It's a stock BC Rich, but I'm going to build a different body and transfer the parts. I used two gtrs to record the Blotted CD, one tuned to E (E A D G B E), and the other tuned to drop A (A E A D G B).
Alex and I were looking for a theme to base songs on and the brain/sleep disorder topic came up, so we went with it. I did a lot of reading on various brain related subjects, but didnt know too much about the medical side of things, so I got some help from people who were more knowledgeable about the subjects. I did research enough to find ways to make the music tie in to the topics
The Adenosines (Buildup and Breakdown) are the same sets of tunes, but played backwards.
Oscillation Cycles taking the same musical theme and plays it at 4 different speeds (getting there via metric modulation), mimicking the 4 stages of sleep.
Amnesia plays 3 main themes, then during the 2nd half of the song, the same themes are played but lots of the notes have been left out or forgotten.
The main theme of EEG Tracings plays the notes EEG in various timings.
Then there were the songs where we just tried to basically write a score to fit the titles, including Night Terror, Bleeding In The Brain, Laser Lobotomy, Vegetation, Sleep Deprivation.
Probably the most fun was the nightmares song Activation Synthesis Theory. Alex said he has dreams of suffocating, and drowning in quicksand. Dead Guy, Monsters, and Flight In Space go back to when I was a kid. Probably my favorite though is Spiderchase where I wanted a real fast melody line for spiders, but the music also fit for being chased, so we combined the two and came up with Spiderchase.
REM is a guy sleeping, then having the twitching eyes, REM sets in, then he wakes up.
Narcolepsy has the scattered string/filmscore sections where the subject is falling asleep, then waking up right in the middle of musical phrases (as if he is awake then nods off at random).
We also wanted to have a band/project name that could work with various themes and concepts should we decided to do another record. Of course the Science ties into the techy side of things, and the Blotted refers to where Alex and I came from, the ink blots, and Cannibal CD covers usually being full of blood splatters.
Ron
