Behind the Album
Apocalypse Now is my second release and the first album to be fully composed from the ground up to be a single piece; mostly. It started out life as a single that was being used as my track for EDM Tips’ Accelerator Course. That song was “Black Harbinger.” Originally, I had envisioned the album to be about some kind of Mecha-inspired story, taking place in a universe not too dissimilar from Battletech. However, as I was drafting the album’s tracks out, I came to the realization that I didn’t want to spread my efforts in too many different worlds as I already knew that storytelling would play a major role in life at this point. So I made the decision for the album’s story to ultimately take place within my Bionicle-inspired world that has been in development for nearly a decade and a half as of 2024, the year of this album’s development and release. This would also have major ramifications for my previous album, Spectres, giving it a rhyme and a reason to have a story of its own.
Perhaps the biggest challenge of this album was the need to develop and learn a process from scratch, as I had never purposefully written or developed an album from scratch previously. I had to draw on concepts taught me in the Accelerator Course, as well as past experiences in creating concept album playlists using anime opening and ending songs. I had to find songs that I thought fit the mood and sound of what I was going for as best as possible and develop the songs from there. I then researched the key signatures, BPMs, and chord progressions used in order to obtain a strong, starting base. I then took my inspiration tracks and arranged them in a playlist, in order of when their respective inspiration takes place in the album. I would then listen to this playlist at work all the way through. As I finished tracks, I would also listen to those in order of appearance. The cool thing was is that the album flowed pretty much exactly as I had laid out the music in that playlist.
This album’s sound is much more heavily inspired by the NES and Gameboy tracks of games like Metroid, Castlevania and Pokémon, while also borrowing ideas from the MechWarrior 5:Mercenaries OST. I also began experimenting with elements from J-Pop music, specifically the chord progressions. My First Story and Thousand Foot Krutch were both major inspirations for having “bridge” tracks, a concept I am actively refining to this day.