User 73706
Banned
Released: Wednesday, 26 August 2014
Produced: August 2013 - Release
Genre: Alternative, Space Rock, Metal, Score, Varia*
Length: 1:46:09
Trinity is a "pilot album" of sorts for a larger endeavor by name of Project Livechamber. The suites and songs produced here are largely getting-off-the-ground sort of tracks that will pave the way for further music, including future albums if there's community acclaim.
- *Varia is a genre term I've personally coined, short for "Variations Suite Alternative," suites or movements of harmonically-focused albums that depict a fluid, cohesive journey in concept. A variety of albums and soundtracks, particularly film and video game scores would fall under this category.
- Project Livechamber, also known as "Project Live" or "PLC," is a humbly minimalist arena shooter currently in infantile, conceptual stages of development. It is a modernized, fanmade spiritual successor of sorts to Halo: Combat Evolved.
- Gravity Gauntlet is the name of the informal development team, from music production to actual game development, responsible for creating Project Livechamber. "Gravity Gauntlet" is a term - name of a weapon - that comes from the PLC universe, serving as a development in-joke.
- Trinity, specifically, is the name of the world where the game and album take place. Threes are important, recurring themes in-universe and the name has a pseudo-religious implication similar to the Halo title. Which leads me to...
I've been working on and off on Trinity for pretty much a year now, with production really cracking down midsummer of 2014. The first formally-finalized track, Schiavona Sarabande, saw an early release on THE GAF TAPE, a NeoGAF-made mixtape that dropped 19 June of the same year. I'm inspired by the likes of the myriad of Halo composers throughout the years including Marty O'Donnell, Stephen Rippy, and Neil Davidge, in particular the latter two. Other inspirations include Pendulum, Broken Iris, Metroid Metal including Stemage's individual work, the Shinesparkers team, the Homestuck Music Team, Mick Gordon, Kow Otani (in particular his work on Shadow of the Colossus) and Austin Wintory, especially his work on Journey. From a comparison standpoint, the album has a sound that's something to the effect of "what if Pendulum's slower, softer pieces and Stephen Rippy's Halo Wars work had a harmony-over-melody baby, got raised by the Homestuck Team, got babysat by Stemage and got counseling from Austin Wintory."
Some of Ian's inspirations include Murray Gold, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard and Delia Derbyshire. As a result, he has more of a bombastic-meets-prototype-electronic sort of sound.
The album artwork is a heavily-screwed-with public domain image of a quasar starburst with loads of post-processing effects thrown on top. The idea behind it was to blur the line between micro and macro - that is, it could depict something colossally celestial, but likewise be a polygonal cell under an electron microscope. This carries over to the sound design and production of the album. I did this thing on a purely personal budget for purely personal reasons, but I wanted it to inspire future garage-bands to create and invigorate big-budget composers to keep on keeping on. Modest digital production effects and sounds are used in tandem with higher production-value work seen in the modern music industry to create a fluid gradient between the two. It's also worth noting that I have pretty high-level synesthesia and wanted that to carry over to the album for fellow synesthetics. There's a sense of richly-textured "auditory iridescence" that glossies the album that I personally feel can be lacking in modern production sometimes. Warms, colds, wets and dries are all juxtaposed through unconventional processing, composition and instrumentations in ways that make the album mixed-media to a degree. It goes as far as "FISSION MAILED" interface screws to give listeners room to keep up on a real world basis, while doubly giving listeners enough wiggle room to make their own decisions on the implications of the album overall and its individual tracks with regards to their development, inception and repercussions.
The album's overall progression tells a standalone story that will be further contextualized upon the release of Project Livechamber, but deliberately carries a degree of video game-style progression with the intention of spicing up traditional album progression a bit. Hypostasis starts the album off with a poignant prologue, Verse Anthem to an Inverse World is a taste of mid-tempo power to come, and Gravity Gauntlet Presents is a developer introduction jingle. Project Livechamber (Dyson Overture Mix) is an aggressive love letter of sorts to classic arena multiplayer in the way Mick Gordon's version of Orchid's theme from Killer Instinct (2013) is a love letter to classic arcade fighters. Adagio in Più is the album's Level 1-1 or Green Hill Zone, a slow ease into the production style with a few hidden depths to keep veterans sated.* Schiavona Sarabande begins to challenge listeners with frenetic, constantly-adapting melodies, and so on.
*
Adagio in Più is literal Italian for "slow plus," giving you O+, an uncommon blood type. Adagio in Più is the patron theme for the Blood element-type in-universe.
Time |#| Track Name
2.28 |01| Hypostasis
4.11 |02| Verse Anthem to an Inverse World
0.13 |03| Gravity Gauntlet Presents
5.43 |04| Project Livechamber (Dyson Overture Mix)
4.42 |05| Adagio in Piu
5.23 |06| Schiavona Sarabande
12.18 |07| Inner Midheaven Suite*
8.50 |08| Coda Corona
6.51 |09| Hardened Hellfire
5.48 |10| Interim
2.59 |11| Omega
7.06 |12| Alphabetum Archrivalis
5.30 |13| Silicon Campfire Stories
5.20 |14| Welcome to the Western Desert (Silicon Trail Mix)
5.58 |15| Another Winter
4.23 |16| Adjudas
6.10 |17| Project Livechamber
5.31 |18| Trinity
2.13 |19|
War · Lore · Identity
2.18 |20|
Interim (Muzak Mix)
2.14 |21|
Threefold
Total Length: 1:46:09
Coming in at just over an hour and forty-five minutes - the bulk of a commute or better half of a day off - Trinity is a pretty big album, and I've deliberately divided it into two self-contained albeit wholly cohesive halves for convenience's sake. Hypostasis up to Interim makes up "disc one," focusing on the more alternative and experimental sides of the album. The run from Omega to Trinity alongside the bonus tracks takes a darker tone exploring the space rock and metal segments before going back into a more traditional Trinity sound for the main theme and title theme.
*Inner Midheaven Suite is huge - weighing in at a whopping 816.9 MB and twelve minutes, eighteen seconds - and was too big to be uploaded to Bandcamp. For convenience's sake, though, I have it uploaded to Soundcloud for free streaming in lossy 320kbps mp3 format. If you decide to purchase Trinity, you'll be given a link to offsite storage where Inner Midheaven Suite can be downloaded in its full lossless .flac glory.
Purchasing Trinity will give you a bunch of neat additional content, including the lossless download link to Inner Midheaven Suite mentioned above. Bonus buyer goodies include:
- Three bonus tracks: a perpetuum mobile piece for piano, a middle-of-the-road elevator music reprise of Interim, and an original three-piece written and arranged by Ian Kerns and produced by me.
- The album art in its native 2000x2000 resolution with and without the text.
- Trinity-themed 1080p wallpapers for desktop and mobile resolutions.
- 1080p Project Livechamber logo wallpapers in dark and light versions for desktop.
- Full black insignias at huge 2400x2400 resolutions of the Sapient Eight - the eight races, two to an element-type not including Aether, characterized by the music.
I know this is a ton of superfluous context for what amounts to a launch mixtape. It's important to me for two reasons, though. For one, I have a pretty notorious reputation - or at least did, anyway - here on GAF for waxing lyrical over boatloads of fanmade conjecture that never really went anywhere and did nothing more than weigh down particular community threads or more specifically discussions with write-ups that were all bark and no bite without proper context. This is meant as an apology to that, and to prove that given the proper inspiration, deadlines and resources that I can produce sufficient content if there's a demand for it. Second, jumping off of that point, Project Livechamber took a variety of forms over the past few years and it wasn't until just recently over the past 9 months or so that it entered a tangible "conceptual" stage complete with artistic references, research, low-level commissioning, etc. PLC is my personal, recreational baby. Beyond everything else, I want it to have its own voice for free - the gameplay's physical build will be free (not free-to-play, free) for the Arena Multiplayer portion, bare minimum. Likewise, Trinity's bulk is free to stream online, even Inner Midheaven Suite, which I easily could have monetized. The bonus tracks aren't mandatory listening or pivotal to the context of the album. This is my swan song to PLC's conceptual stage. I've been waiting to enter the Air Force for a little over a year or so and finally will be early September, at which point I'll be living by myself and have access to way more resources, especially from a financial standpoint. After the gauntlet of bootcamp and tech school, and once I've settled down for a while, I'll finally be able to get out of the conceptual - physical interim thanks to salary pay and begin concrete work on a playable form for Project Livechamber, which I hope to have out in some degree (whether that's a demo, alpha, etc.) by Q3 2015. I may spend a lot of time screwing around on the forums here, but I've always had ideas on developing a recreational pet project like this, and I'm really happy to see it finally have a physical form, even if that is - just for now - a pretty big album.
Ian Kerns - Direct compositional development, arrangement and instrumentation for "Gotham," "Threefold"
Gravity Gauntlet Development Team - Support
Adrian "Ghazzarro" Ghazi - Inspiration
Grant "Stemage" Henry - Inspiration
Alex "Menachite" Jay - Inspiration
Steven "Jellycrackers McDonald - Inspiration
Carlos "Sai-Kun" Revollo - Inspiration
Katelyn Biso - Inspiration
HaloGAF - Inspiration
NeoGAF - Reading this gigantic OT all the way through
