Greetings, members of the Daemonyx collective (which, metaphysically and spiritually speaking, means everybody). Two new tracks are now uploaded/rotated to the player for your listening enjoyment. The music is -- variously -- dark, dreamy, beautiful, melancholy, and hypnotic.
One track is titled "Dystopicana." As this would indicate, the song is an exploration of classic dystopian themes of dehumanization and the decline of civilization. Longtime listeners will recognize this one as a revised version of a song that formerly went by a different title. What's been revised are the sampled vocals, which consist of audio clips from the redoubtable Andre Gregory, experimental theater director and actor extraordinaire (see his performances in, e.g., The Last Temptation of Christ, Demolition Man, and of course My Dinner with Andre), describing modern Western life as a kind of robotized existence in which the masses live in a combined state of trancelike stupor and perpetual terrorized paranoia. I took great pains to pare down these clips from their previous elephantine lengths and run them through a series of audio filters that add interesting effects and layer them much more organically into the overall musical mix. Note the (not so) hidden point of the song in the final, haunting exhortation to "Escape before it's too late."
The other track is the third movement of a four-movement piece titled "Blood and Milk." I don't think I've ever made it available for public listening, or if I did, it was a year or more ago and only lasted for about a week. I composed "Blood and Milk" as a set of musical interludes to accompany a reading of Canadian horror writer Barry Wood's effectively chilling and tragic little tale "Warm Milk." The music of this third movement is delicate and minimalist in the extreme, consisting of lightly strummed nylon guitar, glockenspiel, flute, string section, and oboe, underlaid by an ominous, reverberant mix of cavelike synth rumblings. At a running time of just one minute, the piece is intended as a fleeting flash of darkly ethereal mood. Of course, you can decide for yourself whether it's successful at that.
The other two tracks available in the player as I type these words are "Daimonica" and "The Face of the Deep 1." The first is a piece of vaguely creepy thumping electronica accompanied by a montage of audio samples from numerous movies that collectively create a message about a spiritually demonic or daimonic influence within a person's soul. It has become a kind of signature song to those who know Daemonyx. The second is a hard rock instrumental that amounts to a musical and sonic exploration of the ultimate origin and end of the cosmos in the awesome dark depths of primeval chaos.
I hope you enjoy these musical offerings. I also hope they encourage you to consider buying Daemonyx's debut album, "Curse of the Daimon," when it's released later this summer. Speaking of which, watch this space in coming weeks for an announcement about the release date. There's also an official Daemonyx website in the works. At Mo*Con III a few weeks ago I sold five-track sampler CDs to stoke interest, complete with Jason Van Hollander's wonderful "alley demon" cover art that was created especially for this album. I still have some of these left at $5 each (via PayPal) if anybody wants one. Just send me a message with "Daemonyx sampler" in the subject line.