released March 8, 2024

Presenting the first Eryth album of 2024: Fermi

I wanted to create something of a 'typical' post-metal album after the recent diversions, as well as experimenting with the idea of mapping existing songs movements and tempos to see if I could capture some of that live band essence that I feel I miss. I took some of my favourite 'post' tracks and mapped the bpm, energy levels, types of riffs etc, and added my own riffs and ideas to flesh them out. In some cases I have adapted entire riffs because they fit so well with my existing ideas. I ended up with four long songs and one behemoth, and cognisant I'm never going to have 90 minutes to sit through a single album ever again, this project has been split into two releases. The cover is an evening shot of trees in the garden, blended with an image of deep space.

I also wanted to experiment with some methods I'd not used in a while: clean vocals, clean guitars, more song dynamics and noise as an 'instrument'. As it turns out I can't really sing in tune and my clean playing is surprisingly poor! Nonetheless, I have had a go, ably assisted by studio trickery and MIDI. I used various YouTube videos of 'the spookiest space sounds... EVER', run through noise machines to create the noise textures throughout, many of which ended up sounding like wind on a distant planet or alien language. The guitar/bass sonic template here is the 'Kanli sound', which gives a grinding propulsion without too many guitar tracks, offset by a few different types of new (for Eryth) clean lines for contrast

True to the post-metal theme, this album is about space and our place within it, ie the Fermi Paradox. However, the tracks explore a more philosophical take on any solution, namely: what are we meant to do if there isn't any life out there? Considering the general state of humanity, my own practical plan is to look inside and live our best lives here and now, finding solace inside ourselves, and not hoping for some extra terrestrial saviour - a sort of optimistic nihilism. As a result, I used a combination of dirty chromatic doom riffs for despair, tempered by more melodic lines and leads for optimism, largely composed using 'Tintinabulli' techniques to emulate an otherworldly spiritual aura. Writing lyrics was by far the hardest part, and something I've now realised I am not really cut out for - future Eryth lyrics may well be in the 'wordless nonsense' vein!

Oblique

Another Boris rip-off here, of 'Snow Baked Sun Cave', which evolved out of some quirky picked lines I had initially planned as interludes. Building from layers of subtle noise and doomy guitars, this builds to a psychedelic crescendo before falling back to the simpler picked lines over 45 minutes. Creating the various layers was largely an automatic process - most textures here are mixed forms of delays, reverb, distortion and feedback from the few actual live recordings