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Here it is, as promised: The entire An Exploration of an Open Wound album plus artwork. Naturally, I think getting a hard copy with the artwork is better, but I'm sentimental like that and refuse to give in to this mp3 revolution. The CafePress price is set up for zero profit so that it will hopefully attract more people to get the entire package the way I'd intended it. If you must be one of those downloading heretics, I'd really prefer that you download the entire thing in the zip file above, as it is a continuous album designed to be cohesive from one end to the other. Also, it was mastered in one fell swoop, and crossfades were implemented, so if you have access to it, use a higher-end burning program such as Nero so that you can get rid of the standard two-second gap between tracks that is found in standard burners and the crossfades will come through correctly. If you don't feel like downloading the whole thing and just want to pick through it for individual tracks you may like, I've got the separate tracks downloadable right here, but be forewarned, the obligatory ranting will be involved!

And now the pre-rant: I stated the last album was hard to make. I was wrong. This one was the hardest thing I've had to commit to binary as this is more than just a hodge-podge collection of music in the way that Comatose Insomniac was. I was going through a rough time and needed a diary. An Exploration of an Open Wound is that diary. It's a document of everything from suicidal feelings, psychotropic medication, depression, inadequate healthcare, stupid decisions, insanity, self-loathing, and most every other emotion I've experience in the past year and a half. It's not pretty. This is not the kind of album that you can make love to, have a happy part to, or even share with friends while just 'hanging out'. At best, you could probably mosh to some of these songs. In the end though, it's for sitting down, absorbing, and understanding just how significant you truly are and how quickly everything can fall apart just because Gawd thought it would be fun to watch. You may laugh at or cringe at some of the cheesiness in some of these lyrics, but they are a representation of what I was feeling as best could be described at the time.

Aside from the compositions themselves, I do have a thing or two to say about the production aspect. One of the things that I am proud of is that software effects and synths were not used in this recording. I would have preferred to do the mixing in the analog realm, but that wasn't possible at the time. However, it was mastered to tape, so you do get some of that nice 80's warmth. I am of the belief that modern digital recording/mixing is a bit too sterile. When I think of classic recordings and what made them sound so good regardless of composition, the 70's and 80's come to mind for their use of huge analog consoles and tape machines. It is my hope that I have adequately recaptured that sound. One of the nice things about not so tied to a label is a got to make my own decisions on mixing, so the vocals are turned up to a level that is a bit more audible and actually understandable at times!

The artwork was another part of this album that gave me some trouble. When the plan was to have this CD pressed in a large run, I already had an idea for the artwork. The front cover was going to be a pair of slit wrists against a black background with pills coming out of the cuts. Nothing too complicated, and it was something that I could manage on my own. ...however, our coveted Olympus D-550 died, and we haven't been able to get a suitable replacement. PhotoShop just isn't the same without good source pictures! I'd have liked to just throw the project to the guy behind the last album's artwork, but I was unable to reach him. So, the artwork was thrown together a bit last minute, however I'm still quite proud of the results. I think that the red on black pills really conveyed the story almost as well as the slit wrists would have.

So enough general ranting. How about some song ranting?

Synaptic Assault. I composed this song around November of last year when I had first moved to Las Vegas. I had actually had the verse guitar riff stuck in my head for a few months but didn't get to play with it until after the move. I really fell in love with the MS2000 after the last album, and so that sequenced tweaking was brought to this song, especially in the outro bit. The lyrics didn't get thought up until I was in the sanitarium. Just some wordplay about psychotropics. The dialog samples are from Young Frankenstein. Kind of ironic how a comedy had lines that fit the tone so well. I think this is the only song that ended up with the Poly-800 in it. It's a shame because that synth has a lot of balls, but programming it is such a bitch.

Endless Terror. Jacob's Ladder samples! I know that a lot of artists have sampled this movie, but it's still got a lot of good lines left in it (especially the bit about Santa Claus.) Naturally this song is about going crazy, hence why that movie worked so well for it. One of the things that was fun about playing live way back when was that you can get away with a bit of improvisation, and occasionally you land on a bit of guitar that works well and gets incorporated into the song every time you play it from then out. So what I tried to do for this album was rehearse the guitar a number of times before recording, this way, little bits got added here and there that fit better. A great example of this was in the prechoruses for this song. Originally, they didn't have guitar, but that brooding tone was too perfect to not have long power chord drones.

Refuge. The idea behind this song was to layer a few string patches together to create a synthetic symphony kind of sound. All percussion was provided by that fun little drum box, the ER-1. Nothing too imaginative going on with the lyrics, just overwhelmed by self-loathing as well as love, a strange sensation.

For You. Lyrically this song is about dealing with bad choices so much that you end up going out of your way to play the part of the asshole because that becomes your comfort zone. It's kind of an apology to Dez. The guitar didn't come out quite the way that I was hoping it would in that I was trying to vary my picking enough to where random harmonics would have been thrown in. The dialog samples came from Heathers. The breakdown (the part where the guitar just drones out an open D power chord) was supposed to be replaced by a guitar with a whammy bar going nuts. ...I forgot to go back and track that in, but it still worked out. The outro was fun to record. Call me nuts but I enjoy these half-time breakdowns because you can really play around with simple guitar parts and be able to build tension as well as accentuate the mood.

The Open Wound. Not really as anthemic as I had intended. Just a handful of lyrics about wanting to escape spread out over an evolving synthetic soundscape. I like the way it kind of has classical 'movements' going on. The beat kind of stagnates towards the end, but that was so I could put more emphasis on the freeform string parts. Makes it fun to listen to. The dialog samples in this one came from Bringing Out the Dead. I love that movie. To me, it's Scorsese's best work. For a short time, I was even inspired to work as a paramedic after seeing this movie for the first time. ...this was of course until I found out about their high suicide rate.

Pacing. This song was centralized around some ideas I had while I was in the sanitarium. 120bpm with a clock synchonized to it and a mantra of 'Back and Forth' going on in the background as some crazy man ranted over top of it. The lyrics were inspired by one of my room mates. He talked to aliens using this curious combination of clicks and mouth chomps. He was actually a vessel himself and an alien was living inside of his brain. ...all craziness aside though, the guy was actually a genius who had finally cracked (impossible to beat at chess). I finally came up with the lyrics for this song after one night when he sat down and pointed out in the Old Testament of the Bible evidence that Gawd was an alien, and there was a very vivid description of a 'flying saucer' and little grey men wearing jack boots. When it dawned on me just how much sense he was making, I came to the conclusion that I had just flipped my lid. Anyway, this song came out much better than I had expected and is one of my favorites. The samples are from Johnney Mnemonic. I love William Gibson, and I think that the crazed rant at the end fits the bill perfectly.

Lust. It's pretty rare for me that the lyrics come before the music. There's a lot about this song that's unusual, though. I'm on Cymbalta now which has a tendency to limit your creativity and make you sleep a lot. When I wrote this song, I was on Zoloft. My dreams were extremely vivid during the rare times that I did sleep, and when I wasn't laid out on the bed praying that a meteor would fly through the window and kill me because I was too lazy to do it myself, my mind was just reeling with ideas constantly. I came up with plots for movies, novels, songs, music videos, all kinds of stuff all the time. Anyway, one night I was just barely asleep and then I just popped awake with these words in my head. So I jotted them down as fast as I could and then tried to go back to sleep afterward (a few hours later, I did finally manage to steal some z's from the sandman.) The next day I sorted the words out, came up with a song to fit around them, and started composing. The dialog comes from Matchstick Men. Not a very inspired movie, but there are some pretty interesting lines that pop up now and again.

Breakdown. The lyrics are kinda silly. It's just about feeling like your losing your mind. The samples come from Little Nicky. I thought it was time for some humor. I think I was wrong.

Cold and Dark. ...okay, I'll admit it, I kinda stole the 'No escape' part from Sleep Now Yes. It's catchy! It just got stuck in my head, but with different music behind it, so I had to do something about it. Otherwise, it's about lusting for the unattainable and being trapped by that desire. The samples are from The Addam's Family. Desiree got me hooked on the movies and the TV show. Damn her!!! It's okay though because they're creative and funny yet romantic at the same time. Astroboy would be proud of me for this song though because the extra guitar parts I mentioned earlier also apply to basslines, and this track does have basslines that weren't originally going to be there.

Let You Go. This is one of those songs about making stupid choices and wondering why you did them afterward. After I separated with Desiree, this one came to mind. It's cheesy, but it expresses how I was feeling at the time in regards to how I thought I was doing the right thing in pushing her away from somebody as flawed as me, but my selfishness was telling me that I needed her. The samples are from Equilibrium. I only recently got became aware of this movie, and I enjoyed every bit of it. It's like a martial arts version of 1984 and the 'subtle' commentary about emotion-numbing medications really struck a chord with me. The piano-harpsichord-ish kinda synth towards the end caught me by surprise. It came from a TX81Z, and I never thought of that as a machine capable of such pretty sounds. The mix of that, heavy guitar, soft piano, and strings is nice. This is the first song that used the X-Station, the first patch I ever created on the X-Station at that! It's supposed to be a virtual analog synth, and therefore not sound so harsh, but good god does it fail in such a good way! Sounds like something else entirely! In fact, when taken to the upper and lower ends like this patch was, there's nothing at all analog about it and in fact sounds rather sharp and brittle, but in a fun way.

Trust Them. This song was originally a bit longer by about two minutes, but the opening just seemed kinda redundant considering my usual hangup with intros. I think it worked out better this way. It's not one of my favorite songs, but it works. Lyrically this song is about irresponsible doctors claiming they know what's good for you. By that I mean telling you that you need to stay in the nut house for a whole month, and then pumping you full of medications even though it's obviously not working. To add on to this, it's kind of like how the doctor in charge of my medications tells me that it only takes three days to get off Cymbalta when pretty much any other doctor will tell you that it takes at least two months, and then telling you that the withdrawal symptoms you are feeling are actually attributed to a relapse of your depression. (Really!? I had no idea that nausea, dizziness, and brain zaps were part of depression!) The movie samples on this track are from Dracula. If you listen really closely during the verses, Count Dracula is chanting "Do not put your faith in such... trinkets of deceit. Trinkets of deceit."

Suicide Mission. This song almost didn't make the album. It's had problems with it since the beginning. First off, there was originally a bunch of samples from Stargate, but they just sounded really cheese-ball. Then, even though this was written as a guitar song, it turns out it sounds better without guitar in it. ...WTF!? The lyrics are kind of fucktarded, too. And it doesn't really fit the feel of the album, either. I mainly kept in there because bad TDC songs have this weird tendency of becoming fan favorites. The original version ofCarnival for instance. That one was kind of redundant to me and pretty much any former member of the band, and yet that's the one that people end up associating with us the most. Go figure.

Living Dead. A song about your inner self being changed... But it's fun and moshy!!! Makes me want to beat the shit out of something whenever I hear it. Definitely one of my favorite tracks on this album. Plus, I love the way the break turned out! I'm not one who's good with writing riffs that don't have the shit repeated out of them. This one worked out, though and really helps in building up tension before the bridge.

Underneath. This is the last song I wrote for the album and if memory serves me correctly, it's the only one that was recorded after I came out of the nuthouse. It's kind of fitting that it's at the end of the album in this respect. I like the way this song starts from such calmness and builds up into this beast. The X-Station surprised me with that lead synth that also doubled as a string-ish drone in the intro (hence why it's mixed kind of loud.) Plus that creaky 303-ish bassline sounds nice, though I can't remember for the life of me what synth made that. This song is about resenting the things that you've just done, living with your choices, and being haunted by your memories. The dialog samples are from Jersey Girl.

Refuge (Reprise) Okay, now for the origins for Refuge. This is pretty much what the song was intended to be. Just layers of synths and a vocal (I threw in the Solaris samples and changed parts of the melody to keep it varied enough to want to sit through it a second time.) I threw in the drums and bass guitar when tracking this so that I could have something to reference in order to keep it moving. Then, I would take the drums and bass guitar out and have this. Well, the problem is that I liked how it sounded with the drums involved, so I didn't know which version to keep. Well, why not have both of them on there, kind of like how the 'All is Full of Love' single by Bjork sounds? I like it, and this is great at taking things down an extra notch for a closing as 'Underneath' is a little heavy for a closing piece.

Well, that's it. An Exploration of an Open Wound pretty much in a nutshell, and the death of The Divine Chemical. I really really REALLY hope you've enjoyed this. It took a lot of effort and wrecked me both emotionally and psychologically to bring all of these things out of me. If you don't like it. ...well I'm just going to have to kill you!

04-28-08

Well, we've had a long run, but it's time to draw this carnival act to a close. I hope you've enjoyed putting up with TDC as much as I have. In accordance with my own personal beliefs, I don't think it's really fair to be charged for music by an artist that doesn't really care so much about making profit of his works anymore. And so, here's the entirety of the Comatose Insomniac album in addition to the archives. Also, An Exploration of an Open Wound will be posted here as well after its completion.

Inhale. It's an album opener. Nothing too special going on here. Just a bong sample, an EMX-1, an ESQ-1 pad, and some bad mixing. I've never been too happy with this track because of the mixing. Most of the synths are too loud.

America 2.0. Here's the reworked version. Always a favorite of the band, we had to bring this one to the album. IMO, it's better in some ways and worse in others.

Kingdom of the Cockroach. One of the few original tracks to land on the CD. The lyrics are about how at the end of the world, only the roaches will remain. This was also one of the first times I learned to really love my MS2000. The modulated drone throughout was really what inspired the entire song.

Carnival. It's a resurrection of the lyrics of the original, but that's about the only similarity. I think this track is fun, though it loses the point of the original. The remixes of this track were incredible, in my opinion.

Infection. Originally dubbed 'Executive Assembly Line' but Pam didn't like the name. This song is kind of dry, but the half-time breakdown makes it all worth it to me.

A Sorrowful Celebration of the Flesh. Another lyrical resurrection. I'm not so fond of this one either.

Thinking in Circles. Another original track on this album. Pretty much inspired by a line from Dark City. The video is fun.

Extermination. I love this song, I love this song, and I LOVE this song! This turned out so much better than the original version. This song makes me want to kill something. Plus the ritualistic chanting is a fucking great way to vent.

Pig Fucker. The name alone makes it a favorite for people to talk about. It was a working title that just kinda stuck, even though it doesn't really have anything to do with the lyrics. (see above for the video.)

Come Undone. I don't really like doing covers so much, but this one just kinda flopped out by accident. At the time I got the Korg ESX-1 sampling groovebox thingie, I had a bit of an obsession with Duran Duran's version of this song. So, just to try out the sample splicing capability and see what it was all about, I sampled in the opening guitar line and stuck a phaser on it so that other percussion could be put underneath it and I could make a dancy sort of remix of it. ...that sample inevitably evolved into a cover that was supposed to be a joke, until people started liking it. This was ultimately the hardest song on the whole album to mix because everything is just layers and layers of instruments, thus it sounds the thickest of all the tracks. Profytt from Another Liquid Ramble was originally slated to do vocals for this track, but due to self-imposed time constraints, we just tracked in Dez's vocals and Autotuned the unholy hell out of it to get the Cher 'Believe' effect going on. ...we never could get a live version of this song working.

Solution. This was a remake of Sheep. Just make the lyrics more serious and replicate it as accurately as possible. ...unfortunately 'accurately' pretty much lead to a tempo shift up to 150bpm and changing samples around, and this ghastly thing was the result.

Exhale. I often miss my Ensoniq VFX, and this track is the reason why. Aside from the didgeridoo and the bong, this track is just one bizarre ass patch I made on that synth by setting a wave cycle so that it would go through each wave in the table sequentially. It's kind of obnoxious sounding on it's own, but when you put pitch tracking on it and then hold down every note you can within a few octaves, this is the result. ...people used to watch me do this in horror either at my simplistic technique or at the noise coming out from the speakers.

That's it. Expect more within the coming months when I finish up the new album. In the meantime, here's the original 'archives' content:

Just found a couple missing pieces (Thanks Mitigan!!!)

A Single Digit Salute. This song is about my ex-wife. The band always hated it and made fun of a part that sounds like how I miss your 'sausage'. Thought I'd try to recapture that Skinny Puppy hatred that was all over Last Rights after Ohgr divorced his spouse. I failed. ...I still like it.

Slave New World I swear, I did not mean to steal the title from Sepultura! They have nothing to do with each other. The name just popped into my head one day, and I kinda ran with it. The robotic vocal sample is saying "You look so happy, I think I'm going to kill you" in case you were wondering.

I've been meaning to post this stuff up here for quite a while, but quite frankly, I've been very lazy about it. However, there have been a mass quantity of requests to have this stuff posted lately, and it's about time I obliged. Plus, as I'm not planning on releasing any more of my works for the listening public until An Exploration of an Open Wound is finished, I might as well pacify everybody in the meantime. This is quite the stroll down memory lane for me, so I'm going to be doing quite a bit of ranting. If you don't like it, too bad. It's free music and you have to read me going on and on about nothing in order to get to it.

Many of you already know that The Divine Chemical wasn't always running around under that alias. We used to be holders of the much less pretentious name of Null. After quite a lapse of time, the name was eventually dropped due to fear that there might be some confusion with another industrial artist by the name of K.K. Null. In retrospect, I didn't really have a reason to give a fuck about this. Null was pretty much my industrial experiments in their infancy. The story of the evolution of Null is quite a stupid one. I had just moved to Austin and had the intention of starting a cyber-thrash band kinda like Fear Factory. So, I threw together a bunch of tracks without vocals as I was and still am unable to do any real singing. Now, the problem was finding some people to play this stuff out live with me. This was a very tough thing to do, especially on the vocalist front. Finally, after months of searching, I stumbled on a gentleman by the name of Bryan Alvear. Nice guy. Totally digged the idea. So, I get him over to my place to let him listen in and see how into it he would be. Then came the magical words which changed my musical direction forever: "Why don't you try something a little more industrial?" I had dabbled in the genre before, but never tried anything serious. In my quest to become the next Fear Factory, I had accumulated a number of synths, so it wasn't so tough a thing to do. A couple months and a shitload of work later, I had finished approximately ten songs requiring vocals. Low and behold, the son of a bitch couldn't be found anywhere. I figured what the hell, I'd already tread far enough in the direction of electronic music, I might as well continue. Then, one fateful drunken night, I discovered that with a fuck-ton of effects (namely distortion) I could alter my voice to fit the material, and so this lousy fucker that wanted nothing more than to play guitar for a cyber-thrash band ended up being the vocalist for a bunch of alcohol-loving industrial maniacs. It is for these reasons that this music holds a special place in my heart... well more accurately my abdomen. Somewhere in the vicinity of my colon. So anyway, we did a number of gigs with this music. Even developed a small following and at one point had a record deal with a small start-up label. Alas... things eventually fell apart as they tend to do in my life. The final gig we ever had, our guitarist didn't show up, and we damn near called it quits that night. Thankfully, I was drunk enough to where I just grabbed the fucking guitar and sang with it. Most of the songs I had discovered were simple enough to where my novice abilities could pull off vocals and guitar simultaneously. Somehow, that crazy night with a bunch of drunken Germans trying to lick my wife/keyboardist's face reignited the fire and we decided to trudge on with the new name. I spent the next year working on what I hoped would be my masterpiece: Comatose Insomniac. A lot of the songs were remakes of the old ones, but with significant differences. In most cases, what you will hear below will sound nothing like what is on Comatose Insomniac. I tried to improve as much as possible, especially in production. I most cases, I think I succeeded. Extermination carries much more energy in it's new incarnation than it did in the original. Solution never made it quite to the level that the original version, Sheep was at. So, it was with this new album that the resurrected version Null was going to take flight again. As many now know, I ended up having a bit of a 'breakdown' of mental health, and landed my happy ass in Las Vegas to be near my parents, and eventually ended up in a mental hospital. My wife and I are still trying to pick up where we left off with the band, this time with her doing vocals and a new guy playing basslines on the keyboards. Where we're going from here... who knows. Somehow, I fear that I may never see a blood, fog, and strobe light covered stage again. All I can do is try my damnedest.

So enough ranting (for now.) Here's an explanation of what follows: The following tracks were recorded in three separate stages. There's the original Null material that started us off. (This can further be divided into tracks that were done before and after I had a full band.) Following was our first attempt with our little record deal: Filth. This was a lot of fun because there was a lot of input from my fellow bandmates in the making of this one. A lot of these tracks never made it to the stage, and if memory serves me correctly, we never did distribute these CD's in the way we did with the free album we gave away at shows. The final segment consists of one track. It was a marketing ploy I was attempting where I wrote a song, played this song for only one show, distributed copies of this track at the shows, and was never going to play it again. Thanks for reading this (unless you're an asshole and you just skipped this entire section and went straight to downloading) and I hope you enjoy this piece of my past.

A Sorrowful Celebration of the Flesh. (And you thought you'd escaped my ramblings! Well you were wrong, bitches!) Again, if memory serves me correctly, this was the very first track I had ever worked on as an 'electronic musician.' It's very simplistic and in a lot of ways reminiscent of my influences at the time, particularly Bile. That cool movie dialog sample at the beginning comes from the movie Event Horizon. That's right, that movie owns. If you don't like it, fuck you. My opinion is the only one that matters. Now that I don't work for the govt anymore, I can tell the true origin of these lyrics: It's about my boss. It's petty, but I was desperate for inspiration. He was a die-hard conservative Christian type, and we had a conflict of personalities that ended up resulting in my being written up at one point. This song was written as a way of saying that everything he believed and new as reality were wrong. ...I'm a pissant. When Comatose Insomniac was written, I had fallen so much in love with these lyrics that I had to use them. Otherwise, the new version has nothing to do with this song. ...gotta love the way that Boss drum machine's filter stepped. This is one of the only times where I'd say that filter stepping helped make the song better.

America 2.0. This is one of those songs where the lyrics are extremely self-explanatory. I hate George W. Bush. I'm not going into details as to why because there is enough controversy over him already, so you probably already know my reasons. Aside from that, this song is extremely special to me. The reason being, when I was scewing around with recording vocals, it was listening to the finished proto-mastered version of this song that made me go "Hey! This song fucking rocks! I'm gonna be the vocalist for this shit!" I think in a lot of ways, this version is better than the one that ended up on Comatose Insomniac. Fuck all the haters: The Korg EA-1 was what helped make this song so fucking slamming. And you can't help but laugh at how god-awful that Orbit bass (the one that sounds kinda like a slap bass) was, and yet somehow it worked. And yeah, the jump in volume at the end of the song for the vocals sucks, but it's hard to fix that on a hardware recorder. That dancey outro though used to make us all laugh during band practice.

When God Rears its Ugly Head Yeah... the lyrics are fucking stupid. I hated them the moment I wrote them. ("He's so full, of bullshit, when he speaks, shit falls out." What the fuck was I thinking?) But you know what? This was probably the most fun song in the world to play live. Somehow the flow made it a blast for the whole band. ...plus I used to pantomime the interlude just to make fun of myself. I love the way the staccato synths turned out, thanks to the EA-1 again. (I used to use the shit out of it. It was a fun synth. That's why when I sold my EMX-1, I bought another EA-1.) It's always amazed me the way that Unbreakable movie sample at the beginning matched with the tempo of the song without any alteration. Samuel L. Jackson has an amazing speaking voice that takes on a rhythm all its own.

Carnival. Again, this is much different than the version on Comatose Insomniac. Fun lyrics again, what can I say? The funny thing about the lyrics though is that they were based on the movie Logan's Run. Why this is funny is that when I wrote the lyrics, I hadn't seen this movie in years. So when I'm referring to the 'Carnival' it's actually supposed to be the Carousel from the movie. It still worked though because of the way the main string synth has kind of a carnival-ish tone to it. I was using the Korg DW-8000 to make a string sound, and used an organ tone instead of the usual waveforms, so with the envelope of a string, it just took on this sick life of it's own. Sampling for this song was fun, too. I compose my drums in layers. (That's why I couldn't keep my ESX-1. Nine note polyphony doesn't do it for me.) I like to thicken it out so that the percussion drives a song, especially the shit you don't hear. So one of the main drum elements is a loop I sampled out of an old program called ReBirth. The drums had a lot of delay on it so that they didn't kick in until towards the end of the loop, hence why it kinda rolls toward the end. Live was always funny for me because I have this drunken habit of doing the Jesus pose at the end of the interlude. ...I'm sure it looked ridiculous.

Heroin Needle. I don't know why these lyrics came out of me. I had the chorus line stuck in my head since I was a kid. A heroin needle seems like a clever analogy to a lot of things, but I'm not that clever, so the song ends up just being about doing heroin. I've never done any hardcore drugs. I don't know what the fuck a heroin addict goes through. Playing this one live was interesting though because I usually just sat on the front of the stage, picking one particular person to glare at and screaming the lyrics at this person. Sometimes it was effective as a stage performance, other times it lead to weird situations... like a drunk chick dancing right in front of your face acting like she wants your body. The lead synth was a the first patch I had ever made on the DW-8000. Sometimes I miss that synth because of sounds like that. ...listening to it now, I had totally forgotten about that ending! That was totally fucking cheesy!

Extermination. Here's the original version of this song. All in all, I like the new version much much MUCH better! This song was totally banging and a pain in the ass to play live, but when recreated, it made it all worth the work. Terminator 3 samples. How exciting. ...I really can't think of anything else to say about this song. ...except that mixing was really shitty on this version. I really don't like this version. Go buy the fucking CD and here it the way it should be!!!

Data Crisis. This is an instrumental, yet for some reason I always insisted on playing this track live as an ending number. Everybody would walk off stage and grab a beer while I play keys. ...I think I really missed out on the beer because of this song. I came up with this song because I thought it would be interesting to try to make a song using the same methods Skinny Puppy would have used. Sadly, the only thing that this track has in common with Skinny Puppy is that we both were using some badass lofi samplers, in my case a Casio FZ-20m. If you're looking for a good cheap sampler that has a unique character, get a hold of one of the Casio FZ samplers. These are fucking amazing sounding and have a whole different tonality than the old E-Mu and Akai samplers. Just listen to the way it makes the song in spite of the bad mixing. I am currently kicking myself in the ass for 1.) selling mine in the first place 2.) passing up one of these in favor of an Akai S900 3.) Not having the money to buy another one right now. Heh... sounds more like Orbital than Skinny Puppy.

Sheep. This was the very first song I wrote with another person. Sphincter came up with these crazy fucking guitar lines. I tried to remake the song on Comatose Insomniac under the name "Solution." I think it fails in sounding as badass as this version. This track makes me want to beat the shit out of something for fun. The lyrics were just silly. It's making fun of Emo kids and other whiny bands like KoRn. This was also the first time I used the death metal growling voice on a recording. ...and that wood splintering sample at the end was an accident. I don't know how it ended up there, but I left it in because of how awkward it sounds. I think I may have used to much compression on this song during mixdown.

Flesh. When I first heard the band Terrorfakt, I thought that the whole power noise thing was the most amazing thing ever concieved. I had even temporarily entertained the notion of giving up industrial and becoming a power noise artist. Like most other musical genres that I end up liking, I thought I'd take a stab at it. This is the result. It's not nearly as high energy and motivational as somebody like Terrorfakt, but I still enjoyed making it. To my ears now, it sounds more like hardcore techno slowed down. I'm sure if Ben ever heard it, he'd beat the shit out of me, though.

America 2.0 (Facade's Remix). So for a while, I had the privlege of having Facade playing keys. I wish you could hear the first batch of his music that he made, but he has made it, like himself, disappear from the face of the earth. So when I went hunting for a vocalist, this was the first guy to apply. However, I liked his music a lot more than mine, and so I set into action a conniving little plan to make his band a live performing band, and it worked for a little while. Once, I started playing my own stuff live and realized I needed a keyboardist to make it all work, that's how he fell into the band. One of the cool things I got as a bonus from all of this though is that before we even got to meet, he did a remix of America 2.0 for me as a way of showing his skill as a musician. I nearly shat myself when I heard this for the first time.

12XU. As most of you will probably notice, this track sounds a lot different than the stuff that I had normally done up until this time. The reason is simple: this song is a cover. The original band is called "Wire" and the opening voices and the '12XU' chant is sampled from the original. Astroboy had come over one day and absolutely insisted that we do a cover of this song. I wasn't much of a punk fan myself. In fact, I think I can safely say flat out that I hated punk music. HOWEVER... this track was a lot of fun to make. I raped the verse guitars a bit to make it a bit more industrial, and added my own bizarre ass interlude piece to extend the song and add tension. While I still don't flip out and go "Ooh! Punk music!" this song did help me to gain an appreciation of the genre. This was also the most extensive use of the MS2000 I had made at the time. It's pretty much the entire synth section.

NOW! I would like to pause at this point and make an announcement/observation: Two of the tracks from this era are missing. A Single Digit Salute and Two Megabytes. If anybody has a copy of either of these songs... I would love you forever if you sent me a copy of them! Not just for the sake of the archive, but I'd like to have a copy for my personal collection of failed musical endeavors. I've already lost enough of my own music as it is. I'm also missing the intro track for America 2.0 featuring all the funny Bush samples. I never put it on CD, but did I maybe send the mp3 to anybody? (While I'm at it, does anybody have copies of the Necrophile album I did in high school or that death metal track I did for a coworker's birthday present?) Thanks a bunch if anybody can find these for me!

Filth. This was the intro track for the Filth EP. It's mainly just a bunch of random ass samples meant to make you go "What the fuck!?" It's like... filthy and stuff! The string sounds came from the Kawai K4R. Not bad for a strange ass synth such as that one. If it didn't suck so much ass to edit the patches, I'd probably still have it.

Drycel. Uhm... I used to have a Korg EM-1. It's because of this song that I had to sell it. It was too hard to not write entire songs around that thing. Yeah, it was simple as shit, but it did very well with the limited resources it had. It was primarily the effects section that just made it so fucking evil sounding. I literally stopped using most of my other synths because of this bastard. This is also the first song that Astroboy and I cowrote one drunken evening. Actually... come to think of it, she did all of the writing. I just provided vocals, synths, and a drum section to go behind her guitar parts. Very effective. We should have written more songs like this. It came out very... I can't even begin to describe what I think of this creepy ass song. It's everything I ever strove for in industrial in a lot of ways. It's sick. it's got those haunting synthlines, the guitarwork was very mechanical... it just had this overall weird ambience that I loved.

Victim 13. You can tell that the '12XU' cover inspired me more than I like to admit. Animal rights song. The lyrics are very much Skinny Puppy influenced. I love this song, but we never could play it live because the tempo was just too fucking fast! Sure, playing guitar lines at that speed is no problem for me, but only if I'm doing it sporadically. Playing that fast for nearly four minutes made my wrist want to fall off. I'm an industrial guitarist, I'm not in Slayer, so cut me some slack! Nobody in the band could keep up with this mad speed. We thought Astroboy had it, until it came to light that SHE WAS CHEATING!!! Yeah, you thought nobody would find out about your little 'hit the string once and wave my hand around like I'm playing it' shenanigans, didn't you! Mwahahaha!!!

Stagnate. This song makes me want to cry. These are the best vocals I have ever written. The tone of the song is just so fucking mean, and the live alterations made this song so fucking moving. This song has had the most reaction we've ever had out of a crowd. BUT... Though I have tried many times to recreate this song for a new album, I just can't do it. I can't seem to attain the crazy perfection that the original version of this song had. I don't know if it's my sample selection, the Proteus FX, or even the Darkstar, but I just can't make this song the way it used to be. Unlike other songs though, I don't DARE use the lyrics on another song. It would be an insult to this masterpiece of a track.

Another quick pause. I just noticed Slave New World was missing, too. No, it wasn't a Sepultura cover, I just didn't realize until long afterward that the song title sounded so familiar for a reason. Unfortunately, I doubt that I'll ever recover this song as I only know of one person who might have a copy of this track.

Only Once. I've explained the function of this song already up above, but let me elaborate a bit. This track served two purposes. The one previously mentioned, as well as being an experiment in venturing into a different musical terrain. At one point, it felt like Null was coming to a close. I knew that I would have to start a new musical endeavor when Null died, so this was my shot at electro-industrial. This was also the only song I used an Alesis Micron on. While it was one awesome sounding synth, editing on it was horrendous, so I eventually traded up for an Alesis Ion. It's pretty much the same synth, only it drops the sequencer and other fun toys in favor of the ability to actually edit the synth patches using it's dozens of knobs, therefore making it much more usable for my purposes.

That's it. I hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane, and enjoy the free music!!!

-jim wicked