04/05/2015
A remixed and remastered version of the album Dissonance, originally released in 2011.
---------

Dissonance: Harmony

Dissonance was my big, ambitious concept album about the digital age. At least that's what it was intended to be. It was written, recorded and released in 2011. I think I remember the exact point of it’s inception. I had just been to see David Fincher’s masterpiece The Social Network at the cinema. It sparked something inside me. I then listened to the incredible soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross about a gazillion times afterwards. I knew I wanted to create something which explored similar themes to the film. It was to be about disconnection from humanity and co-existence with technology. So I had big plans. I even created a website called The Hate Pattern, with it’s main purpose being… I’m not sure. It had codes and weird pictures. I think about 3 people visited it.

So after sorting out Broken a little while back, I thought I would give Dissonance another listen. It’s a bit of a mess. I can see what I was getting at but, as with Broken, the final outcome is not quite there. Everything is very compressed for starters. And I really overdid it with some of the synths. It was an album designed to be as far away as possible from my debut Echolocation in terms of sound. I achieved that but it still sounds amateur. Hence Dissonance: Harmony. Like with Broken: Fixed, I have looked to make the whole thing sound more clean and professional. I have upped the overall loudness and beefed up the bass, as well as clearing out some unnecessary midi tracks. But what separates these two remixed and remastered albums is that Broken was fairly organic (i.e. guitars, bass, drums, vocals) whereas Dissonance was always heavy on the midi and electronics. This has allowed me to mess around with individual parts and instruments a lot more. For example, Nine Months has a completely new lead synth sound, Synthetic Skin’s strings are more lush and Wire Release is getting close to the overblown dance/trance track it was always intended to be. The changes are much more obvious than on Broken: Fixed.

Dissonance: Harmony also contains an extra track, Lights Out. This is a totally new version of an old acoustic demo. You can view the video here - www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwYKBetf8ek

Feel free to let me know what you think. And if you like it, share it. (It’s free so, y’know, no excuse.)

Cheers

RC

NB. At the time of writing this, a rather terrible thing has happened. My external hard drive has died. Inexplicably. Everything I have ever done musically is, or was, on there. Which means that I had only just finished Dissonance: Harmony. But I don't think it was actually completely finished. So what you will hear is the final round of masters that I managed to do before I lost everything. Lights Out was nowhere near ready. So it is still an unfinished version. Maybe it's time to move on...