Experiment Portal Interview: Inside «Machine Dialectics»

 

It was a pretty natural process. I always enjoy having a clear goal in mind before composing, so the material was all written with the goal of fitting into this minimalistic low-fi mindset. It happened a few times that I got carried away and instinctively started adding more and more harmonies and percussion, and then I either took a step back and removed some of the elements or decided to save the idea for later use. The idea was to keep things simple, but not at the expense of depth, so it took some work to find the right balance. The first song on the album, "To those that dare to dream", serves as a bridge between the old and new Mitochondrial Sun styles, as it's by far the most layered and complex track.

 

It was planned from the start as one of the overarching goals for the album. As much as I like to create meticulously arranged music with a lot of harmonies and new things happening all the time, there's something liberating about not overthinking every single note and always looking for somewhere to add more details. Like a lot of other musicians, I can be too much of a perfectionist at times, so I wanted to challenge myself by being more spontaneous. With that said, it's not a "true" improv album by any means, just a bit more so than my previous releases.

 

For the whole retro vibe of the album to work, it made sense to have it mastered in an old school way with a lot of weird analog equipment and a certain amount of randomness. I've worked with Anders Lagerfors on every Mitochondrial Sun release so far (he mixed the previous albums), and he also did some work for Dark Tranquillity in the past, so I completely trust him to add the final sparkle of magic to the sound. I don't have the audiophile skill to know exactly what he did, but his masters add a lot of depth and vibrancy compared to my mixes.

 

 

Hopefully every album is unique in its own way, but I'd say that the strangeness of "Machine Dialectics" is that it's designed to be an understated and minimalistic album where a lot of the power comes from the open nature and sometimes almost half-finished vibe of the songs. Not overworking the music also makes it feel more alive and open for interpretation, and as a listener I often find this kind of sketch-like quality interesting. 

 

It would have been easy to make the tracks more superficially interesting by adding - for example - more percussion, more melody changes and more attention-grabbing sound design elements, but I wanted things to sound like they could have been made in the 80's, on very limited equipment and without the need to automate a lot of FX to have modern soundscape. The target audience is probably people like me; old computer geeks that associate the music with the state of mind that one would have playing with 8-bit computers in the mid '80's when things obviously were very primitive from a technical viewpoint but allowed us to use our imagination to fill in the blanks.

 

In a way, this is similar to the riff tapes that bands sometimes circulated in the tapetrading circuit back in the early '90's - there would be only one guitar playing the riffs, and then it's up to yourself to imagine the various ways it could be arranged and how it potentially could sound as a completed song. Many times, this crude demo version felt more interesting than the finished song, and I wanted part of this feeling to be present in "Machine Dialectics".

 

 

The beauty of music is that everyone can interpret it differently, so I don't really have any wishes or requests in this regard. I'm happy if the music takes the listener on a journey, but the details of that journey could be whatever the person decides it to be. The reason why we emphasized the idea of listening to the whole album from start to finish is that there intentionally aren't any hit singles on the album, and none of the songs were really designed to be overly catchy or to be a great representation of the greater whole. Every song is different, and in my view (this is of course very subjective), some of them make a lot more sense if you also listen to the song before and after to get the proper context. 

 

It might sound weird, but experimenting with electronic music made me a better musician in ways that I didn't expect. It's hard to explain, but I was used to making music only with the guitar in hand, whereas now I'm able to compose inside my brain and then "translate" it to songs in my home studio. I love playing metal guitar and will always do so, but after 30 years of only playing a certain type of music, it was pretty liberating to just experiment with completely different tools and see what would happen. Electronic music can sometimes be just as much (if not more) about the sounds than the melodies, and you can use the studio almost like an instrument by processing sounds, adding saturation and reverb and basically do what you want. Playing in a traditional metal or rock band is more rigid; a distorted guitar will always be a distorted guitar even if you can play around with the sound a bit. Both situations have their own advantages.

 

I think that it just fits the conceptual world of the album. As mentioned before, I wanted a certain retro/vintage feel that to people of my generation is synonymous with early 8-bit video games and a romanticized idea of space exploration. Having footage of old CRT TV sets displaying space footage was an easy way of achieving this without having to spend an enormous amount of time.