So, on Myspace last week I made a post about a new album I have been working on. Here are some details regarding this album.

I started writing this material in early 2005, around the time I released “We Waited For A Subtle Dawn”. It was intended to be the follow-up to that album. Eventually, the idea was to put together a score for the “Frankenstein” by Edison Studios filmed in 1910.

For those unaware, Edison’s “Frankenstein” is one of the earliest known horror movies, as well as the first film version of Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. The movie was lost for many decades, until a private collector announced he had a copy of the reel in the 1970’s. Here is a really good article on the movie and its history.

Copies of this film are floating around Youtube, Archive.org, and elsewhere. I am not typically into the stock music editor’s choice for these old silent films, and this one in particular seemed particularly obnoxious. I decided to use this film as the basis for composition. At that time, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to try to sync the movie with the music or not.

I sat down and wrote a number of small tracks, mostly composed of simple melodies, with minimal percussion. I started lining up these tracks with the film, and after some personal frustrations that accompanied a lot of what I was doing at the time, scrapped the project. I took a few of the tracks, and started fleshing them out into finished pieces and putting them into a demo for an album that would be the follow-up album for “I Swear By All The Flowers” sometime in 2006. Sometime after that, I decided on a major change in direction and ended up composing and releasing, “I Swear By All The Flowers”, instead of any real follow-up to “We Waited For A Suble Dawn”.

Recently I was going through data backups and ran into this unfinished project, and decided to finish it up. I really like some of the tracks, and hate to see it sit abandoned on a CD-R and never finished. I have been working on it the past few weeks. Here are some details:

Tracklist

01. Discovered the Mystery of Life
02. The Evil In Frankenstein’s Mind Creates a Monster
03. Appalled at the Sight of His Creation
04. The Return Home
05. The Monster Sees Himself
06. Bridal Night
07. Overcome by Love and Disappears
08. Attack
09. The Monster
10. The Mirror
11. Leaving for College
12. Edison’s Frankenstein

Tracks 1 through 7 are the individual songs broken apart by changes. Track 8 is an extended version of the music from the attack scene. Tracks 9 through 11 are outtake tracks, which were originally used in the mixed, then replaced. Track 12 is the final mix as it appears synchronized with the film.

All of the melodies and musical parts were composed around March and April of 2005. Tracks 2 and 5, which involve important scenes with the Monster, are mostly ambient/noise pieces which I mostly composed over the last few weeks. Track 6 ends with an abrasive percussion sequence which was originally composed to go on the album, “Blood”, but was scrapped because I felt it detracted from the effect of that album. It ended up working here, so it was mixed into the score. Track 8 is the whole recording as it was to appear on “Blood”.

Track 9 is a newly assembled track that plays during the monster creation scene. It is buried in the mix with some older material. I liked how it turned out by itself, and wanted to put it on here by itself.

Tracks 10 and 11 were initially composed in 2005, but in 2006 assembled as full recordings and put on a demo. When putting together the final score, I decided they didn’t fit as well as I had liked, and left them off. I felt they should be included on this album.

Since this material in no way represents the future direction I am going with Life Toward Twilight, it is not going to be promoted very heavily. Still, I like the end result and want to share it. This really is the follow-up to “We Waited For A Subtle Dawn”, and people who enjoy that album will very likely enjoy this as well. I will be posting it as a free download in a few days, along with the film synced to the music on Google video. Youtube won’t let me upload a 12 minute video, but Google video will. I am also going to post it for sale as a CD/DVD for anyone that wants it in higher quality.

In other news, I did a major update the the Life Toward Twilight web page. See it here.