So The Optic Nerve is finished!  It took quite a bit longer than I planned, but I think the extra wait has been worth it.  The single consists of four tracks: the original song, the “Near-Sighted Mix”, the “604 Mix”, and a new remix of “Cyberpunks”.  All of these total up for a length of just under 30 minutes, which is a bit long for a single, but I don’t think that matters much.

I’ve already written about the original mix of “The Optic Nerve”, but I figured I’d offer a few more thoughts on it now that everything is complete.  As I mentioned before, the new age 2012 vocals were not the ones I had originally planed to include.  Instead I had come up with a cyberpunk-inspired story about a guy living in a dystopian future who had just purchased new optic nerve implants from a large cybernetics company.  Upon leaving the building they start to malfunction, sending way too much information to his brain and ultimately sending him into a state of panic and psychosis.  Unfortunately I had to leave out the lyrics I had written since I couldn’t get the recordings to come out right, which still makes me sad to this day.  But maybe I’ll still use the concept in a future song.

Musically “The Optic Nerve” was influenced by both Skinny Puppy and KMFDM, and so it has a more industrial feel than many of my other songs.  In fact the entire concept was sparked by the song “Worlock” by Skinny Puppy, in which they sing the words “optic nerve” through a harmonizer.  This and the bitcrushed/aliased bell sound were basically the starting points for “The Optic Nerve”.

The “Near-Sighted Mix” is really just a dance-oriented version of the original song with a few structural changes.  It’s also was what held up the release of the single for so long since I had an INCREDIBLY hard time getting the mix to sound decent enough for release.  Things either sounded too bassy, not bassy enough, too bland, or totally off balance.  In the end I finally got so fed up that I put it on the back burner and went on with other work.  This proved to be the right decision since I was able to come back later on and actually get the mix where I wanted it.  Still, I feel this is the weakest track on the single.

The “604 Mix”, which is a goa trance remix of the original song, is probably my favorite.  It came about when I realized that I could easily make the original song sound even more trippy if I sped it up a bit and added some squelchy synths, which are a staple in goa trance.  The subject matter also fit quite nicely into that genre, and so I set about restructuring everything, adding new synth lines, and swapping out a few other sounds.  In the end the track has a very nice set of build-up-break-down sections that provide movement but still manage to keep the rhythm going.  I am also especially happy with the way the new goa-like melody turned out.

Finishing up the single is the new “Leaky Mix” version of “Cyberpunks”.  If you’ve heard the original then you’ve probably know that the song is about distrusting “the system” due to its attempts to control us with (mis)information.  You might also be aware of the massive leak of 250k+ US Embasy cables by Wikileaks that started last November.  Well, the “Leaky Mix” is sort of my way of showing support for what Wikileaks is doing.

I didn’t want to change as many things in this particular remix as I did in the “Anti-System Remix” on Inside The Beat.  Instead I saw it as a way to blend the expanded “speech section” of the “Anti-Syste Remix” together with the original song, as well as an opportunity to flesh out and improve things.  The biggest changes are definitely the intro and outro sections, which now have samples taken from a speech given by John F. Kennedy, and the completely rewritten drum lines.  Also - and this is probably something very few will care about, but I was really happy with it - I swapped out the synth that creates the bass sound.  The original one was being produced with Arturia’s Jupiter-8V software and was the exact same patch that I used for “I Love Penguins”.  But I was never really happy with it in “Cyberpunks” because I felt like it always lacked a bit of an edge.  Well it turns out that the same sound I used for the harsh saw in the chorus of “The Optic Nerve” (which was produced by my PolyEvolver keyboard) was very close to the original bass sound in “Cyberpunks”.  It was bassy, warm, and still had an edge.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up The Optic Nerve.  The only thing that hasn’t been done yet is the cover artwork, which will be shot soon.  Once that’s finished I’ll be uploading all the tracks.