Memes and Dreams

Memes and Dreams, released November 13, 2017, is my first album since the EP Frontier Justice released in January 2016. Memes and Dreams marks the start of a new era in the King Ruhtra project. I’m taking a step away from Electronic Dance Music and starting to develop a sound of my own.

On the title of the album
“Memes” because all the songs are short ideas, and “Dreams” because for the first time I really heard a non-existent song in one of my dreams. I’m not a very vivid dreamer, so when this happened, I hopped out of bed and got on my Mac to get the idea out. The song is “Right of Asylum,” and in the dream, I was sitting in the middle of a circle of guitarists who were each only playing a little portion of the loop. It was a cohesive piece, but each beat or so the pan, tone, and style of playing would change. I definitely didn’t recreate the song in the dream by the time I got it recorded, but the idea prevailed. Memes and Dreams also rhymes.

On the lack of material before this release
In the 2 year absence of solo album work, I had multiple opportunities to expand my knowledge and tastes in music. I played guitar in the funk/metal project Blunt Cousin, which got me writing heavier and more technical material. I studied a lot of Jazz and began conceptualizing ideas based around its theory (special thanks to Rick Beato, Adam Neely, and Mark Levine). My career as an audio engineer and composer became my main source of income. And still, every day pushes me forward in music and life. I decided it was time to buckle down and explore some new writing.

On the length of the songs
The songs in Memes and Dreams are in short format. They are all under two minutes. It is fun to try to build a song up in as little time as possible. I have found it easier to pay attention to detail and really make each beat special in this short format. The music is also all instrumental, so the “verse, chorus, verse, chorus” model doesn’t lend itself as well. I like to think of the album as a series of short stories strung together into a semi-coherent piece.
In the past, I’d write long, progressive pieces. Some as long as 10 minutes (shout out to Sawusoidal: The Zinc Blimp) and I found that they got really repetitive, or would lose my attention listening back to them. Too much copy and pasting. Believe me, I love progressive music, but when I’m listening to my material in Logic Pro over and over, the last thing I want to do is have 10 minutes to get detail oriented with. If I really like a song and want it to be longer, I’ll just listen to it again!

On the abundance of guitar
There have been albums in the past in which I recorded guitar, but listening back, it kind of sounds uncanny and forced to me. That may be that I’m a better guitarist now than I was, or it may be that my sound was too EDM to have my guitar playing fit in the mix nicely. Regardless, I do most of my writing on my guitars (although I’ve been starting to write more and more with piano), and I wanted to represent that in my work. It’s great to compose for all instruments, but because guitar is ‘my instrument,’ I have found that the music comes out more authentic when I have guitar tracked as an integral piece of the sonic puzzle.
I can get a variety of sounds going into my interface through various pedals, and I like using Guitar Rig in my sessions for further manipulate the sound. I play a Fender Stratocaster through an Orange Crush 35RT amplifier. I used my Whammy 5 pedal a lot on this record to get cool effects going in.
I have found myself spending a lot of time designing synths in my past projects and losing passion for the writing process because I’d be so obsessed with tweaking the soft synths. With guitar it’s more plug and play, and I prefer that way of writing songs. I just don’t have the patience! That being said, Unnervous has a pretty ‘designed synth,’ and I’m still very into synthesizing sounds.