More Dimensions

For those who are unfamiliar with the Quake Epsilon build it is a free build of Quake 1 with HD graphics and sound. I've worked on it for about the past ten years, on-and-off, including doing soundtrack work for it and it's expansions. My final release was 'More Dimensions', which you can find here:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/quake-epsilon-build/

Back in 2019, when things were saner than they are now, I went around the factory complex within which my recording studio is located, began recording various bits of industrial equipment and processes using my field recording setup. This included flame-thrower-powered rock-tumblers, bandsaws etc, and other industrial sounds. My aim was unclear, I just wanted to see what I could find in the noise.

I slowed each section of audio down to various degrees - in some cases up to 16x. I was recording at a reasonably high sample-rate, so not a lot of artifacting or weirdness was introduced by doing so. In this process I developed a vast body of weird, alien, sometimes unsettling ambiences: some sounded like fireworks, some like steamtrains in a tunnel, though none of them quite like the real thing. Obviously they weren't sufficient in-and-of themselves - they weren't musical works in any right - but they offered textures I couldn't find elsewhere.

Over the course of the next two years I would create and combine these SFX with tracks of dark ambient and progressive industrial music to create the soundtrack for the game. Brief song descriptions follow:

Speckled wildebeest fight-cannon: basically head-on industrial rock. I utilised one of the industrial soundscapes, a slowed-down recording of a bandsaw cutting through wood, and effected it so it became like whispered voices.

The Forgotten Sepulcher: again industrial rock, but with large stands of ambience in between the sections of bombast. One trick I employed on both these tracks was making up for my lack in guitar/bass skill by recording each part at half-speed, then speeding them up using a particular algorithm which I found brought in interesting artifacts into the sound.

Ophanim: I recorded some scratch takes of vocal and violin melodies and harmonies into the builtin mic of my laptop, not expecting to use those recordings in any capacity, just as demo takes to get my ideas down. The results weren't perfect, but by experimenting with slowing the results down I found the vocals turned into a kind of gothic drone.

Touros (instrumental version): An older borked export of a track that somehow caught my attentions through it's weirdness, turned into another large gothic landscape once slowed down and combined with industrial ambiences.

Leader of the Dead World: Recorded late one night back in 2019 in a fever-dream state, and combined with industrial ambiences, and a couple of slower swamp-rock tracks I came up with.

Monsieur is displeased: Digitally-altered recorded bass guitar, breathing into a laptop mic, and fake drums.

My teeth are sharp and I am full of drums: I reconstructed an older track I made in 1997 but never finished, which was made in tracker software.

Carcinisation: The stress of two life incidents back-to-back were funnelled into this progressive industrial track.

Psalm for the Dying: Similar to Ophanim, I used slowed-down choral recordings I made with my own voice to create a dread-filled ambient soundscape.

Xinjiang: A slowed-down and altered version of an old track, this is dedicated to the people of Xinjiang, who must be freed from their dreadful circumstances (see: https://action.amnesty.org.au/truth).

Burn. Everything: An industrial alt-rocker along the lines of the earlier 'Forgotten Sepulcher'. The strange ambient chimes are from a broken wind-up music box made by a catfood manufacturer.

Hopefully the soundtrack does justice to the game and the people who made it, including the original game's composer Trent Reznor (of NiN).

I hope everybody gets a real kick out of it.