Through a Corrupted Mind

At this point in the album, we move from the most complex track to the least complex track. Through a Corrupted Mind, in title, is a homage to the character Vincent from the upcoming horror film Relentless. It is not just in title, however, that the track relates to this film.

The main sequence of Through a Corrupted Mind was actually the original idea for the opening piece of Relentless. Upon extending the opening I came up with a second theme, which I felt better suited the opening, leaving the original as an orphaned sound clip. Given my obsession with sound manipulation, I began experimenting with this clip. The basis of the track ended up basically being a version of the track played at a quarter of the speed.

On top of the melodic base, a noisy soundscape is superimposed. This harsh buildup was created from the atmospheric ending of the Relentless credit piece, Nowhere Safe. It's a heavily manipulated and stretched version, a process which helped to tame the abrasive tone of the original source.

Aside from these two layers, there is a semi-percussive layer which appears near the ending. This layer is created from three copies of a percussive section of a film cue run through Audio Damage's glitch plugin, Replicant. The layers have varied reverb and misc effect settings to give the sum a bit of depth. The three parts were trimmed and arranged as necessary, but were mostly dictated through the random nature of Replicant.

As I stated in the beginning, this was indeed the least complex manipulation on the album, though the effort which originally went into writing the base melodic layer was fairly high. This track just happened to benefit from an outtake of the soundtrack. It just goes to show how important a track's tempo can be, as the Smear Campaign version, in my opinion, is far superior to the original.