The Creative Problem
I couldn't stop thinking about noise.
Not the productive kind of sonic chaos that drives experimental music forward; I mean the point where abrasiveness stops being compelling and becomes pure antagonism. Where does that line exist? More importantly: how do you dance along it without falling over?
New Era emerged from this specific question at a pivotal moment in my creative trajectory. I'd spent years pumping out music at high volume (20+ albums between 2020 and 2023), and the sheer quantity had created a strange effect: my evolution was granular because I was producing so much so quickly. When you're making dozens of tracks in rapid succession, the changes happen incrementally, almost invisibly, because you're moving laterally across vast creative ground rather than drilling vertically into new sonic possibilities.
By 2024, my life shifted dramatically. I had less time, more responsibilities, and paradoxically this constraint forced sharper stylistic pivots. Each idea received more focus because I couldn't just move on to the next one tomorrow. The reduced volume meant each track carried more weight, demanded more attention, required more intentional synthesis. This wasn't a conscious strategy; it was a practical reality that accidentally became one of the most productive constraints I'd ever worked under.
Then the tools changed everything. I got access to Pigments, Vital, and most significantly: Random and Random Metal from Beat Surfing. Random became a catalyst for transformation. It is an "infinite sound generator plugin," forcing me to confront sonic disorder directly. I could generate textures that were genuinely harsh, metallic, shrieking. The plugin didn't just offer new sounds; it destabilized my entire workflow in a productive way, forcing me into territory I would never have reached through incremental exploration alone.
The question wasn't whether I could make abrasive sounds (the VST + plugins made that trivially easy), but whether I could build something intentionally compelling around them. Could I create music that was aggressive, industrial, chaotic, and still musical? Still purposeful? Still something people would want to listen to rather than flee from?
The risk was clear: I might just make an unlistenable album. Pure noise dressed up as experimentation, mistaking harshness for innovation.
Technical/Conceptual Framework: Building the Cage Around Chaos
The solution required building structural safeguards around the chaos. These weren't limitations that constrained creativity; they were the architecture that made genuine exploration possible. Without them, I'd just be generating random harsh textures and hoping something coherent emerged.
I imposed internal rules that sound almost embarrassingly simple in retrospect, but they were essential:
Harmonic Grounding
Even when the timbres became metallic, jagged, and industrial, they still had to sit atop recognizable chords or tonal centers. The listener needed something familiar to anchor to. This doesn't mean the harmonies were simple or conventional (I was still exploring tension, dissonance, and unusual voicings), but there had to be an underlying harmonic logic that provided coherence even when the surface textures were screaming at you.
I'd learned from my earlier work on Pristine Inertia that strategically placed chords, especially tension-heavy or harmonically "leaning-forward" voicings, could keep listeners moving emotionally even when the rhythm relaxed or the arrangement simplified. In New Era, I applied this principle in reverse: keep the harmonic foundation clear so the textural chaos on top has something to push against.
Rhythmic Stability
I stayed in 4/4. This might seem conservative for an experimental album, but it was a strategic anchor. (And my usual time signature, haha) The meter provides a foundation even when the textures threaten to overwhelm. When everything else is unstable (harsh timbres, aggressive dynamics, jarring transitions), the rhythmic grid gives the listener a rope to hold onto. They can physically move to the music, lock into the groove, find their footing even when their ears are being assaulted by metallic screaming.
It was about understanding that genuine chaos requires contrast to be perceptible. If everything is chaotic (including the rhythmic foundation), you don't get interesting tension; you get undifferentiated noise.
Controlled Density
Here's the critical constraint: if I wanted to be abrasive and jarring, I had to limit how many harsh elements could happen simultaneously. The rule: one or two instruments at most.
This emerged from practical experience. When I stacked three or four metallic, shrieking, inharmonic elements simultaneously, the result was just... painful. Not interesting, not challenging, just exhausting. The listener's ears would fatigue within seconds, and they'd either turn down the volume or skip the track entirely. But when I limited the abrasive elements to one or two voices (and surrounded them with more conventional textures), suddenly the harshness became interesting. It stood out, created contrast, demanded attention without causing immediate shutdown.
This principle of controlled density became the load-bearing wall of the entire album's architecture.
Underlying Beat Structure
Everything still needed groove, rhythmic complexity, bass weight. The industrial hyperpop-esque textures had to serve the rhythm, not replace it. I was deeply committed to bass-heavy, rhythmically intricate foundations. Even in the most chaotic moments, there's a pulse, a groove, something you can lock into physically. The abrasiveness lives on top of this foundation.
These constraints weren't arbitrary limitations imposed from outside, the constraints served to transform.
Process Deep-Dive: The Making of Controlled Chaos
The Pivot Point
I remember sitting at the piano one afternoon, playing around with chord voicings & arpeggios, and suddenly these specific chords emerged that immediately felt theatrical. Not just dramatic, but almost musical-theater dramatic. Dire, urgent, charged with narrative tension. I sat there thinking: this sounds like the opening number of something, like a proclamation.
I ran back to my room, grabbed my keyboard, and wrote the lyrics for what would become "I Just". The whole piece came together with urgency and conviction, channeling that immediate feeling of "something is beginning right now." That moment captured what New Era would become: drama, boldness, intensity that didn't apologize for itself. No hedging, no subtlety for subtlety's sake. Just raw, forward-facing energy.
The album opens with "New Era" (track 1) and "23" (track 2), and these aren't arbitrary placements. I made a deliberate structural decision: these opening tracks introduce samples, melodic fragments, and rhythmic motifs that recur throughout the entire album. I wanted listeners to hear these elements early, internalize them subconsciously, and then recognize them when they reappeared in mutated forms later. It creates a sense of cyclical development: you're not moving linearly through disconnected tracks, you're watching ideas evolve, transform, and return wearing different clothes.
The Flagship Tracks: Four Anchors
Four tracks define the album's identity, serving as my favorite conceptual and sonic anchor points:
23: A relentless, bass-heavy rhythmic statement. It's physical, kinetic, unapologetically assertive. The track lays down deep rhythmic complexity and just commits to it for its entire runtime. There's no apology, no dynamic relief, just sustained groove intensity. When I was arranging the album, I knew 23 had to come early because it establishes the rhythmic language and sampling that everything else would reference or react against.
Whoa: Built around a bent-to-oblivion supersaw chord progression that pulls you into this frantic, hyper-dramatic emotional space. The title is literally what you say when you first hear it; the sound is that immediate and overwhelming. Contrast emerges with the strings and piano that rupture from the background, and eventual electric-bass melody. The supersaws create this wall of harmony that's both beautiful and aggressive, melodic and overwhelming.
Reveal: This track synthesizes the album's central tension most explicitly. It starts with ambient, harmonically pleasing textures (beauty, serenity, spaciousness), then injects increasingly percussive, chaotic rhythm and eventually electric guitar. Vocal chopping and the sample of "99" frame an abrasive sonic landscape. The track "reveals" both sides of the album's personality simultaneously: the capacity for beauty and the compulsion toward chaos. It's the thesis statement!
99: A conceptual piece about contemporary instability (inflation, political polarization, economic whiplash, the feeling that everything is simultaneously cliché and urgent). The title plays with psychological pricing (".99") being both manipulative marketing technique and ubiquitous cultural fixture. Most prices used to end in .99, and people stopped noticing. Now marketers use odd numbers that aren't .00 to catch attention again. The track tries to capture that feeling of societal turbulence, where everything is constantly shifting and nothing quite stabilizes.
The Interlude Paradox: False Relief
The middle section of New Era was designed to calm the listener down, to reconnect with my piano-based roots, to provide breathing room. There's a piano-plus-acapella piece and a fully solo piano track ("Feeling Strong"). These should function as relief, as space to recover from the electronic intensity of the opening section.
Except I placed "I Just" in the dead center of this supposedly calm sequence.
"I Just" is about domestic abuse. The lyrics are raw and direct. The chorus goes: "I just want to get away from you / I just want to stop being abused." It's emotionally charged, lyrically confrontational, and despite being less electronic than the surrounding material, it's just as intense. Maybe more so, because the vulnerability is so exposed.
The vulnerability is just as intense as the metallic chaos, just expressed through different means. The relief is false, or at least complicated. You get a break from the harsh textures, but you don't get a break from emotional intensity. This was intentional. I didn't want the middle section to feel like my usual intermission; I wanted it to reframe what "intensity" could mean in the context of this album.
The Arrangement Logic: Cyclical Structure
The tracklist structure follows a clear arc: chaos → vulnerability → chaos.
I front-loaded the album with pieces that establish the sonic identity: aggressive, exploratory, sample-driven, rhythmically complex, texturally harsh. The opening third announces what kind of experience this will be.
Then I clustered the acoustic, piano-driven, more openly vulnerable material in the middle. This creates contrast and provides structural breathing room.
The final stretch returns to high-intensity electronic tracks, creating a sense of thematic symmetry. The chaos bookends the vulnerability. This structure suggests that the harsh electronic world is the default state, and the quiet moments are temporary respites before diving back in. Which, honestly, reflects my creative psychology accurately. The abrasiveness isn't an occasional departure; it's the new baseline.
Sonic Architecture: The Fingerprints of New Era
Recurring Sound Design Patterns
My fingerprints appear throughout New Era, often more concentrated and refined than in earlier work:
Short, Blippy Articulations: I gravitate toward stabs, plucks, fast metallic percussive hits. Short releases, tight envelopes. The punch, not the drone. This creates a sense of forward motion even in relatively static harmonic sections. Every hit is decisive, clean-edged, rhythmically precise.
Metallic Abrasion (Strategically Limited): Harsh textures appear constantly throughout the album, but I'm careful about their duration and density. I want the impact without the ringing aftermath. A crash, not a sustained shriek. This keeps the abrasiveness from becoming exhausting; it arrives, makes its statement, and gets out of the way.
OTT Compression: Heavy multiband compression gives everything that characteristic EDM "sharpened energy." Upward and downward compression, intense presence, controlled chaos. This might be my clearest fingerprint across all my work. OTT (over-the-top compression) brings out detail in quiet sections while controlling peaks, creating that hyper-present, slightly aggressive sonic character that defines much of my production aesthetic.
Inharmonic Bass: I gravitate toward bass tones that feel slightly "off." Not just deep, but strange. Inharmonic, growling, spatially complex. This appears throughout New Era, especially in tracks like 23, creating a sense of unease even in groovy, dance-adjacent sections.
The Iconic Sounds
Certain specific sounds define New Era's sonic identity:
The Opening Metallic Melody: The very first track (the title track) opens with this bright, sharp, industrial melodic line. It sets the tone immediately: this will be aggressive, metallic, abrasive. But it's also melodic. There's a tune you can follow, even though the timbre is harsh. This encapsulates the entire album's philosophy.
The "Snassage" Vocal Harmony: I sang this three or four-part vocal harmony, and it recurs throughout the album like a leitmotif. It's surprisingly human amid all the electronic aggression. The harmonies are clean, almost sweet, which creates jarring contrast when they appear surrounded by metallic chaos. This recurring vocal motif becomes a thread that ties disparate tracks together, a reminder that there's a human being orchestrating all this controlled chaos.
What I Compromised On
Drums remained my compromise area. I still used one-shot samples, existing libraries, pre-made percussion hits. I understand the value of designing drums through synthesis (for building sonic identity and creating truly unique rhythmic textures), but I haven't developed the patience or workflow for it yet. Though I did explore Random Metal.
In Pristine Inertia and especially in ICC (an album where I pushed custom synthesis much further), I experimented with synthesized kicks and snares. But for New Era, I returned to samples because I needed to move quickly and focus my custom synthesis energy on the tonal elements (the metallic leads, the harsh pads, the aggressive bass design). This remains a future frontier: developing a fully custom percussive language to match my custom tonal language.
Retrospective Analysis: What I See Now
Where I Went Too Far
I insisted on 20 tracks because was about to be 20 years old. This is embarrassing to admit now, but the numerology felt meaningful in the moment. It's the kind of decision that seems clever when you're making it and superficial in retrospect. The symbolic gesture diluted the album's impact.
Looking back, tracks like "Citrus Hummingbird," "Beware," and "Is It My Fault?," feel different without being statements. They don't push the envelope clearly. They're good music, competent production, interesting ideas, but they don't contribute to the album's conceptual arc. They exist because I wanted 20 tracks, not because they were necessary to complete the artistic statement.
In a tighter album (like Pristine Inertia's focused 11 tracks), they wouldn't make the cut. They dilute the sense of "newness" and conceptual punch that the album otherwise achieves. If I were sequencing New Era today, I'd probably cut it down to 15-16 tracks and create a much more focused, relentless experience.
Where I Didn't Go Far Enough
Paradoxically, while I included too many tracks overall, I held back on some of the experimental extremity within individual pieces. I could have pushed the electronic abrasiveness further in certain moments. I could have trusted the structural safeguards I'd built and really tested their limits.
I particularly regret not doing something edgier with "Feeling Strong" (the pure piano interlude track). Looking back, I could have twisted it, added some element that aligned with the album's overarching boldness instead of leaving it so straightforward. Maybe processed piano, maybe prepared piano techniques, maybe layering it with barely-audible electronic textures that gradually become noticeable. Something to connect it more explicitly to the album's aesthetic rather than letting it stand as pure contrast.
The interlude section works conceptually, but "Feeling Strong" specifically feels like a missed opportunity to bridge the acoustic and electronic worlds more explicitly.
What This Album Taught Me
New Era proved I could harness chaos without succumbing to it. The constraint of "making abrasiveness purposeful" forced me to think about arrangement density, harmonic clarity, and structural anchoring in ways I'd never prioritized before. These weren't abstract concepts; they became practical tools I used in every single production session.
The specific lesson about controlled density (limiting harsh elements to one or two simultaneous voices) has influenced everything I've made since. It's become an instinctive part of my arrangement process: when I add something abrasive, I automatically scan the arrangement to see what else needs to drop out or soften to make room for it.
More importantly: New Era showed me that my evolution accelerates when I'm forced to be more selective. The high-output years (2020-2023) created volume but slower stylistic change. The moment I had less time and had to be more deliberate, I had to make sharper choices, and those choices pushed me further faster. Constraint breeds innovation more effectively than abundance does.
The Through-Line to Nothing New
New Era also revealed something unexpected: I'd been unconsciously avoiding samples my entire creative life. I built everything from scratch, either through synthesis or live performance. Samples felt like cheating, like taking shortcuts, like not really creating.
But while making New Era, I started using sampling more intentionally (the recurring motifs from track 1 and 2, for example). And I realized the creative potential in recontextualization, in taking existing material and forcing it into new contexts. This planted the seed for what would become Nothing New: an entire album built from nothing but my own sampled material, pushing that constraint to its absolute limit.
The Unresolved Question
Here's what I still don't know: did the safeguards I built (harmonic clarity, rhythmic stability, controlled density) prevent me from discovering even more interesting sonic accidents? Would pure, unrestrained chaos have yielded something I couldn't imagine within the rules I'd set?
Part of me suspects I was protecting myself. The constraints made the album listenable, marketable, shareable. But they also might have kept me from discovering what exists beyond listenability. What if the point isn't to make noise palatable but to make it so genuinely new that listeners have to develop new criteria for evaluation?
I don't have an answer. But the tension between "controlled chaos" and "pure chaos" is something I'm still interrogating. New Era sits firmly on the "controlled" side of that divide. Maybe someday I'll make the album that abandons control entirely and sees what happens. Maybe it'll be terrible. Maybe it'll be revelatory. Maybe there's no meaningful difference between those two outcomes.
Conclusion: The Art of Strategic Restraint
New Era sits at this specific intersection: maximum aggression within a carefully constructed frame. It's wild, jarring, hyperpop-industrial chaos that never fully collapses because I wouldn't let it. The album pushes hard against its own boundaries but respects them enough to stay coherent.
Whether that restraint was wisdom or cowardice, I'm still figuring out. What I know for certain is that the album taught me how to build architecture around instability, how to create space for chaos without letting it consume everything. That skill has become fundamental to everything I've made since.
The album's title feels more prophetic than I intended. It really did mark a new era: the moment I learned to control chaos rather than just generate it. The moment my evolution accelerated by slowing down. The moment I discovered that sometimes the most radical move isn't adding more, but knowing exactly when to pull back.