Curtain up, lights...the beginning

Immortality are a new sound comprising old tech. Though perhaps one could define our sound as 'industrial' or even 'techno-pop',  we prefer to consider ourselves 'progressive'.  

We utilize the synthesis & sampling techniques, coupled with traditional instruments. Much of our 'sound' is inspired by theatrical orchestrations, 80's pop-rock, gothic horror & techno thriller movies.  Though you could say we borrow heavely from groups such as Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Billy Idol, Depeche Mode and the like, we are confident Immortality have created a unique style with our music.

Though not immediatly obvious, all of Immortality's music follow one of two central storylines which are ultimatly releated.  Our goth-rock music follows indirectly a tradgic story of a pair of lovers seperated by death and the undead.  There is moody vampire overtones and with dark rock power chords.

Our techno-synth tunes follow the story of a mischevious computer that believes it was a human in a past life.

These stories will become the basis for our planned album release in 2007.  The disc will be in two parts.

The following is a behind the scenes breakdown on each song in chronological order, with background information on how we came up with the concepts and the recording techniques used.

Little Miss Dizzy

Save Me (From Myself)

Unforgiven

The House On Craggy Spire

Uncontrolled

Is This Love

Dreamscape

Will I Die Tonight

Don't Be Afraid

Generation X

Little Miss Dizzy: Dizzy was a re-write of the original track composed by Jacko and Tim Pringle. This follows the story of a mother searching for her wayward teenaged daughter. Lisa really does a great job vocally on this track.

Dizzy features every trick in the book. The bass was played with a guitar hooked into the PC MIDI port. This was my chance to push my PC to it’s limits. We wanted to create a symphony orchestra using simple General MIDI sounds. 

It was difficult to replicate solo reed instruments, so I played them live, but pretty much everything else is fake (including the back-up vocals during the finale). Thankfully Logic Audio allows you to really humanize computer MIDI, and though much more can be done, it’s has turned out quite convincing.

Save Me (From Myself): Composed by Jacko with lyrics by Fluer Fiztpatric, Save Me follows the nightmare of a insane women, incarcerated in her own mind. Originally in the Unforgiven stage musical, Save Me was performed shortly after the lead actress had been bitten, or inflicted, by her lover (later she discouved he was a vampire).  She was becoming mad with the voices and evil thoughts in her mind.  We slightly re-wrote the song to loose some of the vampire overtones (I felt, for radio release anyway, our tunes were having too many blood sucking lyrics)

This track contains many synthesizer instruments, such as famous Oberhiem, Korg Trinity, Roland Juno machines, and the classic Roland TR909. The haunting piano line was played on my favorite Yamaha P200 keyboard (oooo....damn, I love the Yamaha P200!). Ingenious samples used throughout the track 'morphing' Lisa's vocals with the now familiar 'Cher' effect, and our own invented 'Vocal Squelcher'. This method samples Lisa's voice and reverses it onto itself using a vocoder. This gives the notable childlike effect used in the tracks vocal echo.

The are currently 3 variations on this track available, the original (with the Matrix Mix variation), the Viper mix and the crazy Lost In Space Dub mix (originally penned The Space Race Mix) - how that mix came about, I really can't rememeber, though I'm sure it involved drinking too much bourbon. All are available for download from this site.

Unforgiven: This is the story of a spirit trapped in purgatory for murdering her family, many decades ago. Lisa's haunting lyrics cut through the mystical music. There are 3 other variations of this track, though they are more of less the same track with varying levels of distortion guitar. The Rock Mix is one of the only tracks we recorded with live drums, bass and guitar.  This song was originally released as The Returning.

Lisa out-does herself again here (she has the annoying habit of coming into the studio and laying down the vocals in one take, making me look like a complete amateur having spent many months preparing the backing). All of the instruments are sampled, aside from the bass which is a Juno 106. The other mixes where re-mixed using real instruments and more dance club style drum grooves. 

The House On Craggy Spire: tongue-in-cheek ACD/DC vs Nosferatu. Craggy is a techno mix of hard rock, gothic organ and the Phantom Of The Opera. Lots of fun.  In the musical Unforgive, this song was played as the overture and reprised again after the intermission once the lead actress had discovered her vampirism.

Many...many samples are used. The cello, though real, was sampled for this song and played via the sequencer. The guitar is real, as is the bass (a Pedulla MVP5), though we also ran the Juno 106’s classic synth-blips to give the bass line more attack. The drums are  MIDI again, but we used 3 drum machines layered together. The strings were taken from a very expensive Kurzweil PC88 piano we we’re testing on appro (we had to send it back unfortunately, but used it to record the track first…hehehe!!!). The overdubs we spoken by our friend Steve Dale – and that’s what he really sounds like in real life! Scary. All of the thunder and wolf samples were sourced from Internet surfing (hopefully no copyright issues)

Uncontrolled: This is our take on Rodney King's night with the LAPD, and the following riots and racial struggles and a comment of current religious and racial problems in the worlds hot-spots.  This is one of the few songs not take from the stage musical Unforgiven.  We originally wrote the music for the show, but never actually penned the lyrics.  

Instruments used are mainly electronic (the Juno, a Korg Trinity string sample and the Yamaha P200 piano), though the bass is real, as is the guitar. Speaking of bass, I tried a trick to beat sync the bass. It's very difficult to play 16th constantly for 4 minutes (well, Joey Ramone managed to do it for his whole musical career), so Logic Audio was used to sync the bass to the high-hat MIDI track. Normally this gives the bass a computerized feel, but it seamed to work quite well on this track. The bass used was a Yamaha B200 passive 4 string.
Percussion is pretty standard affair, consisting wholly of MIDI samples. Lisa's voice was thrown pretty heavily through the FX machine. All of the vocal treatment was hand done (no fancy effect processors here...well, except for a touch of reverb). All of the delays and chorus effects we done by double tracking, as was the funky reverse effect used in the counter melody in the bridge.

There was a version made with a guitar solo after the bridge, but it never really gelled with the song and we dropped it.  The Aztech Brothers (a local DJ) made the best remix for this song - check it out in the download section.

Is This Love: This song was a dare – to make a song in only one key. So I did – A minor. The song is mainly sampled, though the guitar is real. The bass is my trusty Juno again. The marcato violins we made by layering 3 samples, hard limiting them and running them through a Logic Audio’s matrix editor (cropping the samples so they sound staccato).
The song is a anti-love song, so to speak. Plenty of bass, and the ‘Cher’ thing going on again. Lisa layered her vocals for the BV’s, and the Mariah Carey thing she does in the bridge is actually her – she can hold mezzo-soprano notes for days! (though my speakers don’t like it)
Craig Betteridge did a standup job on the guitar. Believe it or not, there was no editing on the guitar track...that's how he played it! He used an Ebow with his Ibanez Jem guitar into to get the sound. Very cool. 
I ran the first few bars of the song through a Harmonic Synchronizer too. This, when listened to with headphone, should make you feel slightly euphoric...kinda. Its an old trick using phase inverted wave files to replicate very fast pseudo stereo panning. If you have surround sound speakers set up perfectly around you, the music will actually chase itself around in circles. Funky stuff, huh. 

Dreamscape: This track was one of the very early titles from the Unforgiven musical. Originally it was an instrumental, though lyrics were later added, and then rewritten for its current version. Dreamscape follows the thoughts and desires of a computer, or possibly an android, who wishes it's self to be human. 

Musically Dreamscape is quite challenging. Its 6/8 time signature makes it difficult to not only sing, but to score. Lisa has done a top job on the aria parts. Though these opera style snippets are not really proper harmonic modal scales relating to the piece like a true aria might, I think they portrait the feel of opera without bogging the listener down with something too heavy. I would like to re-score the ending of Dreamscape soon with a 'scientifically correct' opera score.

We used mainly sampled sounds through the PC for this track. All of the intro was sampled from various cop show television programs that we running at the time, and a few FX conjured up on my trusty Juno. The piano is a Roland A1.

Generation X

Our up-coming EP project, Generation X, will feature variations of these tunes, with other special incidental tracks and perhaps a few surprises. Though we can afford to send this disc out to everyone wanting a copy, we will have the MP3 version available for free download. Fill in the form at the bottom of the Overture with your e-mail address and we'll let you know as soon as its ready.