Preview:



Description from http://voidcraeft.svart.nu/:

On The Body Is of Death my approach to songwriting actually started with the drums instead of the guitars, which is the opposite of what I had been doing for years.
This resulted in extremely simple signatures and patterns I was not entirely comfortable with.
While I made the same mistake in the first track of this release, I have since returned to the old approach of doing the guitars first, then the bass, the drums and finally the vocals.
This way I was able to restore the degree of complexity in riffs and signatures I usually work with.

Other than that not much has changed since the last release.
The general style is still pretty much the same but there have been some minor changes in the way I record the drums and the vocals.
I no longer use a dedicated hi-hat microphone and started using two microphones for the snare drum instead (one clip-on condenser microphone and a slightly more distant dynamic microphone).
I also started using two different microphones for recording vocals simultaneously.
I combine the Rode NT1-A condenser microphone and the Shure SM-58 dynamic microphone and place them right next to each other, behind a stack of cheap pop shields.
This is the very same SM-58 I have been using for all my vocal recordings for years, even prior to this project, and I must admit that I am somewhat sentimental about it.

The new method combines the raw dynamic sound and the details and definition of the condenser microphone.
Actually, I had already tried this approach on the last release but I made the mistake of placing the microphones too far apart.
This resulted in some odd phase problems that made the recordings sound like I had applied some kind of flanger filter.

Lyrically, I drew from Emil Cioran (The Fall into Time, History and Utopia), Ernest Becker (The Birth and Death of Meaning, Escape from Evil) and Miguel de Unamuno (Tragic Sense of Life).
By the way, my attempts to read Cioran in French turned out to be a failure.
My knowledge of French is far too limited to deal with his highly literary language.
His notebooks feature an excessive amount of rare terms, forcing me to look up new words far too frequently.
I had to learn about 30 new words per page and even after a week I had not made it past page 15, out of over 1000 pages.
I have since returned to consuming English literature.

The cover of this release features a modified version of a scan of a graphic from a 18th century book provided by the Saxon State and University Library Dresden, as was the case with the last release.

I had a blast making this release.
As for the future, I am still motivated and intend to make more music.
I might buy a new double bass pedal for the drum kit.
Also, I really need to work on my double bass drumming, it is far too slow and inconsistent.
This Harley Benton bass I have been using for years is pissing me off, too.
I would like to get myself a new one, with active pickups.