Track 5: Icidina - Royal Highshiva of the Glacierplains
Espers by 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier
One of my favorite tracks on the album, I imagined this track as a journey across a large frozen landscape governed by Icidina, the Ice Queen Esper with huge crystal mountains and ridges of pure, frozen malice and a stereotypical new age spacey purple sky above.
This track was actually a lot of fun to design and Metroid Prime was a huge inspiration here too. I used a lot of z3ta+ for the synthesizers and Kompakt for the tribal rhythm. The orchestra is, blah, squidfont for lack of space and I think it all came together in about 8-10 hours of work - all things considered.
About the album: Espers is a wildly ambitious, slightly experimental and thoroughly, deliberately arranged and manipulated chill-out album with lots of New Age, Ambient, Progressive and apparently Darkwave sounds and structures in them. Each track is designed to be a completely different experience than the one before and after it; where the soundscapes create sparse melodies and evolve the track instead of it moving until finally culminating to a 10 minute piano solo, performed by Michael Huang of www.nobuouematsu.com, as a stark contrast to the album before it. This album and all the many sounds and motifs and designs were inspired by Peter Gabriel, Motoi Sakuraba, Yasunori Mitsuda, Uematsu, Hiroki Kikuta, Berlin School electronic music, Steve Hackett, Enya, David Arkenstone, NIN, Moby and a lot more. It was released in September 2011 by Lightfall/Aardvark Records.
For more information and album credits, see www.meteoxavier.com. Enjoy the album!
