Another Dimension

Howdy y'all!

Hope everyone is having a great holiday season. Today's update isn't so much about the progress of book 2 (which is banging along on all cylinders-- a bangin' hoot to write, even this deep into the draft work) as it is about reading in general. It's pretty rare that I read or write without music. Most of the Definitive Host trilogy was written to darksynth, death metal, vaporwave and, the oddball out, classical (Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven etc.). I feed off the energy and mood of the music when I'm visualizing a scene or putting myself in the mind of a character. Generally, I try to pair the music with the intended mood, texture or level of energy that I envision. To give an example, there is a certain scene in Sundyr's Web in book 1 (won't spoil which, but if you know the song, then you know the scene lol) which was written to Gojira's The Art of Dying. While this is fun and adds a layer of emotion to the act of writing that would be absent otherwise, only so much of it can come across on the page. More on that in a minute. 

Before I begin a book, I do something very similar to what I do when I write: I look at the subject matter and try to pair it with an album that comes close to what I expect the universe to feel like while I'm there. For scifi I lean towards vaporwave or darksynth. For fantasy, it's often classical. I grew up listening to the radio while reading, and it was invariably tuned to the local classical station: King FM 98.1, Seattle. (A quick aside here. Lovecraft is probably the only thing I read in without music, because I feel that cosmic occult horror should be read to the sound of a beating heart set to a terrifying backdrop of silence.) What this does is add another dimension to the narrative. As the selected album repeats every hour or so, it slowly becomes the book's soundtrack. Soundscapes form the background to the prose, and when the pairing is just right, the words sing. I think the best example I have of this is pairing Magic Sword's Endless with Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space. The album felt as though it was written specifically for that book. It made the whole book an absolutely immersive experience. I have similar sentiments about pairing albums by Occam's Laser with the Alien franchise novels (decent reading if you love the movies). Really, you could pair any music to any book and I believe it would make the world open up-- even putting David Wong's John Dies at the End to something wildly off-tone like Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night has worked for me. 

An additional perk to listening to music while reading or writing is that I have found that you can call up the memories of what was read or written much faster while listening to the same album again. The two become linked, and you can almost relive the moment you first read or wrote a scene. I love it. 

Now, where am I going with all this? Well, I wanted to suggest a few albums for the Definitive Host trilogy. Obviously, you should listen to whatever you like, but if you're looking to be in a similar headspace to where I was when I was conceptualizing and writing these books-- if you want to feel what the characters are feeling, if you want a more cinematic experience out of this strange universe, then I'd start with the below (in no particular order):

​Perturbator: Dangerous Days
HUBRID: COSMIC MEMORIES and/or COSMIC MEMORIES 2
Volkor X: This Means War
Magic Sword: Volume 1
Oscillian: Ad Astra or Escape from Antarctica 

These are all absolute bangers that I recommend listening to regardless of whether or not you intend to pair them with any reading or writing. All are available on bandcamp, but you can listen to them elsewhere for free as well. Soundcloud has some good options too. And on that note, if you're the kind of person who would rather listen to, say, 70+ hand-curated tracks that I the author chose over the course of several years while working on the trilogy, then you need look no further! It's almost 7 hours of vaporwave and darksynth, with almost zero lyrics throughout. Near-pure instrumental stuff. 

I hope you enjoy the rabbit hole I've opened here, and I look forward to updating you all again soon-- hopefully with a soft release date for Skin for a Demon!

Until next time!

​MB