January 4th, 2006 | mosquito

There is something well beyond words that I feel when a track that starts out sounding like a concrete sketch becomes a fully baked composition. I believe the saying is that “the devil is in the details” and for me, nowhere are those details more important than in music. It’s probably just as prevelent in all forms of “craftsmanship,” but my abilities are within the realm of music, so that’s the realm I seem able to really focus on the details. Typically the way things have gone ae there was a stack of essentially “sketches” that I put before Xipetotec and from there we began picking at them. Once the structure has been hammered out in regards to aspects that the initial sketch lacks, we’ve set to the task of building. We don’t stop “building” until typically we run out of headroom in the mix or we run out of polyphony on the synths. Ironicly, we seem to hit both at about the same time.

Whenever we hit that breaking point, it seems like we have to take a step back from the track for a bit and analyze it. That’s when the “devil details” comes to play. If I can’t listen to the same track on repeat for the better part of a week, knowing every last change, instrumentation, and theme variation, without hearing something different each time, then it’s not done.

“Following a Trail of Breadcrumbs” was one that started out as something that was quite possibly my favorite of the sketches. By the time we declared it “in the can” on New Years Eve (excluding vocals of course… and we got the first bit of that recorded Monday night), it had reached a level of symphonic orchestration that I had never imagined possible with it.