Macrohelion from 1994-1996 and beyond

As mentioned earlier Macrohelion appeared as a parallel side-project to Atropine and Anstalt because we were without a proper sampler for an extended period and quite frankly one just has to make music of some sort to feel good. Initially we were unsure what to do, but quickly discovered that the attack of the rack mounted FM-synth Yamaha TX81z was powerful enough to make quite passable bass-drums on as well as most other types of frequently used percussion sounds such as snares, snades, hi-hats, crashes and whatever else. When coupled with an Oberheim Matrix-6 and a Casio CZ-5000, we discovered that we could compose rather freely and as an added bonus we managed to make something with a novel sound. Much of what you'll hear in Macrohelion consists of those three synthesizers, but we also used the Roland Juno-106 and Roland Juno 2 to a lesser degree.

Of course, Macrohelion differs substantially from anything else we've done before or since which as I also mentioned had to do with a necessity to learn how to build a track with very few options open to us. In general the sound is less bleak and the tracks for the most part are rigidly structured. We even tried recording vocals for them, but we lost interest in that since we felt the vocals were detracting from the songs instead of adding to them. Also it was nice with a break from screaming all the time =).

On the third and final workload for Macrohelion it's becoming more and more apparent that we'd hit another dead end and with that we folded the concept altogether. Regardless, I think we came out the other end as more accomplished musicians and many lessons were learned as a result of making the 50 tracks that make up the entire production of Macrohelion.

Here are three examples of Macrohelion, one from each remaining tape:
Macrohelion - Undercurrents

Macrohelion - Exeunt
Macrohelion - Overthrown


Onto more recent events then:
As recently as late last year we had another look at Macrohelion and decided to revive it - at least to explore the project within a real studio environment. Things are a lot easier these days, but that is not without pitfalls of its own. So we made a couple of new tracks as Macrohelion, but we're not entirely convinced it's even remotely related. We cheated a bit and added digital drums and all the previously used synthesizers were discarded in favour of old analog equipment which were sequenced using a Kenton CV/MIDI converter and then recorded as audio. It's quite different, but in very much in the same tonal range as most other things we've made over the years. This is not the final version.
Macrohelion - Soldering Iron


Enjoy!

.//Cthulberg