I wasn’t sure how to capitalize i built the sky for a while. The secret? It’s always uncapitalized. Starsystems’ latest album Starsystems II had i built the sky featured on the second track, “Dune,” and you can definitely hear Ro Han’s influence. He is the mastermind and does all the recordings himself, playing with a live band when he does shows. This is for fans of Cloudkicker, djent and people shutting up (there’s not vocals).
The first track, “Fibratus,” is a great example of how lush this album can get. Synthesized piano, cushy drums and another instrument that sounds like it was modeled in Logic’s physical modeler, Sculpture. It’s a rhythmically focused track as opposed to the second track, “Arcus,” which centers around a groovy sounding acoustic guitar. Ok, so groove is also rhythmic, but this song’s groove is straight swing and the first track is more complex and down beat oriented.
Then we come to the track that The Prez said, “...defines instruMETAL music. I absolutely love it,” in 2014, “Perlucidus.” While that may be a bit of an exaggeration- I just want to clarify that I came up with the term instruMETAL back in 2008. Yes, caps and all. I smithed the word while concocting ideas for the name of my upcoming radio show which eventually was known as Ad a Dglgmut on KZSC. Enough about that though, the next track is a mixture of the groove from “Arcus” and the distortion of “Perlucidus.” “Lacunosis” is closer in my opinion to the epitome of instruMETAL music, but it’s still not the chosen one. Honestly, how could any song be the one song you show to someone to give them the full breadth of instruMETAL music?
“Duplicatus” is another acoustic centered bit and then we jump into a new style- Djent! “Undulatus” is super djenty. 0-0-0′s and bends, loose and ringy drums, and a vamp with a super well toned guitar ringing out into the “ether.” The last track is “Inortus” and it has four versions! There’s the album version, the 8bit version, the demo version and the alternate mix. I can’t pick a favorite. After all that there’s also a track called “Untitled” and it seems like a good closer.
i built the sky is fun because Ro is able to use ingredients from many different styles and mix them all into one album to make a tasty treat for us to listen to that doesn’t taste like fruit cake.
[this post wasn’t actually posted on a Monday- sorry, my new training regime is intense and I have been sleeping any chance I get]
