Gate (instrumental)

Instrumental version of Gate, the 2nd Ankhaos album. Includes recordings in the 2007-2022 range. I was originally planning to hold on to it until I had vocals ready, but I’m doing a PhD right now which doesn’t leave me much free time to work on music, and my wife strongly recommended that I eventually release it and move on, especially considering that I have new material planned out that I wanna record. I still wanna record vocals for this, but that’ll have to happen when I can freely drop work for days at a time with no one breathing down my neck :^)

I see the album as anxious, heavy, fun, silly, and listening to it I feel like it does end up having a profound effect on me cumulatively. That’s really why I can’t just shelve it: there’s something about it that makes it feel soulful for me. Hopefully the long stretch of time since I recorded all this stuff means I’m impartial enough to not just imagine things that aren’t there, but of course I can’t guarantee what you’ll experience here. As you listen, imagine yourself as a frog in a lily pond filled with gallium, or maybe imagine you’re burrowing into a tel not knowing what you’ll find. I tend to listen to it while doing something else (e.g. coding, data analysis, …), but I feel like attentive listening is also sufficiently rewarded.

My advice is to listen to Gate in chunks, take breaks, and let it seep in via osmosis. The transition into “Dive” is jarring at first, and I recommend you persevere, because imo that’s when the more impactful part of the album actually starts. I believe after “The Balloon” you can start getting acclimatized to the new environment.

All music by Ankhaos. Recorded on Korg TR, Juno D-i, and Musescore versions 2 and 3. Editing on Audacity.

Original “Nest of Long-tailed Tit Aegithalos Caudatus” (2009) photo by Alan Shearman, published under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en). Changes were made to the original photo.