Singled Out: Aethereus' Upon Infinite Seas

Keavin Wiggins | 01-31-2022

Leiden album cover art

Aethereus just released their sophomore album, "Leiden", and to celebrate we asked guitarist/vocalist Kyle Chapman to tell us about the writing and recording of the song "Upon Infinite Seas". Here is the story:

"Leiden" is structured to begin more conventionally melodic and progressively become more dissonant. With "Upon Infinite Seas" being the final track, it needed to represent the most extreme end of that spectrum without devolving into complete nonsense. This posed a major challenge, resulting in this song becoming an 8-to-9-month passion project for me. There were several points where I wasn't even sure if the song was ever going to see the light of day, let alone actually end up making it on the album.

Upon Infinite Seas can be broken into three distinct movements. The first movement is more akin to a funeral doom track, slow and lumbering, setting a very sinister tone. There is a lot of deliberate of dissonance between the guitars and vocals while the bass and strings carry what little melody is present. Ben's and my guitars in this section are about as atonal as they could be, essentially stacking unrelated dissonant chords on top of each other and then, for added discomfort, tremelo picking those same chords in the second half of the intro.

This intro is also where the presence of multiple vocalists on the album becomes most apparent. Throughout the album, Vance and I have both been sharing vocal duties, with Vance's vocals representing the primary form of the main character, while my vocals (and Mike Alvarez's spot) representing the slow fragmentation of the main character's mind, becoming more broken and erratic as the album goes on.

I recorded five different layers of mostly clean vocals that are essentially a series of stacked minor seconds to add even more tension and further emphasize the purpose behind the multiple voices. Once it gets to the end of the funeral bell / trumpet break, you get the first taste of a gravelly voice that I'll use in the first verse before Vance takes the reins back for the rest of the second movement.

The second movement is pure chaos. It represents the character fighting the many voices in its head as it attempts to resist their efforts to fully break it. The riffs are fast, frantic, containing some of the most discordant and difficult riffing in our arsenal as well as a straightforward but extremely heavy chorus to help tie things together. It also contains one of the weirdest sections with the first half of the first verse, especially regarding the percussion.

This riff (starting at 2:20) is comprised of two bars of 4/4, one bar of 3/4, and one bar of 4/4 before it repeats. During this riff, Matt plays a relatively straightforward tom groove with a quarter note pulse and accents primarily occurring on the downbeat. Over the top of that, I played a beat on a djembe, dividing the bars and accents of the riff into two bars of 3/8, one bar of 2/8, two bars of 3/8, one bar of 2/8, one bar of 3/4, two bars of 3/8, and one bar of 2/8. Put them together and you get what we call the jungle groove...that or the beginning of the People's Court. It's a pretty wild section that is deceptively weird in its execution.

The final movement is all doom and gloom. The character's consciousness is separated from its physical body and trapped forever in its own subconscious. This section needed to convey a lot of drama, anger, and definitively end the album. It begins with a massive string break heavily inspired by Michael Abels' score from the movie "Us," beginning very simply, with layers of new instruments slowly introducing themselves. After lulling you into a false sense of security, Kyle Rasmussen unleashes a devastating (dare I say vitriolic) vocal performance, conveying the unbridled fury the character is feeling as it essentially loses itself. Vance and Kyle overlap for the final bridge, one more time emphasizing the broken nature of this character, until we reach the outro.

Other than the clean-ish vocals, this section is really cool because of its connection to our first EP, "Ego Futurus." The story of "Leiden" is a follow-up to the story of that EP, so I thought it would be a neat touch to include some riffs and lyrics that directly call back to the songs "Immaculate Cosmogenesis" and "Orbital" at the end of "Upon Infinite Seas." It's a small detail that few will probably even register, but it's one of many things that help make this song so special to me.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here