User:Andrex1212

Andrew Parmeter
Andrew Douglas Parmeter (born Andrew Douglas Forbes, February 18th, 1991), known also under the musician name Theta, is a Canadian guitarist, vocalist, and song writer. Andrew's first album was recorded during 2004 under the name Xarnt. The style was very basic high-speed techno/trance, with one song being speedcore style like the Japanese artist m1dy. This first album was recorded in only 3 months, but was extremely simplistic and used very little alteration on pre-made sequencers in the program Fruity Loops. At the time Andrew was using Fruity Loops 6 XXL to create sample sounds to see what kind of sound he wanted as his signature. The first album created was called 6 O' Clock Speedway and was 14 songs long. This album was never printed and never had finalized album art. A second album was then started called Cosine - No Sine. The album also consisted of fairly basic music, but was more complex than the debut. This album was also made under the name Xarnt and was yet again never printed and never included album art. Subsequently, Theta was created around the time Cosine - No Sine was, with a much slower pace and more melodic sound. To this date there are 8 albums that have been created, 5 of which are fully complete, and two are EPs. The 8th album is a "greatest hits" compilation which features the best songs, some reproduced or remixed in order to create a newer atmosphere from older songs.

Xarnt
The original idea with this music was to create something fast paced, but also melodic like DJ Sharpnel, or other techno artists who were inspiring at the time, the other major inspiration that is part of every song in each album is numerology. When the album 6 O' Clock Speedway was created, a myspace page was also created to try and gain support. There were about 300 views on 4 different songs, and the best reception was from a slow song called Off-Ramp which was 10 minutes long with 2 minutes of Off-Ramp, 1 minute of silence, and 7 minutes of a song which was at that time titled My Derogative. As soon as people started praising this song, Theta was created and My Derogative was renamed "End [Beginning] (Quantum Polarity)". Even though Andrew enjoyed the idea of creating more melodic and slow music, he went on to make Cosine - No Sine, which was yet again ideas thrown together very quickly just to produce more songs, and in turn was another flop. Both albums were never released and were never to receive album art. The entire process of xarnt lasted from around May 2004 to November 2004.

Album: 6 O' Clock Speedway


 * 1 Bonus Track
 * 2 Includes silence

Album: Cosine, No-Sine

Theta
Once "My Derogative" became a favourited song, it was renamed and put as the title track on Theta's first album "Sequence". This album became the testing ground for a new soundscape/ambient style of music. This album was yet again very simplistic, but contained a lot of melody and included one song that became somewhat of a local hit called "Winter". A lot of the ideas on this album circled between the death of Andrew's Mom, the beauty of environment, and the negativity felt towards many people. A few of the tracks on this album were actually written on guitar and then transposed onto piano since Andrew never had taken piano lessons, but loves playing the instrument and the sound of it when played properly.

The album Sequence was completed in 2006 and included these tracks:

Album: Sequence


 * 1 M.O.M. also stood for More On Mentality, and More On Morality

Song Meanings:

01. The intro track to this album was written on guitar and composed using piano. The entire song was emotions transitioning from grade 8 to grade 9 which presented confusion as to what would come, but also feeling hope that something new would come around the corner. It was a prequel to a year ahead.

02. Deprevation Chamber represented feelings of being trapped in my own head. The song introduces almost binaural sounding vibrato effects which I felt presented a very imprisoned moment in time. The absent and distant melody later in the song also provided this feeling.

03. This song is very much about the environment and the way I feel connected to it. The intro has waves coming up on shore followed with a vibrato horn. These two sound effects when merged create somewhat of an environmental mystery, at the time making this I was contemplating the natural mysteries of life that scientists still have never been able to crack yet. That is where the second part of the song comes in, there is a sci-fi ambient effect that sounds that of being in a laboratory.

04. Winter was ironically written with no real presence of mind. I was hungover after a New Years party and I ended up writing this on my friend Josh's acoustic guitar. The intro chords were actually something I arpegiated in an Opeth style. Basically a minor chord, while skipping a note to create a less simplistic melody. This was my favourite song on the entire album and I have redone it twice since making it. I guess the main emotions were depression and pain after realizing that I needed to figure out what I needed from this life to make me whole. At the same time, the Winter atmosphere always gives me a very interesting creative aura.

05. Sifton Bog is about an area near where I live, it is a bog that a few of my friends used to go to as kids and my main inspiration for this came from the ideas of global warming and the destruction that will cause areas like that to be non-existent for kids in the future.

06. Distant Desire was another song that I just sat down and wrote, but I was sitting at my piano and I felt deep meaning in these two simple chords. As they rang out in reverb on my actual piano at home, my heart, body and soul felt as if they merged and I was being completely cleansed of anything wrong that I had done in the recent past. Unfortunately I need to redo this song to convey the message more appropriately.

07. M.O.M. (More On Mortality/More On Mentality/More On Morality) was written while thinking of my mom. The entire aspect of my mom's death confused me, and made it so hard for me to care for others that I fell into a depressive slump for about a year and a half only able to think of the things wrong with this world. This song was written when I had finally come to terms with her death and I was able to reincarnate myself into the person who I needed to become in order to live my life more effectively and realize the things that I need to do in order to make it somewhere.

08. This song has quite an obvious inspiration behind it, my girlfriend Jayde.

09. Submersion (Submission) was another song composed on piano with small ambient effects for more atmosphere. The song also includes a sequenced electric guitar because at the time I did not have any recording equipment to record my guitar on the computer. In the future I will redo this song with my current equipment likely. The song was another expression of depressing emotions that were being relieved by changes in my life. I mainly enjoyed playing melodic solos over the piano chords for this, but I decided to make it into a song just to add another to the album.

10. Mortality was a darker song that carried an odd atmosphere. The song was recorded in one take playing a pad synth that sounds somewhat undertoned but also sounds fairly good for being so basic. The end of the song is my favourite part with the legato ending. Unfortunately not much was put into this song.

11. Vacant Valley is a song inspired by Silent Hill's music composer Akira Yamaoka. The intro to the song uses the same pad from the menu screen of the game Silent Hill 2. The piano part that follows was another recording done in one take, but it has no reverb or any special sound to it, so this song ends up sounding very bland. I will likely redo a bunch of the songs on this album and make Sequence Redux or something of the like.

12. Safety And Sanity was inspired by my curiosity of different pad synthesizers. The song almost sounds angelic at parts, and this provides a fairly good contrast to the following song called Time.

13. Time starts out very low after a heavenly sounding riff from Safety And Sanity, the reason for the title comes from my use of of beat time signatures to create the song, but also my infatuation with the topic of time and it's non-existence as a whole. If you really think about it, time is just another measurement created by people as a universal way to keep track of certain records, similar to that of length, weight and mass. So if you really think about it, every moment of your life could technically be relived in a completely different manner if we still lived under the rule that, when the sun goes down, you go to sleep. That's a really basic way to put it, but I don't exactly have the time to go on a rant with myself... get it?

14. The final song is a static effect where I alter the Oscilators to create different pitches and frequencies of static. The song needs to have the volume lowered to be more normalized with the album, but static is a very prevalent piece to ESP which is the idea that you can use white noise to record the dead speaking. I personally sway on both sides of the topic. I believe people die, that's it, they're gone, but at the same time there have been so many personal experiences that I have had with "ghosts" or whatever you want to call them that I can't completely debunk the topic.

The album Oceanic was started being recorded before Sequence was done. The first song Oceanic was created because I loved the way one ambient pad sounded like I was swimming far under the ocean all by myself. The entire album was still very experimental and following the theme of the first song made, but at the same time contained more complex songs and melodies.

Album: Oceanic

01. The beginning of the album opens perfectly in my opinion, the entire idea of an oceanic setting is presented well by feeling like you need to come up to the surface to catch your breath. Everytime I listen to this I enjoy it.

02. The next song is about my insomnia and how it is extremely hard for me to stop thinking at night in order to fall asleep. I often lie in bed thinking of occurences that may be completely irrelevant to anything that happened recently, but flashbacks seem to occur frequently and unannounced which causes me to also have very odd and disturbing dreams sometimes. This song was also written the day before the last day of school for grade 10 when I couldn't sleep for the life of me.

03. This song was written actually because of the Ensure drinks that I would drink in grade 10 since I never ate breakfast and I had gym first period. The enlightenment was that I need to begin treating my body well and do more activities while eating healthier. If you were wondering, no this song still didn't inspire me enough to do so.

04. Song 4 is yet again about a season, this time the opposite from the first album. I wrote this song the day after the last day of school for grade 10. The music sounds almost like a sunrise which was the effect I wanted since I wrote this song after waking up with some great inspiration in mind.

05. Sunday Sonnet was written on a Sunday in the summer, but this was definitely the most basic song written for this album. I should have put a lot more effort into it, but I left the entire song as one basic sounding piano with little harmonization.

06. Forgive Me, Forget Me was written while feeling very bad about things that I have done and said to people in the past, I wanted some of the people I got rid of in my life to forgive me, but of course my music had only been heard by about two people at the time.

07. Relief is a song that was actually written from a melody hummed by my girlfriend at the time. Unfortunately the song is fairly boring and way too repedetive.

08. Nocturne was the Winter of this album. This song was written on guitar but composed on piano. The song refers to darkness and my love for nighttime. I was mainly inspired by late night walks around my street and the nearby parks. Another ironic thing about this is that I have been afraid of being alone in the dark for my whole life, I have just recently been able to get over this phobia.

09. The 7th Guest is actually the theme song from the game The 7th Guest from 1991 or 1992. I composed this after writing The 11th Hour because I felt that song had a very similar ambiance to this game, and The 11th Hour was actually the sequel to this game.

10. As mentioned above, this song was written in inspiration to The 7th Guest video game which caused me to make The 7th Guest cover song.

11. Requiem is a cover of Requiem For A Dream. I was running out of ideas by the end of the summer, but I also loved this song. Unfortunately I covered it fairly poorly and I will likely be remixing this one later.

12. Snowscape was written with seasons still in mind. I had been talked to by a fellow musician who claimed my style was more Soundscape than Ambient Electronica and so I decided to write a song called Snowscape due to the connection between environment and the music genre. The song is another to feature synthesized electric guitar, but yet again it does not sound half as good as the real thing so I will make a better version of this song. I also used this song title as the title of my 4th album.

13. Affinity is a cover of the final piano riff in the song The Leper Affinity by Opeth. I really enjoy how this turned out since I loved listening to Opeth's song, but I really wanted to have only the soft part at the end, so I made it myself.

14. Rain felt like a good way to end the album, after a couple of failed ideas and some fairly decent ones, I used a looped rain effect for the last 7 minutes of the album since ocean is the start of the water cycle, and rain is the final step.

The following album to Oceanic was Mind Less. Mind Less was an idea I had to write an album from song 14 down to song 1 in order to see if I would still create better songs at the start of my album than at the end. Some how I managed to still keep most of the good songs within the first few tracks after some great inspiration from a fellow musician. The other main part to this album was that it focused on phobias, some of which that I have and some that I find interesting and can relate to.

Album: Mind Less

01. The first song is the fear of insanity, which I believe starts this album off well with a very demonic and insane sounding breathing effect for the first song.

02. This song refers to the fear of tight spaces, which I personally have. The intro causes you to almost feel restricted with movement due to the constriction of the static and the "voice" like noises that are the ambient pads.

03. Hypsiphobia is the fear of height which I used to suffer from a lot more than I do now. The intro sounds like you are being lifted in an elevator and follows with an almost "in-air" limbo effect.

04. Decidophobia was my favourite song that I had created to this date. It follows through different emotions, positive and negative through an indecisive decision that of which I end up doing a lot of the time in life. I have a really hard time coming to an agreement with myself on what to do for the simplist things, such as what to eat for lunch.

05. Mastigophobia was somewhat similar to the song Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. The first riff is almost identical, but still remains different with a more ambient tone. After making this song I decided to create an actual cover of the entirity of Moonlight Sonata. Mastigophobia is the fear of punishment and this song yet again refers to my mom's death. I believe that I suffered an undeserved punishment from her death and it causes me to fear suffering other negative consequences that I don't necessarily deserve.

06. Ennisophobia is an extremely suiting title for this song due to it meaning the fear of criticism. I wrote this song after being heavily criticized for my very simplistic piano riffs from Sequence and Oceanic and it caused me to work into overdrive by actually working with effects and layering to create a very nice sounding song. Luckily I think I achieved that very well with this one.

07. Anthrophobia is the fear of nothing. You fear things that cannot harm you in any possible way such as flowers. Of course you know I'm not talking about people who are allergic to them, I just mean that they are inanimate object that cannot harm you without someone else doing the deed. This fear I thought was quite insane, and helped go with my theme.

08. Lygophobia is the fear of darkness which I have mentioned in the Nocturne description. I used to suffer from this heavily, mainly when alone, but I have over come this fear luckily. The song is very slow and has a dark ambience throughout which gives it a powerful backing to the actual meaning of the song.

09. Doxophobia is the fear of giving opinions and having them shut down, or even being praised for those opinions. I do not fear this, but I am also not very used to receiving praise for anything. Martha often sucked the joy out of the music I created by insulting it and me for making it, but hopefully with future listeners enjoying this music I can get more people to get rid of this false pretense I have about my music.

10. Metathesiophobia is the fear of change. I am constantly excited and nervous for changes, especially large changes like me moving out in less than a month. This song more so represents the great feeling of a change that affects my life in a positive way though, to get away from a lot of the negativity of other songs.

11. Eremophobia is back to the slower and sadder style. This is the fear of being lonely. I am constantly alone writing music or doing things by myself with nobody else around. This basically is another song that suited the flow of the album and the ideas behind it.

12. Katagelophobia reverts to a more upbeat electronica style about the fear of ridicule. This song is upbeat mainly due to the fact that I have learned to ignore ridicule and laugh at myself for things as opposed to beat myself up about them.

13. Psychophobia is the fear of going psychotic or schizophrenic. This song jumps from numerous different melody styles randomly to signify the schizophrenic behaviour of the song.

14. This is the final riff of Psychophobia repeated until the end of the song, getting distorted and evil sounding. Necrophobia is the fear of dying, and yet again a very fitting outro to an album like that of Sequence and Oceanic.

The fourth album which was recorded simultaneously with Mind Less, using the inspiration of winter which it was at the time, I created this album basically as a continuation from Oceanic. The first few songs resemble water in more than one way, but with the snow interlude it carries you over into the wintery state of mind.

Album: Snowscape

01. This song refers to the store A&P which I worked at for 3 years and during the time of this song. The main inspiration is the idea of the connection of the Atlantic and Pacific with the land of Canada and this idea of including everyone from coast to coast gave me a great idea for a mellow opening track for this album.

02. 256 refers to it's bpm and I basically wanted to create a fast song with a cool chorus to add to an album, this being it. There wasn't much inspiration here other than a cool drum beat that I came up with.

03. Dire Dire Docks is a song from Super Mario 64, it's a water level by the same name, but the song I thought suited well with the overall sound of the album. It's basically a generic cover with no extra beats or anything added, just different instruments to create a cool atmospheric sound.

04. Essence becomes the name for the 5th album due to a great picture I found that inspired the entire album, the song on it's own suits well for Snowscape, but I made a remix of this for the 5th album which should be finished in the preceding couple months. This song was actually one that I thought up in my head in a dream once, so I decided it would be a good idea to make it into a song.

05. Snow (Interlude) is a very short track taking the listener from the start which is very similar to the Oceanic album into the full on Snowscape style.