Trenchwraith is a name I made up for myself for Deathlance Records. It's kinda seen as the "ambient guy" now usually but to me, it's just a name. Like, I'd be fine releasing music of any genre/theme under it, not just ambience (which the only reason I even did, was because it was easy).
When I sent Crepusculaurora to Dakoda (co-owner of Deathlance Records), I intended to just use my current name as the name of the artist, so like I coulda just went by "3V1L5H0073R." He told me that Deathlance's thing is that "everyone has spooky names" so I set out to make mine. Here were some suggestions I made for that name:
6000 Feet Under
Phantom Marine
Trenchwraith
Mariana's Secret
They were all based on an underwater theme, thanks to what I was thinking of Crepusculaurora as at the time (thought of it as an abandoned Atlantis). I immediately thought Trenchwraith sounded the coolest, but wanted Dakoda to have the last say on the name because it's his label. Man was quick to decide on Trenchwraith cuz he thought it was a sick name. Wise minds think alike.
One thing I tried to do was keep the name as original as possible. That worked out hella for Trenchwraith tho there's a Simpsons comic book episode on "The Trench Wraith"... Leeeeet's just ignore that.
Did you know that yumpoopsoup thought the name was cheesy? Kid is lost.
The music is nothing more than a bunch of sound edits, and I barely take credit for them as proper, creative tracks. I just thought that my first track sounded cool enough to be released on a music label, and surely enough it was, so I continued.
So I made three tracks:
Crepusculaurora
Alta Caeli
Spectre of Stars
(note to self: make these slideshow between covers of personal and deathlance, with clickable links, tooltips and figcaptions
Aight, I'ma talk about what I was trying to do when I made them, some trivia (hidden in pointless detail buttons) and how y000 can make y00r own!
DeathlanceSelf-release
Crepusculaurora
Takako Mamiya - All or Nothing (slowed + reverb edit)
aight so I'ma talk about how to make the track first. that's prolly what you care about, right? but then will come the TL;DR part, the HISTORY. this is p damn important cuz it shows that it was kinda 90% unintentional, but also that there waaaaaas SOME thought at least put into this!
Process
Aight I'ma prepare this out like some cooking tutorial (p ez ngl)
Ambience with a soundscape of underwater gleams and breezes that can sails its listeners to lands never before imagined.
Tools y00000'll need
Audacity (preferably any version before 3.2 for easier VST control)
OrilRiver (VST)
Moises.ai (use a free account)
The audacity
Ingredients
Your sample track: Takako Mamiya - All or Nothing (from Love Trip, 1982)
Directions
Upload your track to Moises.ai.
pick any option that separates out the Vocals, Bass and Drums.
Download the track layer (the instrumentals but no bass and drums, basically)
specifically the Other track. this has the synths, violins and vibraphones(?) all in one.
Open that track (you just downloaded) in Audacity
you need the audacity for this.
Generate a bit of silence at both ends of the track.
this is to allow for the stretches and reverbs to fade in/out easier.
Copy and paste the track into a new layer, then mute it.
let the second one be your backup.
Apply Paulstretch.
Stretch Factor: 3.0
Time resolution: 1.0
Slow down the song.
Down to 65% speed (0.65)
Apply OrilRiver reverb VST
Pick the Deep Cave preset.
play around with the settings. I maxed the room size and stuff. Played with the Dry and Wet volumes to get a nice balance.
For the regular version: wet only.
For the clearer version (the best-of-both-worlds, Deathlance track): have a good balance of Dry and Wet
For the clear-only version: dry only. hell, don't even bother with this step
when possible, insert a picture of the actual VST with the settings from then
Cut out the dead silence at both ends of the track.
You just want the meat of this thing.
Make up some pretentious background story/theme and create the name and image
i thought of it as like an abandoned atlantis
to be serious tho, this can help mould the audience's perception of your work, guiding their imagination. covers don't always need to just look cool.
History
How D4F@Q did it come t000 b3333?? thought processes and shizz
I was listening to this album on repeat, Takako Mamiya - Love Trip (1982). Sexy album. There's one track that I like a LOT and that's All or Nothing.
By000t1ful. But y000 kn0w what else is beautiful? MY MOM.
Jk she isn't actually, but what is tho is that background instrumental at the end of that track (starting around about 20:00 on that video). That sounds pretty damn nice. How tf do I extract that out?
I knew that I had to get rid of the drums, voice and bass to just get those leftover instruments, but there is no existing tool (as of back then) to help make this happen. So using my limited knowledge, I just tried to perform what I wanted on the track anyway.
What I wanted to do was elongate that sound, and "melt" it so you cannot hear the individual hits/"twangs" of each instrument. Instead, they're all melded into a single flow of sound, almost like violins. So here's what I did...
got All or Nothing and slapped it into Audacity
applied Paulstretch.
Settings: Stretch Factor = 2.0, Time Resolution = 1.0.
this "melted" the track, making it longer but muffling out the little details (e.g. piano notes are now long drone notes, but now drum hits now sound like thunder, which wasn't wat I wanted)
used and applied the OrilRiver VST reverb plugin.
set it to the Deep Cave preset and made changes like setting the dry off n stuff
applied the OrilRiver VST again.
makes it sound "bigger", more muffled, like y00 in a big-ayas cave or somein
And this is what it ended up sounding like...
And right off the bat you get this large-ayas thunder-y noise that persists for the entire thing. It ain't crap or anything, but it defo wasn't intended. That was cuz of the drums, for sure. But for a lot of it, you do hear this nice overlying background noise to it, especially towards the end. Now THAT's what I want, but I legit had no idea on how to remove instruments from a compiled track. So at that point, I just gave up and uploaded the thing to Bandcamp for funsies.
Made the cover on Roblox. Literally made a new place, checked out a few free models of ballrooms and found one that I liked in particular. This (was most likely stolen from an uncopylocked game) had this nice detailed ballroom but the entire thing was upside down, with all the furniture having collapsed onto the damn ground (or should I say ceiling).
Eh, it's fine. Changed the ambience to be kinda blue, added a blue neon block behind the window and took a picture. And there you have it, All or Nothing, but mostly nothing. I think that was a fair title. A cooler one I pooped outta my brain at that moment was "Lost Atlantis Ballroom", but I didn't want to provide a cool standalone identity to such a low-effort track.
A few months pass by, and I always remember the track as a cool attempt at some kinda ambient thing, but I always thought every now and then, how tf do I remove instruments from a track?? There's gotta be a way.
Someone then enlightens me on this totally mind-blowing web-app called Moises.ai. Seriously, this thing is close to black magic when it comes to music. A lot of services now exist that do the same thing, but this is the one that stands on top for all its extra features. Essentially though, it uses AI/machine-learning to hear/recognise what each instrument in a track is, then it cuts it out with a pair of scissors and slaps it into its own layer. This is about ~85% perfect, which is more than goddamn enough for me to have my tiny mind blown to dust. I try it out on a couple of songs and I'm just gobsmacked.
Then, I remember this track once again: frickin eureka moment.
This time, I got All or Nothing and slapped it into Moises.ai. Removed the instruments that I didn't want (vocals, bass and drums - so just the Other track) and ran it through the same process. That resulted in this sample below.
Honestly, that sounds really damn nice. Absolutely happy and that is, more or less, exactly what I wanted. So, yeah. What now? Eh, idk. Let's try this same effect on the entire track.
Shit. That actually sounds alright.
I'm just skipping around it, and the entire thing sounds consistent in its tone, fitting in a particular theme, and had a full start-end structure with a sorta climax to it as well (all because it was literally an edit of a real song). As cheap as the process felt, the result was shockingly original and utterly unrecognisable from the original track.
This was one variant of the track I made, it comprised of only the wet (the reverb). I made another version which was only the dry (no reverb applied). I liked the sound of both a LOT and thought people would dig either track. Like, wet-only version has this big underwater, huge landscape-y feel to it, whereas the clear-only felt like light shining and had this gleaming feel to it.
So, how do I make it so it has the best of both worlds? So you only need to listen to one track instead of splitting between two? Idk, just slap the two together. There, done. Even the imagery of the tracks felt combined: so like the underwater-y landscape is now being shone by light passing through it. Crap felt majestic.
Considered uploading it to my Bandcamp, but that was when a friend, a CLASSIC one I met on Roblox at around like 2014 (he used to go by SnootleBoop, but now it's "dakoda") (we talk, this ain't a crazy long-time-no-see thing), told me about this music label that he and his friends are starting, where they'll upload their own music together in. Idk about you, but I thought that was lowkey cool af and I wanted in. So I sent him that track a bit later for consideration, and he was happy to accept it right in, hell idk if he even listened to it yet but it didn't matter.
I went back to the Roblox place where I took the picture for that previous ambient track I did and took some more pics. This time I made it even more blue and added some effects like blur, crepuscular (HAH) rays, and broke down that window for some reason (well it was to allow the rays to enter the room). The music felt srsly fitting this time and the pictures themselves lent itself to the theme a lil bit better. That's something interesting btw, I thought of the sound as blue and water-y, but I've had others tell me that they saw orange in it. What's great about music is that it's all open to interpretation and there's no wrong answer really... But I want you to see what I see so f0q y0000000000
Here are some sample pics I took. You can see the gradual change in theme from the VERY beginning (like the first track I did) to its finished state. I settled on the statue picture for my own page cuz I liked the ambiguous nature of it a bit more.
The room with slightly updated blue lightingLooks nice. Nearly became the pic but I needed it to slap with more rays.Room with final look.One of several pictures I took. This got used for the Spotify banner and inside decal of the CD release
I also had to make a name for this thing. Takako Mamiya - All or Nothing (ambient edit) is just not going to cut it, despite how true that is. Would be nice to call it that, but it's long af, and just makes sense to give it its own name. So here were some that I made up, like some damn AI generating sentences. They're all basically tryna be based off of what I imagined the track looked like.
Bluemore
Sub-aqua crepuscular
Atlantis Crepuscularis
Takako Mamiya - All or Nothing (ambient edit)
Crepusculaurora
I settled on the name personally. I knew it was pretentious af and all that but I didn't take much credit for the track so I felt okay being stupid and stuff with it.
Sent the track and its pictures to Dakoda, he then asked me to make an artist name for Deathlance that was "spooki and eye catching". Aight. Made several suggestions. Mind you, I was perfectly fine with just "3V1L5H0073R" or something, but whatever.
6000 Feet Under
Phantom Marine
Trenchwraith
Mariana's Secret
Dakoda and I, both totally separately, latched onto Trenchwraith. I was keen on letting him have the final, unbiased say in this but he was already on the same page as I was.
He then proceeded to send me a screenshot of someone's reaction to that track. That person was Harmonic Illusion.
HEAD OVER HEELS, BREAKING HER WAY, PUSHING UNKNOWN JUNGLES EVERY DAY
This was the (imo) ridiculously talented guy on Deathlance, who plays like multiple instruments, writes jazz music (original & covers), orchestrates bands, just lives and BREATHES music. A guy like him you'd just NEVER expect to be around in a place like Deathlance Records (in that you'd assume he'd be in a jazz label or something). His stuff on Deathlance was SICK too. At the time, he had released like two tracks as Harmonic Illusion, Crystallize and Abide, and some stuff with Hallucinations. So yeah, this mf knew his shizz.
So to see his reaction like that, just blew my mind because, mind you, I made this track in like 15-20minutes. I spent LESS time on this track than I did actually listening to it. I didn't even listen to it in its entirety before I sent it!! The track's length is LONGER than the time I spent on it!
The track gets uploaded basically immediately. We talked about trying to get the three versions of it uploaded but he couldn't for some reason, so we just settled on the best-of-both-worlds "clearer" version as the one you see. And yh, that's kinda it for that story really.
TL;DR: I was messing around with a track on Audacity and Moises.ai, and made a sick ambient track really fast. Sent it into a friend's label and he was happy to upload it. Made 3 versions, used the second one for the Deathlance upload.
DeathlanceSelf-release
Alta Caeli
track2.aup
this story is FAAAR less interesting and coincidental and crap. Instead, it comprises of me forcing myself to essentially "try again." Make a "sequel" to Crep or something. Thing is, that song is almost an accident. To intentionally do that again, blegh, I dunno how.
Process
how to make your own
🔊 Ambience | 📈 Medium | 🕒 1-3 hours | 👥 ∞ people | ❤️ Vegan
Ambience that soars its listeners to new, uncharted heights, taking them to lands never before seen on land
Tools u finna needa get
Audacity (preferably any version before 3.2 for easier VST control)
OrilRiver (VST)
Moises.ai (use a free account)
Enough of a shit to give
Ingredients
Your sample track: Miho Nakayama - You're My Only Shinin' Star (album version, 1986)
Directions
Upload your track to Moises.ai.
pick any option that separates out the Vocals, Bass and Drums.
Download the track layer (the instrumentals but no bass and drums, basically)
specifically the Other track. this has the synths, violins and vibraphones(?) all in one.
Open that track (you just downloaded) in Audacity
you need the audacity for this.
Generate a bit of silence at both ends of the track.
this is to allow for the stretches and reverbs to fade in/out easier.
Apply Paulstretch.
Stretch Factor: 3.0
Time resolution: 1.0
Slow down the song.
Down to 65% speed (0.65)
Copy and paste the track into a new layer.
the first layer is gonna act as the dry-only (the non reverbed) track.
layer 2 will be the reverbed track.
we're then gonna do a layer 3 in a few steps...
Apply OrilRiver reverb VST to layer 2.
Pick the Deep Cave preset.
play around with the settings. I maxed the room size and stuff.
make sure the Dry is totally off, because you already have that in layer 1, remember?
but play around with the Wet volume so it doesn't blow up ur speakers, ok?
when possible, insert a picture of the actual VST with the settings from then
Copy and paste layer 2 into a new layer (3)
000 848y
Apply OrilRiver reverb VST to layer 3.
yes, we're reverberating a reverb track.
same settings if you want (recommended). you might need to lower the volume because it can get loud.
Play around with the volumes of the three layers
to get a sound that doesn't shrek your speakers, and to get a sound that is preferable to you.
Cut out the dead silence at both ends of the track for all layers (at the same time).
You just want the meats of this thing.
Make up some pretentious background story/theme and create the name and image
i thought of it as like a lost land that still roams in the sky
to be serious tho, this can help mould the audience's perception of your work, guiding their imagination. covers don't always need to just look cool.
History
tf was i thinkin
So this time round, it's been like a couple months? After I submitted Crep I wasn't really expecting what would happen next, let alone what I would be doing in the label. Hell, I was pretty much set on just not doing anything afterwards, and was content with that (and still am tbh). Idk wtf you are meant to do to recreate a track like Crep again cuz that was kinda a one-off.
MMMusic (Harmonic Illusion) had contacted me not long after to help him out on an album track, Sorrow, on his album, The Best of Harmonic Illusion (later renamed to "As (Potentially) Seen On TV"). He was stuck and he didn't know where to take the track so he thought I could help. All I really did was stretch+reverb some samples he threw at me, and said like one or two ideas, and he got back on track again.
Ever since then, we've been talking. And he wanted me to make another track for Deathlance, especially since that would be cool for a CD release. Despite how I felt about Crepusculaurora (lazy, not really mine, etc), a CD release was an insanely novel concept to me and I lowkey wanted to have one myself. One problem though, I need to have more material to put on a CD, cuz it'd be dumb af to just have a single 22 min track use a whole disc, so having at least 2 would make sense. This meant making a new track.
I guess I was interested in making a new one, but I knew that I was not going to recapture the same magic as the first one. Despite that, I tried to push forward anyway.
So I go and try a couple tracks, lookin' into the ol' 80s Japanese catalogue once again, aaaaand nothing. Tried other songs that I knew too, but it just didn't work out as well, y'know? Here are some that I remember trying:
Weyes Blood - A Lot's Gonna Change
INSERT others that I was thinking at the time
Music is always damn good, but what makes Crepusculaurora work is its nice flow-y, somewhat ethereal, mythical, elegant background sound that it's made from, like it aaaaalmost doesn't sound like instruments, almost. It's not too intense, nor loud, and is a nice mixture of several instruments, all almost forming one. And when stretched, it's almost unrecognisable as to what instrument is being used, but you can hear the harmony, and the theme/feel/texture of the sound compliments it very well.
The closest track I could come to with this idea once again, was Miho Nakayama - You're My Only Shinin' Star (album verison, 1986). Great song. Written by Toshiki Kadomatsu, who's a really good songwriter from that era.
This version in particular lowers the volume of the bass synth so you get to hear the background more. AFAIK, the original version was released as a single and it was part of a TV show. The violins, background voices and stuff in the background are pretty nice and are kinda constant throughout the track, IMO. Thought it was good enough to try, especially since I was starting to get kinda desperate.
And so yeah, I did it right off the bat, exactly as I described in the process. Doing the three layers thing was something I actually did for Crep but ultimately just went with an older method, the one I described (very similar, just less finnicky, and more lossy). Sometimes less is more, even in the amount of work. With this, I've felt that the more work I put into it, the more tedious and lame it got. The magic partly came from its slapdash nature, because the result is so unexpected and THAT was what you worked with. This track was effectively me trying to recapture the sexiness of the first one, and failing.
Okay, maybe I'm being a lil harsh rn, because when I heard the result after working on it in a barely lit room past midnight, I was laughing at how decent it managed to sound eitherway. It had a airy, heavenly(?), golden sky feel that was like the total opposite to Crep, which was totally fitting.
I then went on to make the cover using Roblox. Had a few ideas but it was mostly centered around a massive lost city in the sky. How could I portray something that feels like it's in the air, mystical, mysterious and large?
What's funny is that I spent more time on this cover than I did on the track itself, probably because the theme of it was more interesting to me than anything else. That or I just didn't feel as enthusiastic about this thing.
Yeah, just sent it off and it got uploaded eventually. Not long after, the CD release happened and I was asked to make the decals for it. Dakoda sends me some CD templates, and I cook something up.
The gang seemed to dig it.
and yeah that was that. if you can't tell already, i really am not enthuasiastic about this story at all
DeathlanceSelf-release
Spectre of Stars
project3.aup3
this was a direct-to-compilation procedure. I had no intention of making another track cuz I was satisfied with getting a CD of my song edits.
Process
how to make your own
🔊 Ambience | 📈 Hard | 🕒 3-4 days | 👥 ∞ people | ❤️ Vegan
Ambience that transports its audience to a new unknown.
Tools you'll need
Audacity (preferably any version before 3.2 for easier VST control)
OrilRiver (VST)
Moises.ai (use a free account)
Any remnant of dignity you have left
Ingredients
Sample 1: Vangelis - Love Theme (from Blade Runner, 1982)
