The Making of Fym Part 1: Fledgling Ideas

Galen here,

I’m writing this a couple of months out from the album’s release. Chris and Jack are working hard on the mix, and all but a handful of oboe lines (huge love to Camille De Carvalho for the beautiful work he’s doing on this!) and one very evil synth sound has been recorded.

Shaz, Alex and Dan are hard at work running through the material, getting ready to bring a couple of tracks to our live shows with Kyros in a few months. Things are going smoothly!

Currently I’ve been procrastinating this task. I’ve been somewhat intimidated by the amount of work that lays ahead, even in the aftermath of my part in this record’s completion. That’s how it’s been every time we’ve made something new though, so really it’s just a case of putting in the work, and I’ve always put in that work. So this time really shouldn’t be all that different. Usually the process is just a case of relentlessly re-listening to the rough mixes, tabbing up fingerings for what’s already scored, relearning the improvised parts, practicing everything in isolation and then gluing all those sections together with a lot of cups of tea and hours with the guitar!

We’ve made something pretty weird though, you’ll hear it soon. I have never been quite as proud of a piece of work I’ve been involved in as I am with this record. I don’t expect it to be hugely well received, or for it to really put us on the map in any way commercially (unless cheesy fantasy epics are back in style in 2024). That wasn’t our intent going into this record. It is however a very genuine expression coming from all of us, and at the risk of sounding a bit overly dramatic (especially about a cheesy fantasy epic), the process of making it has been an extremely fulfilling journey of self-exploration. I’m not exactly sure how much of that story I’m going to share with you, but I want to at least share some of it for those who are interested.

Let’s start at the beginning. At some point in 2020 before we released Mistress and Brine and after we’d spent 2019 working on a different project entirely, we decided it was time to work on album 3. For some reason we decided that it’d be set in a jungle, I have no idea why that was the vibe, and there’s a couple of really odd midi demos that exist from that time (a few riffs from those ended up as sections in Mistress and Spark Madrigal).

Here's a demo of an ambient guitar interlude I made at the time that we wanted to be part of this Jungle album but later scrapped. The entire soundscape, including all the frog and bird sounds are all just me messing around on my Ibanez.

But yeah, while I was leaning hard into this Jungle idea, Chris started writing a couple of demos, as Chris always does, on a very specific, old version of Sibelius. That’s been Chris’s process forever, and maybe you’ll get a blog in the future of Chris extolling the virtues of that outdated piece of notation software. I wouldn’t want to paraphrase one of Chris’s delightfully pernickety rants, so I’ll spare you it.

Here's some behind the scenes footage Chris salvaged from an old phone from around that time:

Those two demos ended up being the backbone for tracks 1 and 2. We didn’t have any lyrical themes in mind at the time, but Chris was half way through writing the novel, Lu (which is out now and you can buy here ) and worldbuilding all of the lore so they were written with a particularly Azurey jungle in mind haha! Anyway, after a couple of months awkwardly plugging away at this extremely loose jungle theme (and a very brief window where I was trying to convince Chris the concept should actually be this very contrived narrative about some monks who sought eldritch wisdom through a ritual of fatal, amphetamine fuelled sleep deprivation) at some point Chris came to me with a new, much simpler and better idea.

What if the narrative of the album was front to back, a dungeon crawl?

Obviously being a massive RPG nerd I loved this idea and immediately it had my mind racing through all the tropes we could explore, and which tropes to discard, and a litany of exciting musical and aesthetic possibilities.

We paid our respects to the discarded initial concept and honoured it by deciding journey would still start in a jungle. So we kept the arrangements for tracks 1 and 2, and figured they’d make great backdrops for the exposition and the call to adventure! After that we moved onto the next obvious step, a training montage in the mountains for track 3. This is where I came in to contribute to the composition, so you’ll notice this is where the riffs and the harmony began to get a bit more convoluted and aggressive on the record, but this is also where the RPG aesthetic came swinging into full effect, starting with some very Chrono Trigger inspired arpeggios ascending to represent the climbing of the mountain for the intro, and descending at the end to represent the descent at the end. There's a lot of other cool stuff in that song but I don't want to spoil everything so soon!

This is the end of what I’d consider to be the fledgling phase of the album’s development. The next steps are really where the story properly begins in earnest. Hopefully by the time I publish the next blog, I’ll be well on my way with rehearsing the material!

Signing off,

Galen