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A Year Without Breath

by Cryptic Ruse

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about

Written entirely in 15edo, this album takes quite a different direction from previous Cryptic Ruse albums. The songs are simpler (rhythmically and structurally) and more concise, stylistically a mix of '70s proto-metal, early hardcore, and a bit of thrash. More fuzz tones than crunch, with a warm, fat, dirty, and organic-sounding production overall. I may have been listening to a lot of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard while writing this album....

Most of the songs were written in mid-summer to late fall of 2020, when my city was beset by police violence, the height of the COVID pandemic, and a week of wildfire smoke bad enough to temporarily give us the worst air quality of any city in the entire world (an AQI well over 300!). Between the tear gas, wildfire smoke, and the omnipresent threat of a severe respiratory virus--and figuratively holding my breath over the fate of American democracy--well, I think it's obvious what inspired the title! Thankfully it's been easier to breathe in the time since, but society continues to crumble nonetheless.

This was originally a larger collection of songs, all of which were intended to have vocals. For better or worse, I seem to have a block when it comes to writing lyrics for my microtonal metal songs! After sitting on the instrumentals for over a year, I finally gave up waiting for lyrical inspiration to strike, and decided to take a different path to get the songs out into the world.

A handful of the ones that really need vocals have been set aside for collaboration with Ben Spees of The Mercury Tree (a truly gifted vocalist whose contributions elevated three of the songs from "UNFERTILE"). I may write a few more to fill that collab out to full album length.

The rest have become this instrumental album, along with a couple new tunes that came to me in the month before release.

credits

released October 31, 2022

Igliashon Joans - all composition, guitar performance, drum programming, recording, mixing, mastering, and artwork.

Thanks to Steve Mueske for his feedback on the preliminary masters.

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Cryptic Ruse Portland, Oregon

Cryptic Ruse is the one-person experimental metal project of nonbinary transfem microtonalist Deja Igliashon.

Each album emphasizes a different constellation of influences, ranging from doom metal sludge to mathy progressive metal. A wide variety of microtonal tunings are employed on every album but Sierpinski's Casket, which is all in 12-tone equal temperament.
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