Dream Encyclopaedia - Released 2019/01/15 (Remastered release on 2022/01/12)

Dream Encyclopaedia is an electronica/synthwave EP I recorded in 2018 with the aim of releasing it as a much larger album, titled "Dream Library". I think the name was a pun or something.

Of course, it's fairly obvious that this is not the large album I was originally intending to release. That's because said album lost direction, turning into way too many different ideas and genres, and I didn't like 75% of the music on there. So I took 6 tracks from it and released those as an EP with the intention of following it up with a full album in the style of those tracks. That... isn't exactly what happened. The full Dream Library album would end up taking an extra three years to finish, and during that time I became dissatisfied with the production on the 2019 release of Dream Encyclopaedia. This led me to create a "remastered" version in late 2021 for release on streaming platforms in 2022, this doubled as an update to an album I felt was severly lacking in production quality and an excuse to finally release it on major streaming platforms.
So, what's on the EP?

Look to the Stars was inspired by a space exploration game which I cannot remember the name of. All I remember is, I played that game and I was thinking of this song.
The version present on the 2022 remaster is the Dream Library album version, as I felt the original 2019 version lacked any real punch in any of its instrumental parts. This new version features "real" strings in the intro, and moderately more agressive drums/synthesizers.

Evergreen was the first song I wrote for this EP. It was written before I even had the idea to do the Dream Library album, as at the time I was working on some space/sci-fi/war-of-the-worlds-but-edm concept album. I wrote it for a friend's speeddraw video, and in my head I thought "yeah, I should do more of this".

Erased originally went by a different name on the 2019 release, but I didn't like it so I changed it. It's a weird song because if you were to say "she picked those chords by firing darts at the circle of fifths" then you wouldn't be far off. I have no idea what I was doing. This track also makes use of some more interesting percussion compared to the drummachines of the other tracks, using chopped up samples of a random drum loop that I found. I'm not sure why I did that either.

Tea is simultaneously my favourite and least favourite track on this EP. It wasn't originally named after the drink, though after the release of Green Tea as a single in 2020 I kind of just rolled with the tea=drink association. The original 2019 version was was butchered by my awful keyboard playing skills, though in the 2022 remaster I was forced to remake a few parts from scratch which ended up sounding better. There was a version of this track before that, which was entirely sequenced, but me being the idiot I am, I lost the original project files (I later found a mastering file which I will be including as a bonus on Dream Library, don't worry). I must have rerecorded the main pad thing on 4 different synthesizers, ranging from software to hardware analog to virtual analog to this terrible old organ I had lying around. What I eventually released wasn't exactly bad, but I still prefer the original version over this version, and 2020's Green Tea over that.

Penne is the only song here who's name is just pure randomness, because unlike both versions of Dream Library (which had/have some fairly random titles), most of the titles here have some assignable meaning. With this track, the only thing I can say about the name is the preset name for the FM lead is called "pasta lead". I have no idea why I called it that.

Final Day is to me what Megalovania is to Toby Fox, minus the meme. I put this song in literally everything. It was originally written for a sample manipulation challenge, but then I did a "remaster" of it a few months later. Then I put it on this EP, and it's on the track listing for Dream Library too, and I have a piano arrangement of it somewhere and it's probably going to be in my game project/idea which I haven't properly announced yet. Point is, it's everywhere.

Dream Encyclopaedia is available on Bandcamp here, as well as on most major streaming platforms.

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