Sunday night, I began a project I've wanted to do for years now, but kept putting off because of its sheer size and scope.
So when I released In Free Fall in 2019, it was actually meant to be a two-pronged thing. I had this album of remastered and reworked older tracks as my debut as aphrodisiac, and then album #2 was gonna be all newly-sequenced stuff. This album was gonna be called Isolated Together—which predates the lockdowns, so you know. It was more a reference to being stuck at college without friends while all my friends and my new girlfriend (six years ago, we started dating, see my previous post) were online. We were isolated together.
If you're a hardcore longtime diehard Somnolescent follower, you might have read the post I made back then called "How a Fusion Drive Ate Our Gopher". I've told this story a billion times now, but for the final time:
I had two Macs, the 2013 one I was bringing to school (and my daily driver still to this day), and a 2017 Retina iMac that had a "Fusion Drive" in it. Fusion Drive was an unholy abomination of Apple stopgap marketing back when SSDs were expensive and hard drives were too slow. There's a small SSD and a large mechanical drive that get summed together in software as a "logical volume" (as in, it only exists in logic, not in reality). The SSD acts as cache for the hard drive, so it feels snappier than a hard drive, but has a lot more space than an SSD. Following me?
The issue is that any difference between the two causes the entire logical volume to fail spectacularly. I was using that computer to work on Isolated Together, run servers, store my music library and childhood YouTube videos and a ton of downloaded art, including some of Savannah's oldest drawings. Even though I was working on In Free Fall in school, I didn't bring the Isolated Together projects with me because they relied on the newer version of GarageBand on the Retina Mac, not my slightly older one on my 2013 Mac. I also wasn't keeping backups, so the project files and the uncompressed AIFF renders of those songs were just on that computer, no spare copies of anything.
So calamity strikes circa Easter 2019, the Mac boots up to a prohibitionary symbol (which means "I can't find a boot volume"), and the Internet Recovery tool shows that the entire drive is unformatted. Now—the data was still there, as some of my recovery attempts proved, so it wasn't that the drives failed. Some kind of power failure nuked the partition table or something similarly low-level, and I blame this on the Fusion Drive. I've had many many power failures with my first iMac and now the eMachines Box, and they just boot back up with no problem. The only time I've seen anything like this is with a Fusion Drive, which again, have to be perfectly synced lockstep at all times, not possible when sometimes the power goes out.
Here's macoclock on Medium saying something pretty similar:
Fusion drives present a merged volume container between the SSD and HDD. Without either one, the data is unreadable. Basically if either the SSD or HDD failed, your entire data is basically gone forever. Fusion drives have a history of mechanical failures. The most widely observed cause is the disk reading mechanism on the HDD is somehow worn or broken.
The true problem data is stored between drives instead of a full file on either drive. Therefore making it more difficult to recover your data in its enclosure. And if you have a mechanical / hardware failure, software data recovery would allow you to see your file structure, but you won’t be able to retrieve the data because it cannot read the complete set of data.
I tried a couple things, including rebuilding the partition table using TestDisk (no dice, and possibly made it worse) and brute force recovering data using PhotoRec (absolutely not what it's meant for, and mostly grabbed random junk cache files instead of my actual files). Worse yet, GarageBand project files are not files, they're technically folders in Apple's bizarre "package" format, so without a working folder structure on the drive, all PhotoRec could ever hope to give me were the random innards of some of those projects, and nothing I could conceivably use.
By this point, I was exhausted and fucked up over the loss of a ton of really important shit to me, so I simply formatted both drives and split them to be two physical volumes (as in, the SSD and HDD were now separate). Surprise, the computer has been fine ever since. I suppose I could've saved some more stuff with a more targeted PhotoRec search, but I just wanted my computer working again.
Fusion Drives haven't been included on Macs in five years now because SSDs are large enough to be someone's entire internal storage without issue. Good riddance.
If you hate reading: a power outage ate not all my data, but the way the computer knows that data exists, and I wasn't able to recover it. This is absolutely due to the special (as in bike helmet special) drive setup Apple came up with when SSDs were too small and hard drives were too slow. Fuck you Apple.
Were these songs anything brilliant? Not really. At the time, yes, the Isolated Together stuff was my best material to date, and the upset about me losing everything was what discouraged me from working on more music. In Free Fall on its own looked like a consolation prize for not having any new songs—and that's actually what I believed it was until I started looking back through old logs and found that I'd been working on both in tandem in January 2019.
But yeah, nowadays, the mtlx stuff from 2023 proves I can do a lot better. That doesn't mean I am not still deeply sentimental about what I made, though, and that doesn't mean I'm not still angry at having lost it. (Now I take a neurotic approach to backups, surprise surprise.)
Now, these songs still exist. Sort of. They exist as the lossy renders I had posted to mari_v1 and also sent to folks on Discord. I cannot use these on a release because the sound quality is degraded. I'm autistic about finding out someone else, even major labels, gave me MP3s on a CD or uploaded MP3s to Bandcamp, and I'm not about to do that myself. Nevertheless, I released them as The Lost Sessions on my site and pledged to one day recreate the songs in full so I could use them, either as they are or as a springboard for more refinement.
That brings me back to this project. Now that I'm working on new music again, it's time to recreate Isolated Together along with it.
Now, I could simply redo the structure, beats, and melodies of each song and have this done in two weeks. These are not complicated songs. What I want, though, is as close to a recreation of those lossy renders as possible. That means the samples, loops, and patches I used, the automation I programmed, the layering I did, the mixing, the panning—they all have to be recreated by ear, as close as possible.
This takes a lot of detective work! In the case of the first song, "I Don't Give a Fuck About the New Smash Bros." (I'm sure that was a working title, maybe), just the main melody line had me figuring out which patch I had used, then figuring out how exactly I had the smart controls on it set (the exact amount of harmonics, shape, depth, reverb, glide, etc.), then trying to recreate the pitch bend curves by ear that creates that weird "siren" effect, again, as closely as possible. For the drums, I know I have two different drum machines going, but I swear I hear a third as well, but I can't place if it's a tweaked Neon or if it's another drum machine patch entirely.
Thankfully, a lot of my custom patches were shared between my two Macs. A lot—not all. Some patches, specifically the bizarre wowing "glob" lead in "Abduction", I don't have, and those are going to be the hardest ones to recreate. Even if it's the same sound, the way it sits in the frequency spectrum isn't going to be the same, or the tonal qualities will be different. Even though I know the lead in "Smash Bros." is the Screamlead patch, my attempts so far don't have the exact bassy "throaty" quality the one on the render has. I was able to increase it by turning down the harmonics knob, but some harmonics are still necessary because of the nasal quality that sound also has, which disappears when you turn it all the way off.
This is gonna take a lot of doing, but I am up to the challenge. This is something that's been on my mind for years now, and it's already been very rewarding. A lot of people would go "well, if they're not even great songs, and you can do better now, why not just make new music?"—and yes, that is the rational play here, and I am. I have a collab project with Connor going, in between him working on the second MoriHime album, and I'd love it if I could get a new aphrodisiac EP or something out this year, just to put all those cool noises I came up with in a musically much more interesting context, especially for ten years of the project (Here Come Monsters was to be released in late 2015!).
But I still want these songs. It's the pride of the thing, the potential, the way it makes me happy to hear them again, and the way they were stolen from me. The same way I wanted to finish the mtlx stuff, itself an idea from 2020, because I'd been putting it off for years, I want to finally put this loss behind me. I was proud of these songs, and I will rebuild them and use these reconstructions to take them to another level.
And then back up the reconstructions. C'mon, I know better now.
