Sunsetters - Ancestor EP

<a href="https://blindmansbook.bandcamp.com/album/ancestor">Ancestor by Sunsetters</a>

Five tracks.

Will give the lyrics first, then the Nonfictional Commentary.

THE LYRICS

THE COMMENTARY

INTRODUCTION
Ancestor is an EP. That means it is a release of music that is not long enough, or at least not considered prominent enough, to sustain a full album (an LP). You will find six mp3 files in this folder [the "DOWNLOAD" button on the left]. Five of them are numbered, and those are the individual songs. We have also included “Ancestor.mp3” as the unabridged 30-minute experience.

The concept for this record is twofold, there’s an Inside and an Outside. Inside the music, the lyrics explore a scene in the life of Chiyou, leader of the Nine Li tribe in Chinese mythology. Outside the music, in the universe where the Sunsetters are a real rock band, Ancestor is built from the unfinished fragments written by rhythm guitarist Remy Larson, released posthumously after his death. Two of the pieces, “South of the Fog” and “The White Drought,” were more or less complete, but the last piece, “Deep Cuts,” was only fragments. The rest of Sunsetters joined up with Coestts guitarist Sally Death to finish his work.
The circumstances of Remy’s death are not entirely straightforward, but they are not to be explored in this release either. This music is simply tribute.

The actual, like, trivia factoid of why this music was made is Nine is God. That was an ARG that Jordan ran for the Fear Mythos for a while. He wanted to release some music that somehow tied into the game, and this resulted in some easter eggs related to the number 9 within the music. The original release was accompanied with a mysterious code that led to two rewards– a secret remix of “The White Drought,” and a little RPG Maker game. We have elected not to include those in this release. You’re not missing much, but if you’re really interested, it is not impossible to locate the original Ancestor. It will require some old-fashioned Internet Digging, but that’s keeping with the spirit of the ARG. Anyway, the point is this EP came from a spontaneous idea. In service of that, Jordan asked Lindsay for any loose musical pieces they didn’t want to do anything with and got the three core songs, which he then edited together.

We first wrote this nearly a decade ago, releasing it in February 2016, shortly after finishing the first Sunsetters album The Mythology of Empathy. Starting in 2020, we began revising and polishing all the Sunsetters albums, releasing our fourth one in 2023. It was always our intention to eventually revisit Ancestor, particularly when we reached the point in the Sunsetters “story” into which it fits, and now we’ve finally done so. It should be a lot better now. Please enjoy.

WARWIG
Lindsay: This one was all Jordan. The waves sound effect is a very new addition, as is most of the guitar part. It sounds nice, and I like how it doesn’t really sound like any of the rest of Ancestor. All in all I think it’s a nice little intro.

Jordan: This is based on the “Ballad of Persse O’Reilly,” an original song whose sheet music is found at the end of chapter 2 of Finnegans Wake. We first did Ancestor back when I was just entering my Wake obsession, and pretty early on I put that sheet music into MuseScore to see what it actually sounded like. I am by now very familiar with the piece. And I always wanted to do something with it, base a song off of it. The earlier versions of Ancestor featured the Ballad’s melody more prominently, and this current version only has the melody appear once, in a different key, during “Deep Cuts.” (well, it appears twice, but they’re in the same section of the song.) Here at “Warwig,” I instead just.. played with the bass underneath. The Wake sheet music didn’t even have a bass part, or chords; it was just the melody!

SOUTH OF THE FOG
Lindsay: This was one of my earliest attempts at writing something in the vein of doom metal, which, if you’re unaware, is primarily known for being downtempo music with a notable sense of despair or sadness or whatever. I just kinda wrote it one day, don’t really remember why I did. I wouldn’t call it the best thing I’ve ever written, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it nonetheless.

In terms of lyrical concept, this one draws from Chinese mythology, specifically the war between Chiyou and the Yellow Emperor, wherein Chiyou conjured a thick fog over northern China, with the Yellow Emperor creating a chariot that always points south as a countermeasure to allow for his forces a more even fight, eventually leading to Chiyou’s defeat at the hands of the Yellow Emperor, who would then go on to rule over all of Huaxia, the confederation of tribes living along the Yellow River who are said to be the ancestors of the Han ethnic group who comprise the vast majority of Chinese people today.

I remember, originally, this song was called ‘the Nemesis Moon’ as a Lovecraft reference and the lyrics were more along the lines of Vaguely Occult. I don’t think the original lyric has survived, and it probably wasn’t even that good anyway, seeing as how I wrote it when I was eighteen and didn’t really know how to write lyrics all that well, but I know at the time I thought they were real cool. None of this is relevant; I just thought it was a Fun Fact worth sharing, or something.

Jordan: For years I didn’t touch this song much. And even now, I still haven’t changed anything substantial. I handled the guitar solos; that much was always true. In this version, I did some more tweaks, some in the name of adding slight variation here and there, some in the name of making the sounds pop. This may actually be one of my favorite Sunsetters pieces; I can most easily listen to it.

THE WHITE DROUGHT
Lindsay: I mentioned in the commentary of We Excavate, since the title track borrows a lot from this piece, and probably also in the commentary for the old version of Mythology wherein Ancestor appeared as a bonus track, that this song was originally an improvisational expression of grief over the death of a longtime pet that I played the night of and then wrote down at some point in the days following. As far as I can tell, it appears here almost, if not entirely, unedited from that original transcription.

It’s certainly been long enough that I’m able to look at it from a more objective standpoint. It’s definitely rough; some of the transitions between sections are kinda sloppy, and I think it probably goes on for a bit too long, but compositionally it fits as a bridge between the slowness of ‘South of the Fog’ and the chaos of ‘Deep Cuts’, and narratively I think it works as a sort of moment of clarity between Chi You’s rageful lashing out and his demise in battle. All in all, it holds a special place in my heart, for better or worse, and it works in context, so I have no gripes about its inclusion.

DEEP CUTS
Jordan: It would help a lot if I could remember what was going through my head all those years ago, as to my memory this song just kinda suddenly existed. I know I must have decided to do it. I do remember that the many sections of this song had their origins as basslines and drum tracks that Lindsay had written for Summer Sucks, and we had already decided to scrap those songs and do a different Summer Sucks, but in the meantime there were some really cool riffs here, all consistently of a.. what would you call it, black metal?? A black metal bent. I know I wanted Summer Sucks to have more variance, more scope, but I could see these black metal riffs as being a part of a single big song. In addition, I also knew I needed to get some MuseScore editing practice in for larger, more complex songs, if I wanted Summer Sucks to even become a reality. So, reasoning it out like that, yeah, it’s inevitable that this song would exist, and I’ve managed to explain it just fine. I just don’t remember it!

“Deep Cuts” is the chaos of Ancestor that has been waiting patiently to show its head, saving energy that needed to get let out all at once. Its structure is such: the first half of the song is a three-chorus black metal jam, and the second half is a medley of reprises leading into breakdown. This is not totally different from how the piece was nearly a decade ago, and besides tweaking rhythms and variations the main thing I did was convert a section from Summer Sucks “foreshadowing” into an original breakdown. That’s the part with the melodic (“Persse O’Reilly”) chorus. I built that part piece by piece, and it came out rocking. It’s moments like that that make this creation process so worthwhile, moments where I check back on the effort I’ve put in and am surprised to find a punchy recognizable result. These songs are not tremendously different from how they were nearly a decade ago, but I have refined my skillset over the years and considered it possible to refine this old material, like sculpting out of marble, in order to highlight what the pieces were trying to accomplish in the first place. In comparison, the older versions are now betas.

Could I still go back and file off some nubs here and there? Yes. Is it possible that, years from now, this and other releases will see another revision? Yes! But we are not perfectionists; I revisit old pieces only when I feel I have evolved enough to know how to bring out a concept from the piece that I was otherwise too inexperienced to approach.

Lindsay: It’s been said multiple times by now that this started life as a song intended to be the big climactic song of the original version of Summer Sucks, and Jordan’s above description of it in terms of the music itself is pretty much spot on. When I started writing material intended for Summer, I had also been writing a lot of song material for various styles of music, mostly just for practise, but there was also a sense of challenge-seeking to it. Like, trying out writing for all the different genres of music I liked to listen to to see if I could, that kind of thing. I bring this up because, in terms of music, this song is pretty much just the combination of the aforementioned Summer Sucks bass-and-drum lines with at least two attempts at writing weird black metal songs that I had been working on at around the same time.

It’s funny, I also don’t really remember what it was like making this song; obviously I wasn’t the one who edited it all together into what it is now, but I’m very much in the same boat as Jordan where it feels like the song just kinda started existing one day. Granted, it’s been almost an entire decade since we wrote it, but it really does feel to me like some switch got pulled and caused the song to just be real. We did a good job with it, though; that can’t be overstated. It certainly is one of our best Pre-Summer songs.

SLEEP NOW
Lindsay: I don’t really remember when it was we decided that Ancestor would have an intro and outro bookending it. It’s an idea that appeals to me, should go without saying; I just don’t remember how we arrived at the idea.

There have been a few different iterations of the outro. Jordan talks about the first iteration below, but there was also a later one that was a short, quick guitar solo in something of a similar vein to ‘Goodbye to Everything’, the final song of Between the Buried and Me’s Parallax duology. This one is more in the vein of the original outro, and it’s pretty neat.

Jordan: The bookends to Ancestor were originally very different. This piece was “Nein, Ich Bereue,” an ambient outro making use of reversed sounds from the original intro. I threw it together then. I threw this one together too, though at least I wrote it all this time. There is at least some method under it: the bass organ draws out the root in monotone, creating a space that seems to stretch. I listen to this piece and feel anxiety that the bass will not last long enough to sustain the chords above. Anyway, it’s a reprise of “Warwig,” short and sleepy.

Goodnight, Remy.

ANCESTORA Sunsetters EP by Blind Man's Book

THE LYRICS

THE COMMENTARY

ANCESTOR
A Sunsetters EP by Blind Man's Book