Lindsay's Introduction:
Here we are in album three. Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride so far. Or something.

We Excavate has been in progress for about as long as the second draft of Summer Sucks, as I recall, possibly even before. At the very least, we’ve known since, like, 2014-15 that we wanted it to be drastically different from Summer stylistically. This resulted in a lot more post-rock influence, though that influence has lessened to a certain degree over time.

For the longest time, this album existed in my notes as six songs long, with the odd number tracks being instrumental and the even number tracks being vocal, and at about an hour’s length. That is an idea that I still like, even though the album didn’t turn out that way. However, with our desire to greatly differentiate this album from the previous one, that meant the tracklist would need expanded, instead serving as something of a call-back to Mythology. Also, like Mythology, Jordan ended up doing most of the work, especially in terms of lyrics.

All in all, We Excavate is an album that draws from the albums that came before it while also being drastically different from them, and is one to be proud of.

Jordan's Introduction:
The Mythology of Empathy introduced us to the midi fictional rock, with some cool riffs and some surprisingly pretty moments.
Summer Sucks refined the structural elements and shot for the stars in terms of scale.
We Excavate is here to bring us back down to Earth, and then deeper still. The rock has been refined, and now it is willing to be playful. Synth and bass are the stars of the show this time, and everything else serves to allow these elements context to develop.

The concept this time is simple: These songs take us progressively farther and farther into the water, starting in something like a river, entering an ocean, taking us through the zones of the sea down to the hadal zone. And maybe even lower than that. Why is the protagonist on this journey? What is their relationship with the “voice” in their head? Who are the gods here? How come nobody seems to need air? These are questions you should be able to come up with your own answers for.

The songs can all stand individually, like Mythology, and they can also tell one single narrative, like Summer Sucks. We Excavate walks steadily in between.

While this album did not turn out to be as rigidly post-rock as we may have first wanted, the end result works as a transition out of the style of the first two Sunsetters albums. “Transition into what,” you may ask. As of December 2020, I do not yet know. Hopefully, though, you will find these midi files to suggest a really good prog album.

Lindsay:
I can’t for the life of me remember writing this, but I do remember that it was quick. This served as an ambient-ish electronic-ish intro to the album, setting the tone for what was originally going to be a very post-rock We Excavate. It still serves that purpose for this expanded version of the album, so we kept it.

. . . also worth mentioning is that this was low-key part of an idea I had however many years ago that Archangard and Magreat could also be an electronic duo that I’m pretty sure I brought up to Jordan at some point and then promptly forgot about ‘til now.

Jordan:
The first ever Sunsetters opener that isn’t based in punk rock, and instead it’s a moody synth piece. I suspect this won’t be the last of its kind. One day I took Lindsay’s piece and rewrote it for flow and harmony, but the core is still hers-- it’s something of a medley of motifs that will show up on the album. I think specifically the motifs are from Sunken Blue, We Excavate, and Lowest Point.

Get used to the sound of the synth, as I made sure it was used consistently on this album. (It’s MuseScore 3’s Synth Strings 2, for the record. Maybe sometimes it’s Synth Strings 1, or 3. But usually 2, because 2 hits softer.)

Lindsay:
This one was intended to be the second track of the six-song Excavate, a long ambient prog song, that set the tone for the lyrical songs on the album. I don’t remember how I came up with the polyrhythmic intro bass and drums part, but it’s been around for at least five years, as has the 3/4 part that follows it. For several years the song was just those two sections before Jordan expanded it by adding all the middle parts. The song became a little bit longer than I had envisioned it being, but it all works and I’m overall happy with it.

This song has the most of my early lyrical contributions in it. I had only drafted lyrics for this one and the title track back then, ‘cause Jordan had already done ‘Lowest Point’. In fact, edits notwithstanding, pretty much all of the lyrics starting from section ABA are from my original draft. I was inspired by the Great Flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh when writing it, hence the allusions to Enki and the Kingship. Also, the final line is Sumerian, and translates roughly to ‘water father sea’, which I had done all those years ago and forgot the translation until recently, whoops.

Jordan:
I had always particularly liked Lindsay’s first draft of fragments for this song, consisting of the A and ABA bass and drums. To this day, I’m kinda surprised that when editing those fragments all I really did was use guitar and synth to provide a tonal texture. CAB was me just plain having fun, though. CAB was really, really fun.

Lyrically, this song introduces the setting and suggests some possible contexts for the protagonist.

(The section titles take that Sumerian “A aba ab” and turn it into a Genesis pun. They’re basically just sections A, B, and C, but the pun was too good.)

Lindsay:
This song originated in Jordan adapting what became the solo guitar section in Ancestor, ‘White Drought’, into a full-band arrangement. At the time I was somewhat hesitant because that solo guitar thing came from a deeply personal pain back at the start of 2016, the death of a sixteen years pet. Then in early 2018 Jordan sent me the start of a new draft of it, and a few months later I finished it up and added vocals for my lyric draft. Then this year Jordan added the middle section to it and rewrote the lyrics.

The original lyrics of the album were about a person drowning at sea and from there encountering an underwater king at war with another and joining that fight, but my two lyrics told that in an abstract way, building up to the ‘Lowest Point’ that is talked about in the Rapture canon. Of my lyric for this one, only a handful of lines made it in, which makes sense because my draft was kinda sparse. I couldn’t tell you what the new lyrics really mean, but I think they’re good enough that I don’t regret mine not being used.

. . . also, in the six song Excavate, this was track four, coming after the long instrumental ‘Feel, Feed, Fear’, which became ‘the Lonely Seas’.

Jordan:
I can summarize the lyrical story to this song as “protagonist sees a holy feeding, then protagonist is swept into a current and floats freely slowly off a cliff.” But I did want the lyrics to be broad enough, and the story to be symbolic enough, that they reward coming up with deeper meanings.

As for the music, well. The intro was a study on Gregorian chant composition I did one day. I honestly do not remember when or why I made it transition into a chugging metal power chord rendition of White Drought. But after that point, the rest of the song always felt like it was going to end up the way it did; it was just a matter of sculpting it out of the marble, and thus taking some years to get better at writing music first. The middle section just kinda happened one day. It’s based around a drum-and-bass groove that was originally slated for Lowest Point in an earlier draft. Really freaking smooth groove, too, good on Lindsay for that. Somewhere I started calling it the “Excavate riff” and then I managed to work it into the song itself. I think this song was originally titled “The Many Names of Weneg.” Instead now it’s our first title track.

Lindsay:
You might remember this one as a bonus track from the previous version of The Mythology of Empathy. It’s been rearranged into a more electronic thing, whereas it was previously a very definitely guitar-based song. As I recall I wrote the whole thing back in 2015, and it was a good three-movement, thirteen minute song. The first movement got used in ‘Rise of Her Rain’, becoming the third movement of that song, and the rest got slimmed up from what it was before.

Jordan:
As “Hidden in the Trees” was our tribute to LizardBite’s Fearblog, “The Lonely Seas” is our tribute to CuteWithoutThe’s. (It doesn’t exist on the web anymore, so I can’t link it.) I didn’t expect this song to end up on this album, but stripping it down to a Basset Hounds-esque drum-and-synth-and-bass setup made it an appealing interlude for me. My contributions to this piece include: The somewhat involved drum pattern, the additional bass providing midrange harmonies, and the attempt at an adorable melody at the end.

While there are no lyrics to this one, consider it a representation of an eventful voyage. The next song’s lyrics allude to the protagonist having already passed “underwater forests” and “high extrusive seamounts,” and I like to interpret “The Lonely Seas” as depicting the crossing of those.

Lindsay:
This one was all Jordan. One day he sent an in-progress draft of it to me, and kept building on it from there. It’s one of the three songs to not have come from the previous version of the album, along with ‘the Sinking Song’ and ‘Siren of the Abyss’. I particularly like how the first thing you hear in this song is vocals, since the previous song is instrumental. I dunno, it sounds neat. Also fun fact, after this, the Sinking Song, and Siren got added to the album, it made what was originally, like, an hour or so album come incredibly close to being too long for one disc. This wouldn’t have been an issue if we hadn’t consciously decided that this album should be a single disc, in contrast to Summer. I dunno, I just kinda find this funny in hindsight.

Jordan:
The “Midnight fills you” chorus, and basically the entire second half of this song, stem from a loose attempt to write music that captured how Finnegans Wake chapter 1 made me feel. This wasn’t even originally part of the Sunsetters context, but years later I still had no idea what to do with the piece, and I found a place for it in We Excavate. Editing this song was like banging my head against a brick wall. At no point in the process did I know what the final song would sound like or how it would be structured; I just knew it had to build into the second half. I would chip away at it, a little bit of work at a time, over a long period of time. And then one day I decided to put this song through the Reala test: I sent it to my friend Reala, and she loved it. So I figured it was probably done.

Fun fact: The only kind of whale with an esophagus large enough to accidentally swallow a human whole is the sperm whale, also coincidentally the only whale known to dive as far down as the Midnight Zone. The whale dies in this song. I’m sorry.

Lindsay:
This song was the first new one to get added to the tracklist, as I recall. There was an idea that it could come after ‘Lowest Point’ as a way to bring the focus back onto the protagonist and their participating in the fight against the opposing king. It was never, like, an idea that I was particularly fond of; the only reason I even tried it was because the in-progress draft that Jordan first sent me had a vocal line, and I tried to write words that would fit it, and it ended up being about the aforementioned fight against a king. But then we reordered the tracklist, making that not work, so my lyric didn’t get used; I think, like, a phrase or two made it in (though I think I deleted my attempt, so I can’t confirm if any of it is actually there).

Jordan:
I do not recall any of those old narrative ideas for this song at all. I also don’t really recall when or why I made this song (I think I wrote it the last time I was in America?), but I do recall how: I wrote a drum beat, then I tried literally just copy-pasting the drum beat into the bass score (always a fun experiment, since it makes no sense to do so), and I noticed a really groovy set of chords in there so I did maybe a little bit of tweaking to clean it up, and voila, the Sinking Song main riff. The bass ostinato (which shows up, for instance, at the very start) was kind of a Super Metroid-y thing. And then the middle section was an attempt at a musical idea I’ve always wanted to do: Music for a descent into an abyss. Out of these ideas, a complete song was pretty simple to come up with. I love the mood of this song.

As for the lyrics, well, I like doppelgangers, and I like sirens. For you Fear people in the audience, this siren corresponds to the Mother of Snakes.

Lindsay:
This was a short ambient guitar thing that I kinda just did one day. I had happened upon a How To video on YouTube for playing ambient guitar somehow, and after watching it I came up with the guitar part. I’m not entirely sure what I was going for with it, but I thought it fit the more ambient aesthetic of this album, so I sent an in-progress draft of it to Jordan and it got included in the expanded tracklist. It was originally, like, three-and-a-half minutes, but it got shortened a bit to make the album’s length more manageable.

Jordan:
I added harmonies and made some sounds consistent with the rest of the album. It’s what I do.

Lindsay:
This was intended to be the Big Song of the album, the sixth and final track and culmination of all the lyrical themes n’at. Apart from now being the eighth track, it is still all of those things. It was more overtly ‘metal’ than the previous songs in the previous version of the album, which fit the previous lyrics better than more ambient material would have. The ambient section towards the end was originally a call back to the ambient movement of ‘Feel, Feed, Fear’, but now is a call back to ‘Rise of Her Rain’ instead, which is fitting, since both songs are the Big Songs of their respective albums and share water themes. The final section is definitely my favourite part of the song. It was originally, like the rest of the song, a metal riff, but that riff ended up in use for another, as yet unannounced thing (so look forward to that, I guess). So now it’s a quiet, melancholic ambient thing, courtesy of Jordan, and it’s probably the perfect ending to the song.

Jordan:
The lyrical idea of movement 1 is basically “what if the protagonist gets to the bottom of the sea, and it turns out they just find the scene depicted in the old album art?” But with details added, pulling from influences such as Greek myth, Collins-era Genesis, and the Slender Man. The guitar solo in movement 2, which I happen to think is the coolest part of this entire album, was written by a predictive algorithm called MuseNet. In Sunsetters context, the solo is thus attributed to someone else: legendary blues guitarist Bastard Lagoon, a name I am irrationally pleased with. As for actually writing the music for this? Well, it took a long time, how about that. But when I hit upon a rendering of a riff that I thought was killer, that’s when that section started to really take shape in my head. Movement 2’s main riff stems from material I wrote for a different band called Breadwinner.

Lowest Point was basically the reason this album needed to exist, as it is the source of “Dawn, I still wait for my God,” a lyric that gets distorted throughout OH GOD THE RAPTURE IS BURNING. This also means, through what I can only loosely refer to as “textual genetic history,” that this song had to be cool enough to match the hype of Dream Theater’s “In the Presence of Enemies,” its memetic pre-copyright ancestor. (These are statements that make sense in certain contexts, I promise.)

Lindsay:
This one has existed for a while, not sure how long, but the second part was pretty much always final, barring certain edits. It having lyrics was a very late decision, but they work as a succinct epilogue to the narrative of the album.

Jordan:
The first half of this song used to be really happy; I had written it while in America, I think, visiting Quinn, and I was almost assuredly channeling a general feeling of love. All that remains of this old first half is the melodic progression for the vocals and that bass riff. The second half, on the other hand, I don’t remember if I also made while in America, but I know I stumbled on a series of notes and a groovy tempo that felt right out of Boards of Canada. The end result is a piece with a strange mood that I think sits somewhere between “sinister” and “mystically content.”

Originally, this was supposed to be somewhere in the middle of the album. The history of how we decided the track listing is complicated and not really that interesting when articulated, though. What might be a little more interesting, at least clarifying from a conceptual standpoint, is that sometime after I wrote this piece I played The Witness and was exposed to an old Islamic passage that felt entirely relevant to what this song was going for. I will leave you with it, in full.

“God bade me behold the sea, and I saw the ships sinking and the planks floating; then the planks too were submerged.
And God said to me, “Those who voyage are not saved.”
And He said to me, “Those who, instead of voyaging, cast themselves into the sea, take a risk.”
And He said to me, “Those who voyage and take no risk shall perish.”
And He said to me, “In taking the risk there is a part of salvation.”
And the wave came and lifted those beneath it and overran the shore.
And He said to me, “The surface of the sea is a gleam that cannot be reached.
“And the bottom is a darkness impenetrable. And between the two are great fishes, which are to be feared.”
- Niffari, c. 970