Album - Preternatural

Released On March 7th 2025

Listen on bandcamp here

Preternatural is a gothic, cinematic exploration of what lies just beyond the veil of the natural world. Born before the pause in DAW-based work during the creation of The Attic Reels, this album picks up the thread with a darker, more orchestral vision. Drawing heavily on the UVI IRCAM Solo and Prepared Piano collections, GForce’s Mellotron (M-Tron Pro), and dusty vintage textures, Preternatural lives in a liminal space between chamber music and ghost stories.

The title track sets the tone: a piano piece performed by a not-quite-human figure, slowly accelerating in tempo like a supernatural ritual. Mellotron textures swirl around a walking bassline and organic drums, conjuring an eerie sense of rising urgency.

Other tracks like Reverie, Twilight’s Dance, and Ghost Dance use cello, viola, Wurlitzer, and rare Mellotron patches to blur the lines between the living and the spectral. There’s a strong sense of memory, folklore, and things unsaid. Rhythms come from lo-fi drum kits and percussion; melodies are played on creaky old instruments and tape-saturated machines that feel plucked from another age.

The textures are often sparse but deliberate - each element is chosen for its emotional weight. Whether it’s the melancholy sweep of the Amati viola on Daylight Breaks or the vintage Prophet 10 synth arpeggios on Lullaby, the album embraces imperfection, minimalism, and mystery.

Track Highlights

Preternatural

The title track sets the stage for the album’s gothic and mysterious tone. Inspired by a chilling scene in Queen of the Damned, where the vampire Lestat reveals his inhuman nature through increasingly impossible musicianship on the violin. “Preternatural” climbs in tempo from start to finish - subtly at first, but unmistakable on repeat listens. What begins as a quiet piece gradually accelerates, mirroring the supernatural narrative that inspired it.

At its heart is the beautifully recorded piano, Claire, by Galaxy Instruments, placed front and center. Supporting it is a haunting array of Mellotron textures: a Brahms like Orchestra panned to the left adds a dramatic, almost baroque tension, while half-speed Mellotron strings to the right give a ghostly, time-warped presence that breathes vintage eeriness into the piece.

Beneath it all, a walking acoustic bass provides both grounding and propulsion, while a 70s drum kit adds a loose, human feel. As the tempo increases, the drums and bass lock into a more energetic groove, subtly escalating the tension.

This track is the sound of something ancient awakening - refined, elegant, and inhumanly precise. It’s the perfect overture for an album that dances on the edges of the natural and the unknown.

Reverie

Built on the simplest of foundations, “Reverie” is a quiet meditation on memory, nostalgia, and the haunting beauty of things half-remembered. The arrangement is stark: a Novachord panned left, a cello to the right, and a solo viola down the center. Together, they form an intimate chamber ensemble that feels suspended in time.

Each voice moves with gentle deliberation, their tones evoking an era long gone. The Novachord hums with vintage warmth, while the cello offers grounding resonance, and the viola leads with quiet dignity. There's no percussion, no urgency - just a drifting, weightless sense of reflection.

This track is a direct descendant of the minimalist spirit found in The Attic Reels. You can feel that lineage in the restraint of the composition. “Reverie” doesn’t try to impress - it simply exists, inviting the listener to sit with their own thoughts. It’s a musical daydream, fleeting but vivid, as if you've stumbled across a forgotten memory and let it play out uninterrupted.

Twilight’s Dance

A dusk-lit dance begins. “Twilight’s Dance” feels like an old-world folk ritual glimpsed through a dusty reel - earthy, mysterious, and alive with motion. A dry, vintage drum kit keeps a steady, unflashy groove: kick, snare, and hi-hat forming the spine of the piece. Supporting it, a walking upright bass weaves up and down in hypnotic arcs, adding bounce and breath to the rhythm.

At the heart of the track is a central solo cello, rich and resonant, almost singing as it sways. It’s flanked on the left by a layered Mellotron section. These tape-soaked strings add a sense of analog nostalgia, like a memory of an orchestra from a time long gone.

The piece draws on a gypsy scale - rooted in E♭ and colored with flattened intervals - to create a bittersweet melodic language. The result is neither pop nor classical, but something in between: a dance from a dream, or a forgotten culture. A twilight reverie spun in circles.

Lamp Light

“Lamp Light” is a study in simplicity - a hushed, intimate groove that conjures the image of a quiet room lit only by a single warm lamp. At its core, just two voices: a dusty Wurlitzer electric piano, and a lo-fi kick-and-snare drum groove. That’s it - but it’s all it needs.

The Wurly speaks with a nostalgic softness, its chords glowing like filaments in the dark. The drums, gritty and subdued, sit comfortably beside it, like a companion adding rhythm to an after-hours jam. Midway through the track, the beat falls away, leaving the Wurlitzer alone in the lamplight, free to meander before the rhythm gently returns.

There’s nothing flashy here - just tone, space, and feeling. A moment of warmth and reflection, captured in the quiet hush of night.

Daylight Breaks

For a vampire, sunrise isn’t a beginning - it’s the end. Daylight Breaks captures that fleeting moment before retreat, when the horizon glows and the eternal night gives way to a light that must be fled. The track unfolds with five distinct layers, each one contributing to the tension and melancholy of dawn.

A 70s drum kit provides the rhythmic spine, joined by two contrasting basses: a percussive synth bass arpeggio, and a warm, fretless clean DI bass guitar. Together, they pulse with urgency - heartbeat and breath in a dying night.

Panned subtly to the right, a Mellotron Gravitron patch adds a swirl of haunted texture, layered from half-speed tape strings. At the heart of the track, holding it all together, sings a centuries-old soul: the Amati Viola, from the Cremona Quartet. Its aching tone weaves between the shadows of the bass and the haze of the Mellotron, delivering a melody steeped in longing.

There’s a quiet sadness to this track, a sense of beauty glimpsed but never touched. As the light breaks, the creature of the night fades into memory - forever yearning for a sunrise it can never face.

Floating Away

As the title suggests, Floating Away drifts high above the world - weightless, wistful, and ghostlike. It conjures the image of something suspended in the stratosphere, caught between dreaming and dissolving. But while the atmosphere is otherworldly, the foundation remains grounded by a gritty undercurrent.

The track opens with a solid groove built from snare, hi-hat, and a simple kick, giving just enough structure to support the lift. A ’60s Hofner-style bass guitar - run through a vintage valve head with pick articulation and further dirtied up - adds a warm, fuzzy grit. It’s the tether in a track that might otherwise drift too far from earth.

Hovering above this low-end anchor is a heavily reverberated Rhodes piano, its soft, ghostly tones shimmering like light through fog. This Rhodes is the soul of the track - moody, reflective, and suspended in time. Its floaty presence contrasts beautifully with the crunchy, vintage textures beneath, resulting in a delicate balance between heaven and earth.

Floating Away is the sound of letting go - of rising above the noise and the static, while still feeling the pull of something real, something human, far below.

Winter’s Tavern

Winter’s Tavern is the oldest composition on Preternatural - a track that pre-dates the album itself and helped shape its spirit. Rooted in the sonic imagination of a time long past, it evokes the warmth, rhythm, and revelry of a fire-lit inn deep in a snow-covered forest - perhaps somewhere in a scene from The Witcher.

Built on the rustic character of a boutique mallet drum kit, the rhythm section features a blend of kick, snare, hi-hat, cymbals, and toms. But it's the instrumentation that truly defines the track’s identity.

The harp, panned left, brings delicate ornamentation - like snowflakes dancing in candlelight. The cello, panned right, lends its deep, resonant voice - melancholic yet noble. And in the center, a tuba holds down the groove with a puffing, earthy presence, adding a touch of levity and grounding to the ensemble. All three instruments interweave in contrapuntal motion, creating a textured dance that’s rich with character.

Winter’s Tavern doesn’t aim for club rhythms or modern beats - it reaches further back, to something more timeless. It’s music you might imagine echoing from the hearth of a medieval gathering, where boots stomp on stone and tankards clink in time with the melody.

Through The Veil

Through the Veil is a haunting drift into the liminal - where the material world blurs and something spectral begins to bleed through. With its slow-burn tempo and evocative instrumentation, the track feels like a quiet moment on the edge of two realms: a reflection on mortality, memory, and what lies just beyond our reach.

At its core lies a dusty, wobbling piano. This heavily taped upright - centered in the stereo field - is barely there, but crucial: a ghost of a melody, grounding the listener amid the swirl of otherworldly textures.

Hovering to the right are two ethereal string patches - haunting, vintage synth layers that shimmer with a spectral glow. They don’t just color the mix; they haunt it. Their timbre evokes the sound of old séance recordings, where static and string blur into memory.

Supporting the emotional weight is a semi-electric acoustic bass, with a walking groove that anchors the track with subtle grit. A 70s drum kit provides the groove - understated and minimal - letting the harmonics lead the emotional narrative.

This is not a song that says anything directly - it implies, echoes, and haunts. Like watching fog curl around a gravestone, or catching movement from the corner of your eye that’s already gone. It’s not a ghost story - it’s a ghost feeling. And it’s gone before you realize what you’ve heard.

Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance is exactly what it sounds like - an ethereal swirl of ancient rhythm and spectral movement, conjuring visions of disembodied spirits twirling through a misty clearing, somewhere between this world and the next. But don’t be fooled: this is no slow lament. It's a celebration in the afterlife, a swirling, syncopated gypsy ritual written in the F♯ Hungarian gypsy scale, giving it both its mystical flavor and danceable intensity.

The rhythm is anchored by a Soca Percussion kit, giving it a traditional yet propulsive percussive bed. Underneath it, a fretless vintage bass guitar slinks with a dark, elastic groove, lending the piece a sensual undercurrent, more felt than heard.

The melodic world of Ghost Dance is richly layered, yet minimalist in delivery. On the left, a VSM IV patch - Vox Humana Dark - drifts in and out with sparse, echoing notes. It’s less an instrument and more a phantom in the stereo field, stalking the rhythm with single-bar pulses.

On the right, two haunting M-Tron Pro IV patches weave through the mix. Ghost Box flutters in during chorus-like passages, its high, playful tone evoking the giddy spirit of spectral revelry. In contrast, a tape saturated orchestra patch delivers squelched, punchy accents at the top of each bar - like dancers stomping in time with the spirit realm’s own downbeat.

A Bandura adds a lyre-like shimmer, pulling the whole track into the past with its harp-guitar resonance. This, too, flits between worlds: familiar and foreign, melodic and percussive.

But at the heart of it all is the central cello - earthy, melodic, and mournful. This is the ghost who remembers, who leads the dance not out of joy, but memory.

To elevate the track’s spectral nature, select layers - including the Bandura, cellos, and Mellotron patches - were passed through PSP’s Wobbler, co-designed by Alan Parsons. This plugin injects tape-like modulation, flutter, and ghostly phase wobble into the textures, giving everything an unsettling shimmer. It’s the final alchemical touch.

Lullaby

Lullaby closes the album with a breath of spectral calm. It’s a minimalist duet between two instruments: a dreamy Prophet-10 patch, and a music box, Speldosa, crafted by Wintergatan in collaboration with Klevgrand.

The Prophet patch is the soul of the piece - arpeggiated chords float and bloom, shimmering through long reverb tails like light filtering through fog. It evokes a half-conscious state, that quiet blur between waking and sleep. The movement is gentle, yet harmonically alive, grounded in B♭ Dorian, lending the lullaby a subtle sense of emotional complexity: melancholic, but never despairing.

Layered delicately against this is the fragile clink of Speldosa's Antique setting. Like an old toy unearthed in an attic, it plays a simple melodic counterpoint to the Prophet’s drifting harmonies - mechanical, nostalgic, and strangely intimate. It grounds the piece without ever intruding.

Together, the two voices create an atmosphere of otherworldly serenity - unfolding slowly, weightless and timeless. The final track feels like a soft goodbye, a spectral rocking chair creaking in the distance. A fitting end to Preternatural: quiet, mysterious, and gently haunting.

Final Thoughts

Preternatural was an album born in the shadows - not just thematically, but in process. It lingered in the background while The Attic Reels came to life, waiting patiently to unfold. It lies in richer, more cinematic territory, yet still carries the minimalist sensibility.

This is an album about the preternatural and the supernatural - of people, places, and feelings. About dances once danced, lamplight now extinguished, and lullabies whispered into the void. The instruments are aged, the scales exotic, the reverbs dusty and strange. It’s an album that invites the listener to step out of time and peer into the fog between worlds.

More than anything, Preternatural is a love letter to the uncanny - the subtle beauty found in decay, in old pianos and haunted scales, in stories told without words. I hope you enjoy its atmosphere.