Album - String Theory
Released On March 14th 2025
Listen on bandcamp here
String Theory is both a musical and conceptual homage to the mysteries of the universe. Named after the theoretical physics framework that seeks to unify all fundamental forces, this album explores the idea that everything - from the tiniest vibration to the grandest emotion - is connected by invisible threads.
While the tracks are grounded in earthy grooves and tactile instrumentation, they also stretch skyward, evoking space, time, and the interconnectedness of all things. The album draws inspiration from the TV series The Big Bang Theory - particularly its quirkiest physicist, Sheldon Cooper - as well as from real scientific concepts like superposition, resonance, and quantum entanglement.
Released on March 14th (Pi Day) - also Einstein’s birthday and the anniversary of Stephen Hawking’s death - the album tips its hat to the pioneers of physics while keeping its feet planted in music’s emotional core.
Built primarily using AAS String Studio, UVI IRCAM pianos, Pigments, and GForce M-Tron Pro, the album features both traditional and unconventional uses of stringed instruments, often blending prepared piano textures with ambient synths, layered drums, and tastefully chosen sample-based performances.
Track Highlights
Andalusia
Andalusia opens the album with warmth and atmosphere, offering a sonic postcard from southern Spain. At its heart is a Spanish nylon-string guitar, whose melodic phrasing evokes twilight serenades and flickering firelight. The guitar carries the emotional core of the piece, fluid and expressive.
Supporting it is a simple groove of kick, snare, and hi-hat, giving the track its steady rhythm without drawing too much attention. Beneath the melody sits an acoustic bass, run through a tube bass amp for a rounded, vintage tone that keeps everything grounded.
Adding a human dimension is Bronte, whose wordless vocal lines thread delicately through the guitar’s melody. Her presence brings warmth and intimacy, as though she’s humming along in the background of a candlelit plaza.
The result is quietly cinematic - romantic, understated, and grounded in a sense of place. You can almost feel the Andalusian air in it.
Khoomei
Named after the Tibetan throat singing tradition, Khoomei is a homage to both the vocal technique and Sheldon Cooper’s obsession with it in The Big Bang Theory. The track fuses organic and synthetic textures to conjure a meditative, otherworldly mood.
The piece begins with a simple kick and snare pattern, sometimes joined by hi-hats, that sets a deliberate, hypnotic pace. Anchoring the center is an IRCAM Prepared Piano - a quirky, detuned instrument with metallic overtones that evoke plucked strings or an ancient dulcimer.
The real magic, though, lies in the vocal elements. A bass vocal employing the deep harmonic textures of throat singing - humming and resonating. It’s joined by a tenor vocal that floats slightly above, providing contrast and melodic phrasing. One is primal; the other is serene.
Balancing these elements is an FM synth patch from Baervaag, panned right, adding shimmer and harmonic glue to the arrangement. Panned left is the tenor vocal, creating a stereo dialogue around the central drone and prepared piano.
The result is contemplative and unusual - a spiritual nod to ancient musical traditions with a modern, textural sensibility.
Resonant Threads
Resonant Threads is a minimalist, percussive dialogue between rhythm and resonance. The track features only two instruments, yet manages to carve out a strikingly full and compelling atmosphere.
The backbone is a boutique mallet drum kit, delivering a rich, boomy groove that gives the piece weight and momentum. It isn’t flashy - just confident, earthy, and deeply felt. Layered over this is a patch from IRCAM Prepared Piano 2 titled Ancient Hammer. This piano doesn’t sing in flowing melodies - instead, it speaks in taut, staccato bursts. Its mute-pick articulation on the strings transforms it into a rhythmic partner for the drums, blurring the line between melody and percussion.
The interplay between these two elements gives the piece a primal energy, as if each note is being struck into existence. The title Resonant Threads nods both to string theory - the album’s overarching concept - and the literal strings of the prepared piano, resonating with intention in every bar.
Eastern Entanglement
Eastern Entanglement is a rhythmic, percussive piece that blends organic grooves with Eastern melodic sensibilities. True to its name, it explores the idea of entanglement - both in musical layers and cultural fusion - all while staying firmly grounded in String Theory’s thematic use of stringed and physical-modeled instruments.
The rhythmic foundation is laid by a tight, organic drum kit - kick, snare, toms, and hi-hat - providing a rolling, almost ceremonial groove. Supporting this is a semi-electric acoustic bass, which plays in close lockstep with the drums, reinforcing the pulse with subtle groove variations.
The harmonic engine of the piece comes from Galaxy Instruments’ Avant-Garde Claire, a prepared piano that feels both percussive and melodic. It doesn’t behave like a traditional piano - it’s part rhythmic, part ambient, producing an unusual rolling motion that interlocks with the beat.
Floating above all of this is a Tomophone patch. It’s a synthetic wind instrument - part flute, part reed organ - and is the key to the track’s Eastern flavor. It weaves expressive notes over the rhythmic bed, bringing a sense of spaciousness and cultural character.
The track finds a balance between hypnotic motion and melodic phrasing. It evokes a sense of mystery and connectedness, fitting for a title that nods to quantum entanglement - with an Eastern twist.
Orbital
Orbital captures a sense of circular motion and spatial drift, evoking planetary orbits, subatomic spins, or the quiet pull of gravity in the void. This one feels like it’s been etched into a space-time groove.
The track is anchored by a subtle yet steady drum groove, consisting of kick, snare, side-stick, and hi-hats, which provide a soft but persistent propulsion. The rhythm is understated, never overpowering - more of a gravitational pull than a forceful push.
Supporting this motion is a Pigments bass patch, which blurs the line between a synth bass and a processed electric bass guitar. Its tone is slightly reverberant and ghostly, giving it a kind of sci-fi shimmer that floats in the low mids. It's a grounding force, yet it never feels tethered - always moving, always shifting.
The harmonic heart of the track comes from UVI’s IRCAM Prepared Piano. This prepared piano is both melodic and percussive, producing a cascade of hammered, plucked, and echoed tones that create the illusion of motion - almost like sonic ellipses spiraling through a chamber. It’s this piano part that most literally suggests the track’s orbital nature, with rhythmic pulses that glide and loop like celestial bodies.
Rounding out the arrangement is a Pigments patch - a bell-like tone, drenched in reverb, that adds an ethereal, crystalline sparkle. It floats above the mix like starlight refracting off a spinning satellite.
Altogether, Orbital captures the delicate balance between motion and stillness, structure and chaos. It’s as much a meditative journey through space as it is a musical composition - and its subtle complexity makes it a standout moment on the album.
Superposition
A single-instrument piece that manages to say so much with so little, Superposition is a study in stillness, subtle movement, and infinite possibility. Taking its name from the quantum mechanics principle that particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously, the track plays like a sonic metaphor for that very idea - a moment suspended in a thousand futures.
The entire composition is built on a single AAS String Studio patch called Sensitive Kiss. This lush, expressive preset combines two modeled layers: Young Keys and Dawn Keys. The result is a sound that blends the warmth of a Rhodes-style electric piano with the airy resonance of bowed strings. It’s soft, melancholic, and shimmers with layered harmonics - almost like light refracted through glass.
The track floats along in B Dorian, a scale often associated with introspection and unresolved emotion. There are no drums, no bass, no other instrumentation. Just the fluttering, wistful phrases of the String Studio patch reverberating through space, giving the piece a feeling of limitless suspension. It’s both grounded and drifting - a contradiction that somehow feels perfectly natural in this musical context.
The mood is contemplative, dreamlike, and wide open - like the world briefly pausing to breathe before collapsing into one of its many possible outcomes. If Orbital felt like bodies circling in space, Superposition feels like standing still in a place where time and space haven't yet made up their mind.
Dark Echoes
Built around space, tension, and resonance, Dark Echoes is one of the more textural explorations on the album. It marks a shift into more atmospheric territory while still retaining the rhythmic backbone that ties much of String Theory together.
The foundation of the track came from an experiment with AAS Chromaphone 3 (CV3), specifically its Objeq Oscillator - a unique engine designed to simulate resonant physical objects. What emerged was a custom metallic bass patch: not a walking bass line, but a ghostly series of plucks and echoes. Each note in the B Dorian scale lingers, reverberates, and decays naturally, giving the piece its namesake - these are dark echoes, spreading ripples through the track’s sonic fabric.
Supporting this sparse but striking bass is a DMX drum kit, heavily tape-saturated and compressed, giving it grit and vintage punch. The groove is classic but dirty - thumpy kicks, snappy snares, and crisp hats. It’s tight and mechanical, yet it breathes, grounding the track without overwhelming it.
Floating above it all is Bronte’s ethereal voice - wordless, distant, and atmospheric. Used more like an instrument than a vocal, her presence adds an emotional shimmer, a sense of humanity reaching through the machine-like rhythm and metallic resonance.
Despite being one of the more minimal tracks on the album - just bass, drums, and voice - Dark Echoes feels spacious and cinematic. The string connection here is subtle, almost subliminal, carried through the resonant modeling of the bass patch and the string-like harmonic behavior of the CV3 oscillator. Whether or not it fits perfectly into the physics theme is up for debate - but in a quantum universe, even tenuous connections echo deeply.
Bending the Fabric
This track lives at the intersection of physics pun and retro playfulness. The title Bending the Fabric cheekily nods to “bending the fabric of spacetime,” a foundational concept in relativity - but here, it doubles as a reference to the pitch bends that define the track’s expressive guitar-like lead. It’s a moment of lighthearted fun on an otherwise reflective album, and it fully leans into its own cheeky, boomer-bends vibe.
The centerpiece is a Pigments 6 patch that mimics a rock-style lead guitar - soaring, expressive, almost cheesy in the best possible way. Though it’s not using Pigments’ new physical modeling engine, it takes full advantage of wavetable shaping and expressive pitch modulation. The MIDI pitch bend wheel gets a workout here, warping the notes into dramatic curves and slides, as though channeling a solo straight out of a 1980s stadium anthem - but placed into a far more surreal, synthetic world.
Supporting the solo are two more layers:
A drum groove made up of electronic indie-style kit sounds - punchy, tight, and synthetic, giving the piece its modern rhythmic drive. Think drum machines with attitude: snappy snares, crisp hats, and a rhythmic structure that contrasts with the freeform bends of the lead.
A synth bass, also from Pigments, using a Juno like patch. It’s plucky, thick, and slightly rubbery - not quite a traditional electric bass, but rooted enough to keep the groove moving forward. It balances out the high-flying lead with a sense of earthbound momentum.
The track’s tonal choice provides a slightly mysterious and moody backdrop, which makes the over-the-top lead bends feel even more surreal and tongue-in-cheek. There's a confident swagger to it - like a space physicist moonlighting as a rock guitarist.
Ultimately, Bending the Fabric doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a playful pause in the journey - a reminder that exploring grand cosmic ideas can still leave room for winks, nods, and musical grin-inducing bends.
Under Night Skies
This evocative instrumental captures the stillness and introspection of stargazing - blending Latin grooves, soulful rhythm, and cinematic atmosphere into a piece that feels both intimate and expansive. Under Night Skies is a contemplative track with a sense of warmth and solitude, like sitting on a quiet rooftop or desert ridge, eyes skyward, lost in thought.
The track features five instruments, each playing a specific emotional role:
Drums: A modern soul and R&B kit lays the rhythmic foundation. The groove is syncopated, built on a punchy kick-snare backbeat with expressive hi-hats, giving the track a smooth yet forward motion - soulful but restrained.
A fingered electric bass, walking gently beneath the drums, locks in with the groove and adds weight. It doesn't push aggressively but supports the track's gentle sway, adding warmth and subtle movement.
Latin Guitar: Courtesy of AAS Strum, this arpeggiated guitar sits in the center channel and brings a romantic, wandering quality to the arrangement. Its cyclical patterns add rhythm and a sense of storytelling, grounding the track emotionally in a familiar, human feel.
UVI’s Prepared Piano 2 joins the mix. This patch creates textural fifths from single notes, giving a harmonically rich and slightly mechanical response that meshes surprisingly well with the Latin guitar. The piano doesn't play continuously - it punctuates certain moments, weaving in and out of the arpeggios like reflections in a pool.
Baritone Guitar: Around 1:54, the track takes a cinematic turn with the introduction of a Desolate Baritone Guitar from e-instruments. It feels like it wandered out of a Tarantino western - reverb-soaked, sparse, and haunted, evoking a windswept desert under the stars. Its entrance adds a sudden openness and emotional resonance, as if the camera has panned upward toward the night sky.
Though rooted in groove and melody, the power of Under Night Skies comes from its emotional pacing - the subtle interplay between rhythm and reflection, between warmth and distance. The combination of Latin intimacy, soulful rhythm, and cinematic drift makes this track a quiet standout, inviting the listener into a still, starry moment.
M-Theory
A fitting finale to the album, M-Theory is a sweeping, cinematic piece that blends orchestral grandeur with futuristic pulse. Named after one of the boldest ideas in theoretical physics - the unifying theory that links all string theories into a multidimensional framework - the track captures the scale and mystery of that concept through a powerful fusion of analog depth, Mellotron textures, and industrial rhythm.
The arrangement unfolds in three movements, each layering new dimensions of energy and texture:
Movement I: Emergence (0:00 – 0:51)
The piece begins with a Mellotron string ensemble. Saturated in reverb and soaked in tape character, these strings conjure a majestic, almost sacred sonic atmosphere - like observing the birth of a universe.
At around 0:24, an arpeggiated motif enters via Aparillo, introducing rhythmic motion beneath the drifting Mellotron textures. This adds tension and anticipation as the track approaches its core.
Movement II: Collision (0:48 – 2:26)
At 0:48, the full ensemble bursts into motion. Industrial drums slam into the mix - hard, mechanical, and deliberate. The kick and snare feel metallic, percussive, and deep, giving the rhythm section an aggressive edge.
Anchoring this section is a massive Moog-style bass from Synapse Audio’s The Legend HZ. The patch is a Hans Zimmer-esque synth bass that adds gravity and cinematic weight. It echoes across the stereo field with thick low-end and reverb tails.
In parallel, the melodic line is taken over by violas and cellos from M-Tron Pro, replacing the earlier strings with a more grounded, emotional tone. This section feels like a cosmic struggle - strings pulling in one direction, synths in another, held together by rhythm.
At 1:35, the original Mellotron strings fade, replaced by an Epic Orchestra patch from SampleTron 2. This version of Mellotron strings is more dramatic, layered, and commanding - rising to meet the intensity of the Moog bass and drums.
Movement III: Echoes and Return (2:24 – end)
A subtle shift at 2:24 brings in a more introspective mood. The Epic Orchestra drops out, making way for a Mellotron solo cello and a dreamy Aparillo pad with soft motion - evoking a sense of floating in multidimensional space.
At 3:11, the track returns full circle: Epic Orchestra returns in force for a final swell. The ensemble carries the track to its climactic conclusion - majestic, thunderous, and enveloping.
Summary
M-Theory stands as the album’s conceptual and sonic summit. It represents both grandeur and mystery, as strings, synths, and drums collide in a layered exploration of dimensional depth. With Mellotron nostalgia, modern synth power, and sweeping cinematic arcs, it closes the album with both emotional resonance and intellectual weight - a final flourish worthy of the cosmos.
Final Thoughts
String Theory isn’t just an album about stringed instruments - it’s about connection. Between sound and silence. Between science and soul. Between groove and gravitas.
It celebrates the tension between ancient and modern, acoustic and electronic, earthbound and celestial. In many ways, it’s a culmination - precise yet expressive, minimalist yet richly layered, intellectual yet emotional.
Where Preternatural was ghostly and internal, String Theory stretches outward. It invites the listener to tune into something deeper - not just in the music, but in themselves.