Triumph In Blog

What’s coming up in 2025 for the Triumph In Black project?

Following the incredibly lucrative and successful release of my first EP of fully-formed good ideas that everybody liked and I thoroughly advertised, it’s important to make sure I keep the train rolling with some follow-up releases. But what could they be? What more could my once-in-a-generation mind possibly produce beyond what has already been made? I mean, there were nine whole songs on the last release.

Well, the truth is that there’s quite a bit still lying around that I either never finished, or just never mastered to a point that I wanted to release it. You see, some of this music was written a very long time ago, but I didn’t start actually producing anything or writing consistently until about February of 2024. That leaves about a year’s worth of time during which I was actually making stuff. Of course, it took until December to release any of it, but that doesn’t mean that it took a long time to make anything on Isserley. Quite the opposite actually; I’ve made somewhere between 30 and 50 distinct songs in the last year, which isn’t a ton, but it’s more than enough for some more releases, surely.

In short, there’s a “decent” amount of stuff floating around still, a little bit of which is more or less entirely finished. I’ve written a few conventional “songs,” and I intend to at some point do more than electronic music–they currently exist as rough demos, but I’ve written them for “real” instruments. Those are certainly further off from being released.

I approach that with some reticence however, because I do enjoy making things digitally, and I have a lot of love for many various forms of electronic music. Whatever ends up coming out first (hopefully by the spring of 2025?) is going to be purely electronic like my first release, and a little more ambient in a sense. Sort of a mixed bag, really, but I think I’m going to put out the first “single” on Soundcloud once it’s closer to being done. It’s the first in a series of releases that I conceived as early as November 2023, that I have tentatively titled Gestalt Music. The premise of the Gestalt Music series is that each album will be a sort of concept album, where all the songs serve the same central motif, but it will be unlike a concept album in that the songs will not be explicitly connected to one another, and will ideally vary greatly in terms of sound and genre. The thesis here is that the songs aren’t necessarily meant to be taken one a time–they are a Gestalt whole–but they aren’t supposed to necessarily be similar.

Is it meant as a challenge to listener, then, to conceive of them as one when they are obviously separate? Not explicitly, no. Most of the idea behind these compositions is that they are going to be breaking down higher concepts, sort of priming someone to understand lofty ideas as moods rather than disciplines. Without being specific, it sounds nebulous and sort of like I just didn’t really put in the full effort to making a concept album. I plead the fifth on that accusation I just made of myself, but to help this make more sense, here’s a brief primer for what Gestalt Music I will eventually be:

Gestalt Music I, or “The Esoteric Cosmos” is an idea I derived from an obsession I had with trawling through old papers and websites about objects in deep space, primarily when I was bored. It sort of grew into something much more personal when I actually gave myself to it a little bit, and tried to learn more than just surface-level stuff about the actual mechanics of astronomy. I have always been fascinated with outer space in a sort of religious way, being that it’s such a difficult concept to grapple with that only gets more frightening the more you try in vain to quantify it. Science and mathematics of a high enough order do eventually rely on blind faith in certain esoteric theories and proofs, as well as fundamental axioms that are challenged by new empirical discoveries every single day. To me, the study of deep space is worth more than idly scrolling wikipedia articles out of boredom, and everything I’ve ever learned about astronomy proper has been overwhelming. It is literally so much bigger than us that we cannot comprehend it, and that feeling can be as comforting as it is upsetting. Something about the simplicity of objects in motion, and immense scale; it seems like it’s hard to understand, but submission to the grandiose nature of the greater universe is one of few things that really makes sense to me on a basal level.

The purpose of the album is to encompass some of the feelings I associate with regions or disciplines of space as defined mathematically, but I’ve tried not to overthink it. You don’t need to do math to listen to it, this isn’t going to be Lateralus or anything. I want it to feel overwhelming, and spacious, but also like there’s something sort of pretty about it. We’ll see if any of that comes through: explaining it makes me sound like I’m insane, which is why I usually prefer to just sublimate the feelings into music, which is how I tend to actually experience them.

So, what are next? That is what I intend to complete before anything else, but I can be fickle about that. I intended to finish that as my first release actually, but it turns out producing things with fewer moving parts is actually harder, at least if you actually have a very specific vision. I have a couple other ideas for such concept albums, but also some more regular songs that I intend to work with down the road, maybe by the end of 2025. I may trickle out a few singles that I can’t rework to fit anywhere else, too. I have some ideas I followed through on that are very large and energetic, sort of video-game-y in a way I didn’t really intend. So I might dress them up and make some bona fide chiptune or jungle or whatever they are at this stage.

Expect ambient stuff coming soon, is what I’m saying. Not that anyone is reading this yet, and anyone in the future will already know if I stayed true to that or not. So fuck you I guess