Track By Tracks: Phaeton - Neurogenesis (2025)

About the album (Lyrically and Musically):

Our third album is a left-field change of pace for us, and we're thrilled with the results. On our debut album, we established who we are and what we do as musicians and composers, and we'll always be proud of that first statement. When we moved on to "Between Two Worlds," we created an album with an overall heavier sound, and all the hyper-melodic neo-classical adventurousness and the bludgeoning riffola were brought into sharper focus and expanded into broader, more lengthy, more emotionally impactful songs - which we believed, then as now, was an impressive improvement on our part. With "Neurogenesis," the songs ended up more compact and concise, but that wasn't deliberate - they just ended up that way. Even as an all-instrumental band, our arrangements follow what might be described as verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-etc., but instead of the riffs and rhythms being frameworks for the vocal delivery of storylines, they become the frameworks for guitar melody, or keyboard melody. Which we've always done, but we took a sideways approach to it this time around. It's up to the individual listener to take the titles we give our songs and let their own imaginations take them where they will as the music unfolds: jazz-fusion ears within prog-metal boundaries, so to speak. And although "Neurogenesis" isn't a Concept Album in the strictest prog-rock definition, the individual concepts of many of the songs included here do overlap each other - we were inspired by the modern theories of the technological singularity, of how we're only a few years away from humanity's biological brains uniting with robotics and cybernetic implants and microchips - and whether we'll still be human when that happens. It's a cold warning as much as a sober observation.

Track By Track:

1. TETHYS RISING:

This was the first song I wrote for Phaeton. I composed and arranged the main building blocks and passed them along to Kevin and Dan to see how they could filter and fine-tune the music. And the song got knocked out of the park! The power of the song's motion reflects the sheer raw awe human astronauts will feel when we finally make it far out to the Gas Giants. I was always fascinated with Chesley Bonestell's old-school futurist paintings of hypothetical rocket ships and orbiting space stations, and planetary scenes from around our solar system. He was painting these amazing images way back in the 1940s and 1950s, but this wasn't garish trash whipped off for pulp-fiction magazine covers - he was a trained architect and bounced his ideas off of the scientists and engineers who formed the original core of the American space program, so a lot of his imagery still looks striking and plausible even today. One of his more famous paintings was "Saturn As Seen From Titan," which is beautiful and ghostly at the same time. Bonestell didn't know at the time that Titan's atmosphere is one big opaque orange fog, so you can't see your gloved hand in front of the helmet visor of your space suit, let alone Saturn looming in the sky, so I thought the view would be better from Tethys.

2. DISCONTINUUM:

A discontinuum is the condition of something not being continuous, as in having gaps, interruptions, or lacking cohesion. It describes a system, or a process, or a structure that is broken, or segmented, or irregular, instead of being smooth and unbroken. You usually find the term when discussing mathematics, which is always a hit at the bush parties we hang out at after midnight, but the term also applies to physical objects and abstract concepts, where a complete unbroken flow is absent. And this song was written to show a method that might not be apparent. But chalking out Venn diagrams on a blackboard doesn't necessarily translate into gripping music, so after a while, we just let the riffs and the rhythms work it out on their own. And it worked out like all hell. Out of discontinuum comes continuum.

3. ISOCHRON:

Even if this song is relatively shorter than most of how our songs end up, there's a lot going on within it, and it's certainly one of the busiest songs we've written in years. And of course, it never hurts to have the brilliant synthesizer tsunami-attack of Derek Sherinian on hand. There's a feeling of whirlwind rush we're deliberately injecting into the tune, and it ricochets back and forth between killer riffs and Middle Eastern mellowness and back to clenched-fist power and all points in between. If an isochron is an imaginary line which connects different points at which an event occurs simultaneously, then we declare that the 'different points' in question are the various sections of the song, and the song as a whole (the isochron itself) is a simultaneous event that we somehow stretched out to four and a half minutes, Newtonian physics be damned...which only proves that the internal clock of varying musical tempo is the only real time machine there is.

4. SYNESTHESIA:

Synesthesia is a psychological phenomenon where stimulating one human sense involuntarily triggers an experience with a secondary sense. Certain people see colors when listening to music, or when reading words, they'll actually feel taste on their tongues. People who experience such things are known as Syntheses, and psychologists don't necessarily see this as a neurological disorder - the word itself is an Ancient Greek term meaning "together sensation" or "union of senses," and to us it only means that certain people are gifted with the ability to combine and overlap their very inputs of reality and existence. We wrote this song in an attempt to encourage the listener to imagine colors and moods along with the music...which, in all truth, is what all instrumental composers strive to achieve, whether you're an 18th-century classical composer hoping to land that sweet contract writing the wedding march for King Ludwig's youngest daughter - or whether you're a bunch of Kootenay misfits trying to wring sonic magic out of overdriven Schechter 7-string guitars.

5. ARACHNID:

When you study Kevin Thiessen's compositional approach, he has a hyper-melodic neo-classical mindset, but he also knows a Crushing Riff when he hears it. The main riff is a stomper, and as it rolls over on itself there's these weird subtle changes to the melody, repetition after repetition, which simulates the crawling-in-your-own-skin discomfort and borderline terror some of us feel when confronted with the arachnids in our life - either the true spiders who harmlessly spin their webs, or the human spiders who seek to suck your souls dry. The song is broken up several times with the eerie djent sections, where there's ghostly synth notes tapping away almost in the background, but that's only designed to create a false sense of relief before the arachnid bursts back upon you.

6. AUGMENTED:

Human progress has always been driven by the desire for humanity to rise above hand-to-mouth survival and create a better, more fulfilling life. Which is why we started with learning how to make fire to warm up and light up the caves, and 100,000 years later, we're helplessly flipping through one TikTok after another. And then the march of progress changes from humans creating standalone technological devices to humans actually augmenting their very bodies with technological devices. Some of them are benign, like artificial limbs and hearing aids and artificial hearts and the like, but now the buzztalk is all about installing microchips into our brains and connecting to a mind-hive...I know it's going to happen, but I've seen too many cheesy sci-fi dystopian movies to feel all that thrilled about it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Brrrrr...this song was written to convey the mechanical unease and robotic inhumanity awaiting us in the near future, and how we must be on our guard. Nobody can avoid this.

7. NEUROGENESIS:

And what happens when cybernetic implants into our cerebral cortexes actually become a mundane everyday occurrence? Do we lose our humanity? Do our dreams break down into binary code? Do we dust off our old FORTRAN codes in lieu of antidepressants? Once we reach the technological singularity and there's no going back, will we lose our individual identities? What happens to ourselves, as a species, as cultures, as nations? Will there be laughter? Will we still love? These are real concerns. In the Brave New World of the 2020s, it's hard to balance progressive excitement with Luddite caution, and everyone's optimism seems to mingle with the doom. We're all trying to feel the warmth of the sun on our faces while we're all bracing for societal impact. This song ended up the longest of the new group of tunes, and we had all of those conflicting emotions of the Neurogenesis concept to transform into musical dynamics, and we had a lot to, er, say...so to speak. Which is funny, since instrumental bands don't talk much. But the sounds - and the warnings - are there.