TRACKS is my first release as Zanadu. The energy on TRACKS at the time emphasized a lot of forward movement. Going from place to place, moving at high speeds, hazy, in and out of consciousness, on rails, a dangerous future. Sometimes there are disruptions, but for the most part it came from a sense of forwardness.
I had dreams around this time about red lights that would hang and fly in front of desaturated twilight skies, coming from active communications towers or vehicles in transit that could only be seen from their lazer-like trails. These feelings are still very close to me, but TRACKS was the first way that I could collapse this idea into a form. It laid the foundation and began the path for how I would evolve with my musical expression.
The dreams and observing of nature weren't my only influences. The simple, beautiful design of games like 'Light Trax' and 'S.T.U.N. Runner' were firmly in my mind. The experiences I've had and attraction toward the futuristic and minimal presentation of these games guided me to use basic waveforms, and project my feeling about this light speed world. Wolfgun shared in some of these feelings about Light Trax, having introduced me to the Bit Generations series of games. It made sense to make album art that reflected it fully. With his skills in blender he was able to create album art that came as an emergent property of the mood.
The album was created at a time where I was very new to synthesis. I had gotten my first hardware synthesizer, aside from a gifted JU-06, called the 'Dreadbox Erebus'. The Erebus is a 3 oscillator, semi-modular synth that made up all sounds on the album, apart from most of the percussive elements that were gathered drums from online. Due to the straightforward and subtractive architecture of the synth, I was able to explore the minimal nature of the sounds I'd heard and imagined before, bridging the feelings between the sharp aesthetics of these old racing games and visions of a lightning techno future.