The ORIGINAL Enter the Requiem

Back in 2017, I wrote a song called Storm.

You know when you're developing a skill over a long period of time, and you can identify periods of stagnation where you're seeing little improvement, and periods of massive growth? Storm was the song that spearheaded a big period of growth and learning for me with music production. I went through a period of writing a few ambitious songs (for my skill at the time), and my next big growth period probably came in 2020.

I was always SUPER fond of Storm. At the time, I wasn't sure how I could write a better song. I loved the motif I'd written, I loved the patch I'd used and the general sound design, how I took elements of electro house and made it into something of my own. There was this huge build up towards the end of the song which I just thought sounded so cool.

For a lot of years, I thought that one day I'd go back and re-mix or master the song when my skills were significantly better. But as my skills got a LOT better, I decided that wasn't really worth my time, as the general structure of the song itself kind of sucked even if I liked the sound design and motifs.

When I started making plans for writing an EP in 2024, I decided now would be the time to revisit Storm. I had to dig out my very old laptop which I'd made the song on to go and find the original file and copy the patch over, so that the motif sounded exactly the same in the new song as it did back then. But I also had to write an entirely new song around that motif.

Since I wrote letter to the stars, this is the first song I've worked on that has no vocals. Even the two remixes I've made in the last year - Legends Never Die and More - have vocal parts, even if they're not mine. Back when I wrote Storm, everything I wrote was without vocals. I've learned that the way you think about songwriting and structuring a song is very different for vocals than it is for instrumentals, and so I really had to figure out how to tap back into that perspective of not writing a vocal track. That was a very interesting experience, and actually has made me realise how much I love writing vocal music now.

The working title for this song, up until the day I sent it to my distributor, was Storm 2. Most of my songs have working titles that change down the line (The ltts ones were imaginatively named 'track 1', 'track 2' etc.), but I often come up with the final title while I'm working on the song. For Enter the Requiem, I had no fucking clue. I think especially without there being vocals, and without me explicitly having a story being expressed in the song, it was so much harder; the purpose of the song was literally to recreate Storm.

I did consider publishing it as Storm 2, for no reason other than the fact it would be funny. But, the song is part of an EP and the EP has a very definitive theme. Obviously, you guys have only heard two songs for the EP (there will be a total of six), but the EP uses a lot of themes of death to discuss other feelings and emotions. So I wanted Enter the Requiem to fit that.

A requiem is a funeral mass, and I feel like you can envision the song accompanying some otherworldly type of funeral procession. I like the idea that it represents the death of some other things that are discussed in the other songs of the EP. As for whether you guys interpret it the same way, that's entirely up to you.

Anyway, here is the original Storm song. You'll very clearly hear the similarities, as well as how monumentally different the songs are. But I think there's something cool thinking that what I did with Enter the Requiem is something that 2017 Geo would have dreamt of being able to make. So I'm glad I finally did.