New beginnings
It was time to find out how the album was to start - and so the Intro came to life. I wanted the Intro to connect to Jaganoto, both in terms of melody as well as in terms of the actual transition. The end of Intro connects seamlessly to the start of Jaganoto through the DI line noise. Beforehand, it introduces the melodical theme which is to be explored in Jaganoto and throughout the album. My initial goal was to make the Intro warm and inviting, with many layers of vibrant, fluid, yet a little mechanical sounding synthesizers.
Despite its short length, the Intro was not as quick to make as 2 minutes of any other song, mainly due to its many layers and different synthesizers to be attuned to each other.
Marching on
Next came March Of The Puppets, a song that felt musically somewhere in between the songs from the Dehumechanization chapter and Sunset In Our Eyes. I knew there had to be Taiko drums in it, I also knew I didn't want the song to be too long. I wanted to have the song to have a kind of military appeal, so I thought that adding a marching drums part would be a good way to achieve that. The reasoning behind this was to point out that many people living modern societies are puppets of the system, which I thought was best represented musically by including a military march. Think of a march of puppets commanded by superior officers, or a march of puppets commanded by bosses, organizations, market necessities and greed. Often times there's not much difference.
I also liked the idea of the whole band continuing the marching drum pattern from the beginning, so I created a part in that expanded on this.
I hadn't planned at the time to make this song the subsequent song of Sunset In Our Eyes, but I knew I wanted to have a little more of the Duduk and Taiko combination from Sunset In Our Eyes in the album.
This song was one of the quickest to make, mainly because it all felt natural and logical. It ended up as the last full-blown song on the album because all other songs were already thematically bound and March Of The Puppets simply didn't have a place anywhere else. Because of its similarities with Sunset In Our Eyes in terms of instrumentation, and because I didn't want Sunset In Our Eyes to be the last song, putting March Of The Puppets last made a lot of sense. Together with the Outro, these three songs now form the chapter "Battling Stars", mainly because of the similarities in instrumentation and style compared to the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack.
