First and foremost, Scar Symmetry is just about done tracking their new record The Singularity (Phase II: Xenotaph) and I could not be more excited, given how phenomenally good Phase I was in 2014. That being said, the band could sure use your help with vocals on the closing track "Xenotaph." The band is dubbing the collective vocal effort The Ultraterrestrial Choir and is asking you to send the vocals to [email protected].
After guitarist and vocalist Per Nilsson's statement, you'll find about four minutes of music to sing along to. Also, Nilsson wrote that piece of music as a placeholder for you to sing along to, and that specific piece will not be featured on the record. That bastard.
As we enter the final tracking sessions for ”The Singularity (Phase II – Xenotaph)”, we call upon our minions to join THE ULTRATERRESTRIAL CHOIR on the album’s title track and closing number “Xenotaph”. The chorus of this song features the words ”xenotaph” and ”unbound”, both to be sung by the choir. In order not to spoil the surprise of the actual song, I have written a placeholder piece of music to accompany the choir part that we would like YOU to sing for us!
Download the .mp3 (link below via the Gear Gods Soundcloud page) and record yourself/selves (have your friends join in!) singing along using any means available to you. If you have access to a studio setup, that’s great, but if you don’t, you can listen to the mp3 using headphones and record yourself singing along onto your smartphone – just make sure that it’s not distorting too much and that you do this in a fairly quiet and acoustically neutral or dead room (a closet filled with clothes is a good makeshift vocal booth).
The sing-along track is rather long, so please feel free to record as many or few choruses as you have the time and stamina for. We will cut the choruses up and stack them, so if you sing twenty choruses, your voice will be layered twenty times! As you can hear on the .mp3, the word ”xenotaph” is supposed to be sung with a pitch, but please don’t apply any pitch-correction whatsoever on your recording, as that will render your contribution useless – it’s the pitch, time and timbre variations that make a choir recording sound huge!
”Unbound” on the other hand, is more of a pitchless shouting thing, like a huge angry lynch mob chanting out their murderous rage… So just yelling out ”UN – BOUND!” at the top of your lungs is one way to go, though other vocal techniques such as growling, screaming and even whispering can work well too. It’ll probably yield the best results if you do two tracks of singing — record ”xenotaph” in one pass and ”unbound” in another, as to not kill your voice immediately :)
So to sum it up, download the track, record yourselves singing the choir part through any means available and then send the track(s) in any format (.wav, .mp3, etc. ALL works) to us at [email protected] – note that our email account has an attachment limit of 25mb so if you send .wav files you might have to use a file transfer service like WeTransfer our upload it to Dropbox, FTP or similar. Please include the real names of everyone singing on the recording as we might want to do a shoutout later to everyone involved. I will personally pick out a couple of participants and send out a Scar Symmetry care package (I’m thinking a CD or two, some touring memorabilia, weird Swedish candy and whatnot).
Resist extinction and join our ultraterrestrial allies in their quest to crush the artilect empire!
– Per Nilsson and Scar Symmetry
