Operation Discord

The Sacred Epiphany

It has been vouchsafed to me by Eris, Goddess of Discord, in an ecstatic vision following the consumption of two "Sunshine" acid tabs, one "Funny Frog" pill, and a gill of vodka and cryocaine, that when the sacred threshold of the Dynamic Range Tabernacle is breached, regardless of whence that threshold may have been set, so it shall pass that compression = overshoot - overshoot over ratio.  Let him (or her) who hath understanding consecrate the attack and release controls and the filter stop-bands to bring about the holy pumping of the bassline and beats, the de-essing of the profane sibilants, and YES, even the Damascene influence of the hallowed bus compression.  This must be treated with utmost reverence, because anything else is poppycock and I am personally offended by any obdurate truth-denier who disagrees.  --Fiona 'RBMK Tits' Price

When we worked on this album, a return to EBM roots that I was into at the turn of the 1980's (yes, I'm that fuckin' old) into the 1990's (with Gwen and Stephen being dragged along for the ride and taking it in new directions I hadn't thought of), we used all 8-Bit drum samples in Mod Trackers that were based on old Amiga OCS programs and the distinctive sound from the Amiga's PAULA chip.  These give a more 'clattery' and warm drum sound than modern drum machines because of the audible quantisation errors.  We put the bass guitars and vocals through every kind of hideous effect pedal and plugin we could find to distort the living fuck out of them.  We even created our own distortion effect called "The FZero Glitch" where we used the HxD hex editor to search wav files for all instances of FF hex numbers and replace the one or more of the four low bits, depending how much distortion you want, to get a number between FF and F0 (11110000 in binary or 240 in decimal), creating the different high end crackles heard on some of the tracks.  To finish off, we used FL Studio to apply some synths to make the whole thing sound a little more futuristic and cyberpunk dystopian.  In the current global political climate we didn't have to look far for inspiration for the rather depressing and dystopian lyrics.  In spite of the dark subject matter, this was a fun little project that took us out of our comfort zones and let us get creative.  --C0unt WAVnstein, 18/03/2025. 

Operation Discord would like to thank:  Graffiti Writers and Taggers from around Ayrshire (Scotland) and Monmouthshire (South Wales) for the Operation Discord lettering, Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (for Principia Discordia), Finn Jacobs + Alex Mauer + Motone and µB (for the st-xx sample library), Lars Hamre + Anders Hamre + Sven Vahsen and Rune Johnsrud (for ProTracker), Fredrik "Mr. H" Huss and Magnus "Vogue" Högdahl of Triton (Fast Tracker 2), Baktery and Awesome (Skale Tracker), Maël Hörz (HxD Editor, used to create the FZero Glitch), Didier Dambrin (FL Studio), Tony Frenzel - Klanghelm (for the IVGI saturator), Christoph Gutjahr and Nicolas Mendoza (for the Aminet), Trent Buck and AnonMoos (for the Sacred Chao image), Skull of Rainbow Trio for the Amiga 500 Text Scroller.