Perpetual Emotion Machine
from Omega
2006
This is a two-phase trance opener to the Omega album, composed probably third or fourth in line.
The day I wrote this song, I woke up from a terrible nightmare and was wracked with panic. At the time, I was struggling with anxiety disorder and didn’t feel at ease most of the time. I decided to shake it off by going down to the corner to grab a coffee. It was 6 am and the sun was barely up, early spring and it was cold out. I remember walking past the gas station and seeing the sign was $1.269 which was quite high. A petroleum processing plant in the US had caught fire and supply was down, thus the cost to fill up were more than usual. Everyone around here was freaking and people were scrambling trying to find a good price.
At any rate, this is a song about that morning. I was trying to calm myself down but everything around me was chaotic. I remember thinking just after I woke up that I was surprised that I was still alive. I had half expected to not to live to my thirties, snuffed out either by a car accident, some kind of illness or nuclear annihilation. I remembered thinking when I was a teenager these things might happen to me because the world was full of unknowns and randomness and this was a great source of my panic. I guess I never really got over that. Call it trauma, if you want.
There was a lot of inspiration from 808 State on this one.
I’m Not Dead (Demo)
Perpetual Emotion Machine
The original version of this ended at around the 6:30 mark, before I had added the second portion of it with the minor key elements. Lost with a hard drive crash.
I’m Not Dead / 1.269 And Rising
Perpetual Emotion Machine
The final album version.
I’m Not Dead / 1.269 And Rising (2014 Drum & Bass Interpretation)
Perpetual Emotion Machine
A later experiment to try and update the track with a remix.
Credits
written, produced and arranged by Perpetual Emotion Machine.