Omega Ronin: Refraction of Existence | Song (2025)

Like Palace of Xalagar, the title track on this EP, Refraction of Existence started life as an Arturia Microfreak recording session.

I spent an evening in the late summer of ’25 noodling around on my porch with the Microfreak and a portable recorder, where I came across the intro and loved it. But I didn’t have it hooked up to sequencers, clocks, or anything related to my usual electronic music production workflow. I literally just recorded it “old timey style” for reference and planned to re-record it later. But I could never get the same sound back. I dialed something in the Microfreak and lost it somewhere that evening, so I kept the original.

If you’ve read my other commentary tracks, you’ve probably figured out I’m not a classically trained pianist (har har), but I am a trained editor. So I put the imperfect recording at the beginning of a song without a beat because the timing is way off, and then sent the song through a Moog Matriarch analog synthesizer experimentation vortex. After that, I used the track in an animation project about the Space Shuttle and worked with it for that purpose, leaning into its retro-futuristic soundscapes.

After liking the intro, I recorded a bass beat on the Juno-X and then went back to the Microfreak to record a few things with a sequencer for timing, which became the core of the song. A few more synth layers, some producing, and drums finished the song and here it is, even if I never ended up using the Space Shuttle animation anywhere. Maybe I will someday... it fits it perfectly.

Refraction of Existence is a mix of synthwave synthesizer tones, drifting textures, and the kind of quirky hardware workflows that define my more experimental pieces.