Omega Ronin: We Will See You on the Other Side | Song (2025)

Back in the Turbo Volcano days (pre-Omega Ronin), I recorded a few songs for a short-lived podcast that I produced in the spirit of a classic "sci-fi radio drama", a style that I dropped when creating synthwave vibe years later. There's one Turbo Volcano song called Universe Tim about a scientist at the turn of the century who discovers a new universe and names it after himself. I'm not even sure if I released it (I still have it, so I probably should.)

I thought the story in Universe Tim was pretty funny and gave the listener something to enjoy while getting into the repetitive beat of the song. That's one of the things about electronic music that's tough to overcome: repetition. By design, electronic music is fairly repetitive, and without lyrics, it can get boring. I've been working more with sampling old Edison cylinders, robot voices, and my own voice using tape loopers. It's like singing but without singing. I've certainly heard enough songs from Thrill Kill Kult, Crystal Method, Ministry, and the like with samples, but damn, it's hard to do! It takes a bit of practice to get right, for sure. This whole method has become part of what defines the Omega Ronin experimental sound design approach.

We Will See You on the Other Side is a narrative tale of a space research vessel flying through a black hole in the future. I recorded the story and played it back in a wobbly way using a tape looper, which gives it a great "lost in space" kind of quality, very much in line with the sci-fi ambient and cosmic electronic storytelling themes that run through Omega Ronin tracks. One can almost imagine a black and white silent film with people running around a cheap set in lab coats as seductive aliens roll around on the floor moaning, while a goofy robot with blinky lights watches.

Fun fact, I recorded the rest of the song first! This is a Juno-X song with a huge lead and lots of sequences running at once. The Juno always sounds enormous on any track, and I love this 80s-inspired synthesizer style that blends into my usual electronic soundtrack feel, but it needs a voice! Whether that voice be talking, singing, or sampling, I don't know. In the end, it's what it is now: talking meets sampling.

I created the original sequence using Korg Gadget on the iPad, which I often do when working in scales that I'm not familiar with. I manually entered each of the Korg notes into the Juno while building a scene with all of the different song components. This hybrid workflow: hardware + DAW + weird sounds + mobile synth apps is typical of the Omega Ronin music production process. Nothing else sounds like a juicy Juno-X sequence; it's just a thing of beauty.

I'd love to do more of these adventure-style songs. I guess we'll see where the future takes Omega Ronin in the future… hopefully through a black hole into more synthwave, lo-fi electronic, cinematic sci-fi music, and weird story-driven soundscapes.