Now let’s get to the heart of the album, the title track, which I didn’t produce until I had finished all the other tracks. I wanted to wait with the production of this track until I knew exactly which gap it had to fill on the album in terms of content and which sound design techniques and elements I would use on all the other tracks of the album, because those should also be used here. It had to be the best and the most meaningful track and be able to be representative of the whole album in terms of style, content and emotion. I therefore wanted to isolate it in the album and not let there be a smooth transition between the previous and the next track.

In this track I musically worked through the theme of depression, which arises from external circumstances that have changed to one’s own disadvantage and slowly eats away at you. In the course of it, you first long for simpler circumstances that are unattainable in the past, for example in your own childhood, until you finally play with the cruel thought of whether it would have been better never to have been born.

The track begins with a recording of me walking home at night from a party in my small hometown, you can hear my footsteps in the dark. The “noise” surrounding the footsteps is actually not the ambience of the recording, but a heavily stretched recording I made when I was out for Men’s Day with a group of about 20 guys. I tend to feel out of place or lonely in groups of people sometimes, so I thought it would be a good idea to abstract these recordings into a kind of ambience that sounds very somber and lonely, almost threatening, as if you’re walking alone through a forest at night and the darkness is growling at you, which is also a good allegory for the theme of depression.

“Undone” is the only track on the album to have three drops, which sound increasingly frayed and minimalistic. I wanted it to seem like the song was undergoing a process of decay, that’s why each drop is less energetic than the previous one. I also decided on a relatively cold, metallic sound for the track, the only warm sounding elements were to be the very deep slowly pulsating sub bass, the strings that appear in the middle section of the track and the recording of a baby laughing. I removed the warm sound spectrum from all other elements as much as possible.

The first drop sounds like it takes place in the middle of a storm. Wildly glitching percussive elements chaotically play around the pluck-like cold, airy vocal textures until the drop dissolves into one of my recordings of rain (which I always like to make and use as a white noise substitute) while my footsteps continue to be heard. I wanted this to represent the emotional breakdown and feeling of being overwhelmed and the perceived hopelessness of the situation.

This is followed by the second drop where I wanted to revisit the past childhood theme from “Time Pervades Us All”, again you can hear music box like sounds here but this time more frayed playing the theme of the track. Also, a very prominent ticking of a clock is added and the whole drop starts to glitch, individual elements morph into each other, are warped together and separate again, strings rise out of the chaos at the end of the drop and form a very sad, suffering sounding arrangement that gets slower and louder. Strong tempo automations also completely dissolve any sense of beat time. At the loudest point of the arrangement, it suddenly stops completely. This is followed by an incredibly delicate repetition of the theme on the piano surrounded by gossamer ethereal sounds and the recordings of a baby making amused and happy noises.

The third drop consists of the main theme, which I recorded and glitched on piano and then heavily processed, which is why all sorts of unusual, intangible and partly neurobass-ish sounds emerge from the piano track. Thus, this drop is the last in the series of mini-challenges in which I tried to use a single instrumental sound as a starting point for as many elements as possible that would otherwise be covered by genre-typical synthesizers. Accompanied by the pushing sub-bass and the strange kick pattern, the fast ticking hats, as well as the absence of other percussion elements, this creates an extremely unusual, morphing, suffering sound structure that first builds up until it completely dissolves into glitches before the outro of the track. In the outro you can hear orchestral elements one last time and my footsteps that suddenly stop.