Dream Weapon

It’s been 13 years since the last album from electronic-metal experimentalists Genghis Tron. Though much of that time was an extended hiatus, founding duo Hamilton Jordan and Michael Sochynsky have completely revamped their lineup with new vocalist Tony Wolski and the band’s first-ever live drummer, Nick Yacyshyn (also of extreme-metal favorites Sumac and Baptists). The result is Dream Weapon, a decidedly more spacious and hypnotic album than the band’s frenzied, critically acclaimed 2008 opus Board Up the House. “We wanted the instruments and arrangements to have a little more breathing room so the listener could hear all the details,” Jordan tells Apple Music. “Having Nick and Tony involved really helped us arrive at a more cohesive, streamlined set of songs that really flow together. They really elevated everything.” Below, Jordan discusses each track on Dream Weapon.
Exit Perfect Mind “We knew we wanted an intro track on the album, and we knew we wanted an interlude. At some point about halfway through the mixing process, Michael stayed up late one night and put together the core components of what would become ‘Exit Perfect Mind.’ He had the idea to pull the same melodies that conclude the last track on the album, ‘Great Mother,’ and use them to start the record. So that was a cool way to bookend the album, by starting and ending with a similar vibe.”
Pyrocene “Many of our songs—and not just on this album—start with drums, and this is one of those songs. ‘Pyrocene’ started when I was visiting my wife’s family in the Arizona desert and I just wrote this funky little drumbeat that I really liked. I sent it to Michael and he added some more synthetic-sounding samples on top and a deep, heavy bass synth stab. Then we just kind of tricked it out over a two- or three-week period. It was exciting writing this song because it was our first full demo for this album—the first real song we wrote in, at that point, 12 years. It’s also the song we used to entice Nick into playing with us.”
Dream Weapon “This is the first song we started writing, but the last one we finished. I wrote about half of the guitar parts on this song in the summer of 2008, a couple of months after Board Up the House came out. It was also a couple of weeks after my dad died, and this was the first thing I’d written since his death. But I really liked those riffs, so we held on to them for a long time. We always knew that if we were going to do another album that it would show up in some form. Fast-forward 12 years and we had a lot of ideas over that time that didn’t age well, but this is one of the few that Michael and I still really loved.”
Desert Stairs “This was based on something that Michael had written a while before we entered the studio, but we were having trouble coming up with tones that really worked. When we were at GodCity with [producer] Kurt Ballou, he busted out a guitar and a metal slide and recorded some really nice guitar ambience where he was moving the slide over the neck and getting harmonics. Then Michael chopped them up and made these samples that sounded more like a synth pad. They really brought track together and made it sound warmer.”
Alone in the Heart of the Light “My wife and I drove to visit Michael in upstate New York, and we were staying in a motel in Virginia the night before. I had a little MIDI controller with me, and I came up with this arpeggiated melody that I really liked. We ended up with like a 20-chord progression that you can’t really follow, but it doesn’t matter. You can just lose yourself in it. This is also the first song we sent our new vocalist, Tony, when we were in the exploratory phases of working with him. What he came up with really subverted our expectations, and we knew we had to work with him.”
Ritual Circle “I have a super vivid memory of this song, because my wife and I were staying in Colorado for a family funeral when I woke up one morning to this idea that Michael had sent. It ended up being one of the more challenging songs to write because we didn’t know what that idea needed around it. So there were a lot of different versions of this song before the one you’re hearing. Our goal was to keep the listener engaged, because you're hearing new melodies and textures and sounds, but you're still in that same driving rhythm. Hopefully you get lost in it.”
Single Black Point “This is another one that started with a drumbeat. And it's another song, kind of like ‘Ritual Circle,’ that has a very distinct part A and part B. The second half of the song is all Michael, and to me it’s more of a classic Genghis Tron electronic jam-out.”
Great Mother “This is another one that has some really old elements in it. I think the opening pulsating synth and some of the other synth melodies toward the end of the song, before the last loud chorus comes in, came from a demo that Michael wrote in 2011 or 2012. But we had trouble turning it into a song until I came up with the main guitar riff and started sketching out a new arrangement. So I kind of stripped his old demo for parts and rolled it into something new. At first we felt maybe this had too many parts, but then Tony came into the picture and his vocals were the glue that brought the song together.”