Shaman of the Night

The last song of God's Flesh was recorded on July 12, 2026. The first song of Shaman of the Night was recorded on August 23. For the six weeks between I did not write music: I rewrote the thing that writes it, and I have kept rewriting it between recording nights since. These 20 songs came out of successive versions of that rebuild.

Every album so far has been a test of SongCreator, and God's Flesh had shown me where it failed: 49 songs went into that album's folder and 20 made the record. The test songs I threw away this summer died the same three ways. A melody would camp on one note for a whole bar. A phrase would leap seven frets after a rest, somewhere my hand simply could not be yet. Or the song would open on two pitches and never earn the right to be picked up a second time. So I spent the summer turning each of those failures into something the software could measure, and then into something it refuses to ship.

The biggest change is that the generator now knows my hands. It carries a model of my reach and my fatigue, fitted from my own recorded plays: how far I can jump on a short note, how long a rest buys my hand back, that a spot I have already been to is one I can find again, and that a seven-fret leap is worse than a two-fret drift. Two separate systems used to guess where my hand was; now one owner tracks it, and a slide between neighbouring frets is finally scored as a slide, not a jump. The result I can measure: the sudden post-rest jumps in the harmony line that ended most of my takes fell by 92%.

Then the melodies. The hook a song is built from grew from five notes to seven. Phrases answer each other now, question and reply, and they are drawn on the song's own sections instead of a fixed template. The one-note drones that were still slipping through in August are gone: zero in the last 178 test songs, down from about one in eighteen. The rhythm guitar can state whether a song is major or minor instead of hiding behind power chords, and the three-note power chord that had never actually been generated finally is.

I also stopped trusting my old rules about what makes a song good, and went to the data instead. I ranked every song I have ever written by how often I came back to play it, and the songs I replay repeat themselves far more than the generator was allowed to. That changed what the scoring is allowed to punish. Meters fluctuate inside sections again, tempo follows the meter changes, and the twelve-bar blues form is switched off, because I never wrote to it.

Every one of those failures I used to catch by ear is now a check the software runs before I sit down to listen. Since the last note of God's Flesh that has added up to 1,108 commits, 273 of them on the generator alone, and the share of test songs that pass every check rose from 39% to 59%. The proof is what has not happened: on God's Flesh I sat down and played 29 songs and rejected 9 of them. On this album that number is 0 — the album closed at 20 of 24 songs generated: 4 were never recorded, one of them started three times and left unfinished, all 20 in E♭, the tuning that converted worst of all on the last record.

20 songs, recorded across 8 nights — 59% of the takes between ten at night and five in the morning. Hence the name.