OK this is way too long lol, hopefully it was interesting and/or helpful!
Thank you for the kind words, and for the purchase! I’m seriously thrilled that people like my music.
Almost everything gets sequenced by the MPC, with the exception of Andromeda Ritual (all done in Ableton), and the acid lines (ABL3 VST). I record in 16 or 32-bar loops when I can, I find that it allows me to make song sections that feel more coherent. The syntakt drums in Theurgy got sequenced on my couch - I was still exploring the ST and trying to see if I could make a coherent song skeleton on just the electron sequencer. I added to the other parts that song later. Basically everything else in almost every song was sequenced by the MPC. Most songs that start with a drum loop, then I add synth textures so I don’t get bored, and they progress from there.
As to how I record things, everything goes into a pair of ADAT-connected Scarlett 18i20s on its own pair of inputs (except for micro freak which is in mono). I have an ableton template so that I don’t have to set up the tracks and effects for every song. The exception to this is that on Theurgy I used overbridge on the ST - it was kind of my experiment to see how I like that workflow. On a few songs I went back and recorded only the kick drum from the MPC, cut the lows on the original drum track, and sidechained the kick to the bass slightly to increase clarity. The drums on the more frantic songs were sequenced, and then I performed the MPC’s XYFX live during recording to spice things up.
As to level matching, I tend to shoot for an overall Master volume of -6 DB during my initial mixing phase. Honestly mixing takes me quite a long time and there are probably more efficient ways to do it - I easily spend twice as much time mixing than I do writing. I remember mixing one of the songs against a Plaid song as a reference, but don’t remember which one. The last thing is that at the end, after I was finally done mixing and tweaking (which really never ends), I put all the song WAVs in one project file on separate tracks and randomly soloed them. This allowed me to catch a few songs that needed their overall volume adjusted slightly.
For cohesion - that’s a tough thing. Honestly I was worried that this album wasn’t going to be cohesive enough, so hearing that it seems to be one body of work is really encouraging!
I initially started with a pool of like 30 potential half-finished tracks for this album. I whittled that down over the course of a few weeks, and once I settled on like 15, started putting more work into the mix, cleaning up arrangements, etc. I kind of write with “themes” in mind at times, and it just so happened that many of the tracks that I chose for the album had a similar set of those.
I definitely had to cut some tracks that I’m fond of because they just didn’t fit the vibe of the others. On the technical side, I think it helps that I use roughly the same set of principles and techniques when applying FX in the DAW. And none of that is particularly unique - almost everything gets EQ treatment, glue compression, saturation, etc. I generally use the same reverbs, delays, chorus, etc across songs. The master track gets a tiny amount of short reverb most of the time. I also tend to use the same set of drum samples until I get really bored of them, though I think I used more different drum sounds on this album on my previous ones.
Feel free to ask about anything else if you want! This was incredibly fun to put together and I’m seriously so glad that you enjoyed it.