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The Imperium March

from Elysian Road by Caleb M. Powers

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This track, parodically named “The Imperium March” as a reference to Star Wars, is unsurprisingly the theme for the Thousand Island Imperium, the evil empire in Elysian Road. I had a lot of fun selecting properly menacing instrumentation for this track and for the
theme in general. I started off without much idea on how to write a villain theme, so I decided to do some research—listening to various villainous pieces from movie scores over the years and reading articles to get a feel for what makes something truly male-volent sounding. The main thing that I think makes this track sound the way that it does
is that it’s set in the key of A Minor (like most tracks are in this album, if you hadn’t noticed), but it uses an extraneous E chord at the end of the standard progression to make the melody stand out starkly against what would otherwise be considered a pretty standard melodic throughline.

Here I am, pretending that I know something about music. Oh well.

The Thousand Island Imperium is definitely the “big bad” of Elysian Road, and as such, this track was always one I was planning to write from the inception of the album. One of the things I was trying to do the most with this piece is to underscore the difference between the Imperium and the rest of the setting—basically how truly opposed the Imperium was to the rest of the citizens of the sector of space our characters live in. I did this primarily by making this track so organic sounding. No electronic instruments, no heroic swells, not even an ominous computer-generated drone. No, the Imperium represents the taking away of a bright future and the stagnation of progress leading to a dark age. The hook of the story of Elysian Road was about the characters losing their jobs as pro-gamers because of the Imperium’s arrival, after all, so it seemed fitting to paint the Imperium here as sort of anti-technology through the instrumentation I chose. Big nasty brass, ominous strings, and larger-than-life orchestral percussion. I think it was that darn percussion that gave me so much difficulty—I spent a lot of time working on getting it just right before I was finally satisfied with it. It was much less dynamic in its earlier incarnations.

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from Elysian Road, released June 16, 2019

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Caleb M. Powers Moscow, Idaho

I'm one of those creative people you've been warned about.

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