With their sophomore album Imperative Imperceptible Impulse, Ad Nauseam took a step forward in terms of composition, musical structures and sound. Music is not intended as a mere sequence of riffs that sounds well one after the other, but is now a naturally ordered structure where almost every musical event refers to the past and/or predicts the future, generating very layered and complex patterns dominated by polyphony and polyrhythms and where each instrument has its own role and is essential in the whole. The music represents a merging of many different styles, the most prominent ones being extreme death/black metal, avantgarde, jazz, post-core, doom/sludge and ambient.
The composition process of Imperative Imperceptible Impulse has been heavily influenced by 20th century classical composers like Stravinsky, Šostakóvič, Xenakis, Scelsi, Penderecki and Ligeti, to name a few. Both the concepts of harmony and melody have been put into discussion to get a music where harmony is obtained by means of disharmony and melody by dissonances. To push this method even further, a unique tuning system has been conceived, to allow a new harmonic vocabulary and to eradicate the players from the comfort zone of the usual melodic patterns every guitar/bass player is used to.
Ad Nauseam takes a step back from the synthetic, flat and fake sound of modern production trends, going in the opposite direction, again adopting the same principles that are used to record classical music: less is more.
An extreme effort has been put to find a way to record the most natural, dynamic and tridimensional sound possible. For this reason, instead of focusing on the mixing and post-production phase, an insane amount of attention has been paid studying how to capture the best sound since the very beginning. The maniacal assembly and calibration of the audio chain allowed to nearly eliminate the use of equalizers and dynamic compressors. Saying it with Steve Albini: "I want to hear the sound of the instrument, not the sound of the processor".
