The Wanderers is an Exile-themed album. At this point it is fairly obvious that the "fake band" project we had started with the Midnight Crew has now evolved simply into a concept album project, allowing us to focus on specific elements of Homestuck including groups of characters and locations. There is no premise that the five exiles have been writing songs and playing in a band behind our backs - this record is a meditation on the plight of those who must surely be the last of their kind. As such, it's got wonderful mood and daring ambiance, only occasionally broken by the "you'll get it when you think about it" references to Blues Clues.
After releasing Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido and spending two weeks traveling in the Philippines on a balikbayan tour of my ancestors' homeland, I hauled ass to put some good songs on this project, which had been cooking entirely without me watching for months. Having finally arranged a decent work space in Los Angeles, I used the streamlined recording and producing process I had developed in the latter stages of struggling through my solo effort to put out two songs.
"Aimless Morning Gold" is one of two themes proposed for the Aimless Renegade on this album, this being a considerably softer approach than the other. Not even realizing that Radiation and Tensei were busily developing the adrenaline-fueled bonus track "Tomahawk Head", I went the route of de-tuned pads and empty-sounding guitar, picturing the AR more as a lonesome sniper than a gun-crazed hick. Diverging from the otherwise world music feel of the record, I drew once again from the spacey sounds of Weather Report's album Mysterious Traveler for inspiration. Attempting three verses but eventually settling for two and a half, the ambiance of gunfire is ultimately what made this piece feel complete.
"Ruins Rising" came out of the realization that much of our back catalog has been swept aside by new-coming fans, especially tracks which disappeared into the intentionally over-long opus that is Homestuck Volume 5. Knowing that a new version of Jit's composition "Ruins" could not be left out of an Exile-themed album, I gave it a treatment reminiscent of the electronic belly dance accompaniment music popularized by such groups as Beats Antique and the selections of all-star dance troupe Bellydance Superstars. The production style I used for Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido carried pretty well over into this song, especially during coda in which the drums explode in. I also threw in some Frippertronics just to sample a wide pallet of ambient sounds.