The three phases of IOT
Twilight 1: About 20-25 finished songs combining death metal ideas with power metal ideas. Most songs relied heavily on the orchestration, using strings, brass and flutes in nearly every song. The lyrics were mostly about different ways in which the world, and most people, sucked. The project started in 1998 as a way to pass time, and ended 2003 when I left my "dayjob" in Amaran and decided to never work with music again.
Twilight 2: A musical movie project consisting of 7 short animated movies that never got past the storyboard phase. The story was about the angel of death and the end of the world. A happy ending, in other words. Musically it differed from Twilight 1 in many ways. Since there was a story to be told, the instrumentation was made simpler than the earlier songs, using no orchestral parts at all. And they no longer had much left of the power metal parts that were so prevalent in Twilight 1. The lyrics were all dialogue narration for the movies, sometimes working as a substitute for character dialogue. The project started in late 2004 and ended in early 2005 after it was clear that it would never be finished, and I would never work with music again.
Twilight 3: So far some 20 songs, some of which are remakes of older songs. This time the songs remind mostly of Twilight 1, but with a bit less power metal melodies. The instrumentation has been kept even simpler than in Twilight 2. Where Twilight 1 could have 20 different instruments and Twilight 2 have 7-8 instruments, Twilight 3 doesn't exceed 5 instruments very often. And in those cases it's usually doubling of guitars. Only a few songs have lyrics so far, but the plan is to write horror-inspired lyrics with as much blood and gore as I can think of. The twilight 3 project started may 8th 2006, and will end the next time I decide to never work with music again.
Regarding recording:
I'm a very lazy man, so I record everything using samplers. A very small number of songs have ever had any real instruments recorded. The exact number is six songs with guitar tracks and one with a bass track. Right now two songs have vocals, but more will come later as I finish more lyrics.
(Bio written with a lot of help from the official IOT historian and html consultant, Annie Ursa)
To hear more songs, go to www.mikael-andersson.com
To see my concert photos, go to www.metalfoton.se