The universe is a cycle, one end meets and the other begins. Inspiration keeps the nothing at bay while children are born and march into ash. Time flows from chaos to chaos to chaos while only itself is constant. When the end comes, this universe will be but a transient of existence as we all expire into the void.

This is the philosophical motivation behind Expire, a 5-song EP about phases of existence. The album is told from the perspective of a hypothetical oversoul and it details conception, birth, the passage of time, decline, and eventual death of the universe.

Expire has gone through two revisions in its lifetime. It was originally conceived during winter and spring of 2006 as a collaboration between Carl Schissler and Thomas Price, classmates at NCSSM. Writing for the first version of the album took about 3 months, with Carl writing most of the song structures, riffs, and lyrics, while Thomas contributed ideas that were incorporated into the whole. The initial recording and production of the album was completed over the course of a week as part of a school project. On the original recording, Carl played almost all of the guitar parts, drums, vocals, and keyboards. Thomas played and wrote most of the bass guitar parts. The recording was plagued by problems with vocals and drum mixes. It was the most complex project which Carl had ever produced at the time, resulting in a long period of incubation before release. Post production took over 3 months, with the original free release of 50 copies taking place on 06/06/06.

Following these events, Carl was still unsatisfied with the quality of the recording and songs, feeling that they did not truly represent his original vision. He futilely worked on editing and remixing the old recording without making any progress for over a year. Carl and Thomas, now at UNC-CH, and two other students (David and Brian) formed a band called Expire. The hope was that the album Expire could be rerecorded with the new lineup and revisions to the songwriting.

However, a lack of interest and motivation by all involved plus a lack of time to work kept anything from being accomplished during 2007 and 2008. By this time, Carl had decided to forgo any additional band members so that he would have maximum control over the music that the band produced. He decided to completely rerecord Expire by himself. An attempt as made in August of 2008 but Carl was unhappy with the sound of the resulting guitar tracks. After acquiring some more gear, a final attempt was made to record the album in the winter of 2008-2009. This recording became Expire, finally completed 3 years after its conception.

Expire was recorded in the winter of 2008-2009. The recording process took approximately 2 months to complete. Following this, the album was edited and mixed for an additional 2 months. In total, over 200 man-hours were logged during its creation. The album was recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered in Carl Schissler's home studio. The album was recorded at 24-bit 88.2 KHz quality. The proceeding descriptions illustrate each phase of the process.

The guitar tracks were the first to be recorded and took about a week to complete. Guitar was recorded to a click track in order to insure the most precise performance possible. Audio was recorded direct-in via USB link with a Boss GT-Pro effects processor. The processor performed speaker simulation and pre-effects (distortion, flanger, compression, gating, EQ) in combination with an Engl e530 preamp which provided distortion and clean tones. Delay and reverb were added in post production. Guitar was heavily multitracked. Rhythm parts were triple-tracked (far left, center, far right) with the center track utilizing the neck pickup. Lead parts were either single or double-tracked depending on the situation and were panned center or slightly left or right.

The drums on the album were played on an upgraded Roland TD-9SX drum kit. The MIDI produced by this device was recorded and used to drive Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.0 plugin. The drums were mixed in an 8-track configuration (Kick, Snare, Tom 1, Tom 2, Tom 3, Hi Hat, Overheads, and Room Mic). Compression, EQ, and limiting were performed on every drum track with reverb applied sparingly. Drums were completed in about 4 days.

At the time of the recording, there was not a suitable bass guitar available. In order to circumvent this problem, the bass guitar was recorded as MIDI and then played through a software instrument in Logic. Compression, limiting, and EQ were applied to the bass track. Bass guitar took a total of 7 days to complete.

The vocals on the album took the longest to complete and were recorded in several sessions. The first session included all of the vocals in Inspire and Aeons and half of the vocals in Progeny. Due to strain on Carl's vocal chords and a lack of lyrics for the verses in Progeny, the rest of the vocals on the album could not be completed at that time. The recordings from the first session were edited for a few weeks before the rest of the vocals (excluding Progeny's verses) were recorded. It took over a month for suitable lyrics to be written for the missing vocals, at which time they were recorded. All of the vocals were recorded by a Rode NT1-A microphone with a pop filter into a Presonus Firestudio firewire audio interface. The recording of the clean vocals on the album was especially hard because Carl was experimenting with slight rasp in order to add an edge to the vocals. This put quite a bit of strain on his vocal chords and would make it hard to record for more than a few hours at a time.

The keyboards on the album were recorded as MIDI data played through software instruments found in Logic. Additionally, custom software instruments were created in order to emulate patches from a Roland RS-5 keyboard. The keyboard parts were recorded in about 7 days.

The album was mixed for the entire duration of the recording process as new parts were added. Each group of instruments (guitar, bass, keyboard, drums, vocals, sound effects) was routed into its own stereo bus so that effects could be applied to all tracks of a particular type. Each bus had an adaptive limiter on its output in order to prevent clipping.

A novel method of mixing was devised which would almost negate the need for any mastering to achieve a relatively loud recording with minimal compression distortion. All of the non-percussive tracks were routed into a single stereo bus while all percussive tracks were routed in another stereo bus. The non-percussive bus was compressed heavily in order to acheive a loud overall volume for the track. The dry percussive tracks were then mixed with this bus with adaptive limiting at -0.1 dB on the output. Slight whole-track mastering EQ was also applied at this stage.

Each song was mixed separately and then combined with the other songs in another project in order to get smooth transitions between each pair of songs. The resulting 30-minute file was then split into discrete tracks and saved at several sample rate and bit depth combinations: 24 bit 88.2 KHz (master), 24 bit 44.1 KHz (MP3 encode source), 16 bit 44.1 KHz (CD quality).