I eventually realised that Arcane Dimensions itself was partially the solution to the music problem. Unlike the original Quake, each level in Arcane Dimensions is it's own self-contained universe, and each one has a very different feel. Crucial Error is very futuristic Sci-fi, Necromancer's Keep and Firetop Mountain are Very high-fantasy, Foggy bogbottom is... a boggy swamp. So each level can get away with having very different, very stylised takes on the musical direction, meaning I could use stuff from multiple genres rather than trying to keep to Quake original's retro-industrial ouvre.
This also meant that I could use some previous works which normally wouldn't fit in the quake universe. Foggy bogbottom suits weird eclectic southern-sounding acoustic music, Crucial Error suits electronica, etc, orchestral work may fit within Necromancer's keep, Realm of Enceladus suits etheral, floating music... etcetera.
In addition I could re-render some of my old material which prior to now had vocals - making it thereby suitable for a soundtrack. In some cases I had to significantly re-work the tracks to get them to work without vocals - take this remix I did of my track 'america', for example. Previously just a vicious angry track, now it suits a sci-fi atmos a bit, via this Glitch incarnation:
In addition I bought a bass guitar off my neighbour once he moved out, my first ever, and plugged it into the large Jansen amp a friend of mine had given me for free many moons ago. Suddenly all the missing gaps in a lot of the tracks got magically filled - it was a revelation how much I'd needed a bass guitar without realising it. It gave juice to a lot of the tracks, made the rhythm 'stick' more, gave more 'thump'. After many days of trying different mic'ing techniques, different mics, different playing styles and alternating between going direct and mic'ing an amp, EQ'ing and processing the results, I got a good feel for bass and how it fitted into the mix, and the variations I could get out of my equipment.
Bass is very simple on one level - it's largely a mono-string instrument, like violin, but at the same time the difference between a bass sound that fits into a mix, and one that dominates it or takes a giant wooly crap over all the other parts, is pretty important and hard to guage without any experimentation. So I ended up doing a minimum of five bass takes for those early tracks, before I got more familiar with which sounds fitted which mixes. But I generally started to find that what those mixes had lacked - on many of those tracks recorded the year before - was this bass sound. It was a welcome addition in the studio.
