When I first caught up with Canadian multi-instrumentalist Ryan Koepke through a written Crannk Q&A in 2025, Cepheidae Variable was very much his baby. The debut album, Primordial Reverie, was this massive instrumental journey through progressive metal, orchestration, synths and science fiction inspired soundscapes, with Ryan building a universe without words and allowing guitars, recurring motifs and atmosphere to carry the story while still leaving enough space for listeners to imagine their own version of what was happening.
Less than a year later, things look very different. Vocalist and lyricist Chad Bernatchez entered the picture, Primordial Reverie has evolved into the forthcoming vocal reimagining Primordial Reverie Ascendant, and perhaps most surprisingly, Cepheidae Variable itself is rapidly becoming something far bigger than Ryan’s original solo project.
Primordial Reverie Ascendant arrives January 8, 2027, and this time I finally got Ryan on camera for a proper chat about just how much has changed. As it turns out, even the press release description of Cepheidae Variable as a duo is already starting to fall behind the reality.
From Solo Project to Something Much Bigger
When Ryan answered my questions last year, he had spoken about potentially learning vocals himself, and at that stage he wasn’t even certain whether Cepheidae Variable would remain completely instrumental. Fast forward to now and Chad is not only handling the vocals and lyrics, but Ryan revealed that the project is already developing into a full band.
“It’s actually a lot more than Chad now too,” Ryan tells me. “We’re essentially a four-piece permanent band, plus we’ve got a really good bassist for the next album that’s coming out, which I’m not really going to talk about here, but it’s exciting.”
As for Chad becoming involved, there doesn’t appear to have been some huge master plan. He heard Primordial Reverie, liked what Ryan had created, and the pair started talking. Initially the idea was simply to do a song together, but Ryan already knew there was a fair chance that one song was never going to be enough.
“I think he proposed the idea of doing a song, and I know in the back of my head, because I’m a guy who only listens to albums in their entirety, I’m like, ‘Okay, yeah, for sure, we’ll do a song.’ But for me it was always, I better make him enjoy this process and have a good time, because if we do one song, I’m going to want to do the whole thing.”
That one song eventually became an entire album.
Why Chad Bernatchez Made Sense
Chad was a fascinating choice for Cepheidae Variable because he already lives comfortably inside the worlds of progressive metal and science fiction through VOIDCHASER. For Ryan, though, it wasn’t simply about finding somebody who could sing over the existing music. He wanted to hear another side of Chad and felt there was room to bring more of his natural singing voice forward while still retaining the layered, atmospheric approach that already made his work stand out.
VOIDCHASER uses a heavily atmospheric vocal style, something Ryan enjoys, but for Ascendant he wanted a stronger balance between those huge layered arrangements and Chad’s more natural vocal tone. The result gave Chad something he hadn’t necessarily heard from himself before and also showed Ryan just how much Chad could add beyond simply singing a lead vocal.
“The Conduit” was the first song for which Ryan received the full vocal files, and when he opened the folder there were somewhere around 70 or 80 vocal tracks waiting for him. For someone accustomed to mixing bands where 20 tracks might already constitute a large vocal session, it was something of a shock.
Ryan initially assumed many of those tracks would simply be alternate takes, but that wasn’t the case. Beyond the multiple clean and harsh takes, an enormous portion of the session was made up of harmonies and additional vocal arrangements.
“It was so neat to see how he took already pretty harmonically dense music and did his own thing with it,” Ryan explains.
Those arrangements also allowed Chad to interact with something that has always been central to Cepheidae Variable: recurring musical ideas. Ryan is obsessed with motifs, with melodies and movements reappearing across the record in altered forms, sometimes becoming almost unrecognisable while still maintaining the musical DNA connecting one part of the journey to another. Chad began doing the same thing vocally, introducing callbacks in later songs to ideas heard earlier in the record, and suddenly the vocals weren’t merely sitting on top of Ryan’s universe, they had become another mechanism holding that universe together.
Giving the Instrumental Story a Voice
One of the things Ryan and I discussed in the original written interview was the vivid imagery he experienced while composing Primordial Reverie. Some scenes existed clearly in his head, while other pieces were driven more by emotion, and at the same time he deliberately left enough ambiguity for listeners to create their own interpretations.
With Ascendant, we now have a much more clearly defined protagonist and journey, so naturally I wanted to know how much of that story actually existed before Chad arrived. According to Ryan, roughly half of it was concrete when the instrumental album was released, and then it kept evolving as he continued listening back to the record.
“I’d still keep listening to the album and that got to 60, 70 percent,” he says.
Ryan also isn’t particularly precious about somebody else hearing something in his music that he didn’t originally intend. If somebody tells him a piece evokes a particular image or idea and he loves it, he’s perfectly capable of deciding that idea now belongs in the canon.
Chad helped fill in the remaining spaces and, importantly, brought concepts Ryan hadn’t previously considered. The biggest example is “The Conduit”, where Ryan’s original idea was relatively straightforward: an artefact in the sky allows the protagonist to travel across the universe. Chad transformed that into something far deeper, with the artefact now requiring sacrifice and the protagonist having to relinquish what she is in pursuit of becoming something more, without truly knowing what the consequences will be.
Ryan loved the idea so much that it has now changed the future of Cepheidae Variable’s mythology.
“That’s basically become a core part of the lore for the next album as well,” he reveals.
Even more interestingly, Ryan now has what he describes as a metanarrative solution capable of connecting every future Cepheidae Variable album without forcing each record to remain inside the exact same story. The release following Ascendant will continue and finish this particular narrative, but beyond that the universe is wide open.
Exploration, Escape and Disillusionment
The protagonist of Primordial Reverie Ascendant begins with an overwhelming desire to leave everything behind and travel among the stars. On the surface it is an adventure, but the deeper I got into the record, the more it felt like something else was going on underneath.
While working through the album, I kept returning to the same question: is she actually running towards something, or is she running away from herself?
Ryan immediately agreed that this sits at the heart of the record.
“You kind of hit the nail on the head,” he says. “Probably the most core concept to the album is the concept of disillusionment. It’s that the grass is always greener somewhere else.”
Ryan connects that idea to something from his own life as well. When he was younger, he wanted to move to Australia after visiting the country because everything seemed better, and while his father eventually did make the move and loves living here, Ryan came to understand something much broader through that experience. Eventually somewhere new becomes normal life again.
That idea becomes increasingly important as the protagonist travels farther from everything she knows. Changing your surroundings doesn’t automatically resolve whatever you were trying to escape, and Ascendant gradually turns that simple desire for exploration into something far more introspective.
“Zephyr of Ouroboros” and Something Far More Personal
One of the most personal moments in our original written interview centred around “Zephyr of Ouroboros.” Ryan wrote the piece during a frightening period after his father received a cancer diagnosis, and thankfully his father is now doing well, but the uncertainty surrounding that moment became permanently embedded in the music.
Ryan remembers meticulously working through the guitar solo, sometimes repeating the same bend or phrase twenty times because a technically good take wasn’t enough. It needed to contain the precise emotion he was trying to express.
“I remember when I was writing, I literally had some tears down my eyes,” he recalls.
That conversation hit particularly close to home for me as a cancer survivor myself, and it gave us the chance this time around to explore something we couldn’t really dig into through the previous written format. The Ouroboros represents cycles, endings, beginnings and the inevitability of life and death, and Ryan views the track in much the same way.
“It was really what it was about, kind of accepting the inevitable.”
Then Chad added his voice, and for Ryan the transformation was immense. The song already contained violin melodies and harmonies he loved, but after hearing Chad’s performance those elements almost disappeared from his own perception.
“I don’t even hear them anymore. I just hear Chad, and he did such a good job emotionally.”
For a record built around enormous concepts and imaginary worlds, moments like this remind you that some of its foundations are intensely human.
How Do You Put Vocals Into Music That Never Needed Them?
There was another huge question hanging over Ascendant. Primordial Reverie was built specifically to function without a vocalist, meaning the guitars, synths, orchestration and production already occupied the spaces traditionally used to carry melody and narrative.
Surely putting a singer into the middle of all that would require tearing the arrangements apart?
Apparently not.
“It was so easy,” Ryan laughs.
He had been concerned about exactly the same thing, but simply dropping Chad’s vocals over the existing material immediately worked. Ryan believes part of the reason is that he had already mixed the instrumental album almost as though vocals might exist there, so the necessary space was somehow already available.
The production on Ascendant is punchier, but Ryan was careful not to change the original material so dramatically that it lost its identity. The main adjustment was surprisingly minor, with Ryan sidechaining elements of the instrumentation against Chad’s vocal range so certain frequencies could subtly move out of the way whenever vocals entered.
The much greater workload came from editing those enormous vocal sessions. Ryan handled the vocal comping himself and, for a self-confessed perfectionist who will perform the same guitar bend twenty times in pursuit of the precise emotional result, having eight clean takes, five scream takes and mountains of harmonies gave him an extraordinary amount of control. If one syllable from one performance carried exactly the right feeling, Ryan would find it.
Ryan Koepke, Producer
When Ryan answered my written questions last year, he told me production, mixing, mastering and layering were becoming every bit as satisfying as writing the music itself. That development has clearly accelerated.
Primordial Reverie Ascendant was produced, mixed and mastered by Ryan through Chromatic Variable Soundworks, and despite the album not even being released yet, Ryan already believes he has progressed considerably beyond it from a production standpoint.
He tells me that even the early demo mix for the next record has him more excited in that respect. That doesn’t mean he regrets the sound of Ascendant, though. Quite the opposite. Changing it too heavily would have transformed the emotional identity of the original record, and Ryan wanted to preserve that connection while still allowing the new version to breathe.
Instead, he sees every project as another point on his development curve, and his songwriting philosophy is evolving too. For years, he believed almost any riff could work if the surrounding elements were strong enough, but a conversation with guitarist Charlie Griffith made him interrogate that philosophy more deeply. Progressive metal can sometimes create the illusion of profundity simply by throwing enough different elements into a composition, so Ryan started asking himself whether the better answer is to begin with the strongest possible riff and then build everything around it.
His new material now involves an unusual production experiment. He’ll mute the band and listen to the production elements alone to see whether they still feel like a coherent composition, then reverse the process and mute those layers to hear whether the core instrumentation still stands up as a great song. In Ryan’s mind, both halves should be capable of surviving independently and then become something considerably bigger when they are brought back together.
Finally Letting Other Musicians Into the Room
Perhaps the biggest transformation isn’t technical at all, but psychological.
Ryan created Primordial Reverie almost entirely alone, and once it was complete he found it extremely difficult to simply sit back and enjoy the record because he could only hear the work that had gone into making it.
“I could only listen to it as a critic.”
Adding Chad changed that. For the first time Ryan could hear something inside Cepheidae Variable that hadn’t originated completely from himself, and he could actually enjoy the music in a different way.
Now he’s taking that feeling considerably further. Future Cepheidae Variable material will involve other musicians writing their own parts, with a drummer who can take ownership of the final drum arrangements and another guitarist who Ryan readily admits is a better player than he is.
Then there’s that mysterious bassist.
Ryan wouldn’t tell me who it is, but what he would say is that the player is essentially his top choice in the entire genre, so naturally I’ll be keeping an eye on that one.
For somebody who describes himself as incredibly critical of his own playing and production, releasing some of that control sounds almost liberating. Ryan has even developed a small mental exercise to deal with his perfectionism by listening to records from bands he loves and deliberately searching for something he would change if he’d made them himself.
Dream Theater is one example. Ryan adores their music, yet if he listens through the same hypercritical lens he applies to his own work, he can almost always find some tiny recording decision, mix choice or musical element he’d alter. It reminds him of something deceptively simple: perfect music doesn’t exist.
One Year Later
We finished our 2025 written interview with a quickfire round, so there was no way I was letting Ryan disappear without putting him through a one-year-later edition.
Last year, Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same was the piece of music he credited with making him want to pick up an instrument. This time, the record inspiring him most over the past year is An Abstract Illusion’s The Sleeping City.
His previous dream collaboration was Haken, and they’re still very much in the conversation, although Ryan now nominates progressive metallers Nospūn before adding with a grin that he “may or may not be doing that already.” Make of that what you will.
His previous comfort record was Khonsu’s The Xun Protectorate, while currently he’s returning to Slice the Cake’s Odyssey to the West, particularly because of the way the record unfolds as a complete piece of storytelling.
There was one callback I absolutely had to finish with, though. Last year I asked Ryan to describe Primordial Reverie in one sentence and his answer was:
“Uplifting journey to the stars that introduces great feelings of melancholy once you arrive.”
Twelve months later, I asked him to do the same thing with Primordial Reverie Ascendant.
After thinking for a moment, Ryan delivered perhaps the perfect summary of everything we’d just spent the interview discussing:
“Don’t always follow your dreams.”
And really, I don’t think I could wrap up the strange, beautiful and increasingly expansive universe of Cepheidae Variable any better than that.
Primordial Reverie Ascendant arrives January 8, 2027.
Keep it heavy, legends.
2025 Written Interview
Cepheidae Variable – A Journey Beyond the Stars: Ryan Koepke on Primordial Reverie
CEPHEIDAE VARIABLE Is:
Ryan Koepke – Guitar/Bass
Chad Bernatchez – Vocals/Lyrics
Connect With CEPHEIDAE VARIABLE:
Official Website: https://cepheidaevariable.com
Bandcamp: https://cepheidaevariable.bandcamp.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cepheidaevariable
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cepheidaevariable_official
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CepheidaeVariable
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0DFZHr1N4hUKjmV1mccmdV
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/cepheidae-variable/1835047629
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cepheidaevariable
