This composition, The Wild Truth, is for the innovative digital musical instrument (DMI) known as the karlax, which was built by French digital lutherie experts Rémi Dury and Bernard Garabedian, around the mid-2000s. The music is, in fact, a quintet for karlax and saxophone quartet and was especially composed for the virtuosic, Montreal-based Quasar. The composer, D. Andrew Stewart, positions himself as the karlax instrumentalist – one of the few Ax experts in the world. Like most DMIs, the karlax comes with no standard sounds and importantly, no standard method of playing. How do you play a karlax and what does it sound like?

For nearly a decade, Stewart has developed a canon, or vocabulary, of gestural playing techniques; however, the sounds for each new karlax piece are unique! In The Wild Truth, Stewart predominantly uses wavetable synthesis, generating sounds with over eighteen different short (approx. 11.61 msec.) waveforms, organised harmonically (i.e., producing a fundamental frequency with related overtones). Each distinct sound requires 12 simultaneous sound layers in order to create a harmonic spectrum. The composition also requires  thirty-two samples of varying lengths, from piano strings played with chains and hammers to the foot stomps of Zulu traditional dancers, from Speak & Math (1980s Texas Instrument toy) to the rattling of a metal tin of Altoids (Wrigley's flavoured breath mints), and more.

For the composer (Stewart), the music is a chance to explore feelings associated with our present-day post-truth environment. Post-truth is characterised as a deliberate effort to subordinate facts to political preferences, aiming to erode the relevance of objective reality (McIntryre, 2018). Through traditional lying, political spin, and wilful ignorance, we may arrive at the post-truth. Stewart considers that the "wild truth" may be characterised as what we choose to know, and at the same time, what we choose not to know. The methods of "this choosing" is the subject of the composition; for instance, concerning methods, Stewart asks, "Can you set your digital phone aside for one hour, one day, or even one week and instead, place yourself in a quiet space, alone, and take a long, hard look in the mirror?"