SpaceShip : Continuum
This is a companion (or sequel) to the similarly named SpaceShip album. The theme is essentially the same, of a group of people hopping on a spaceship to move to a new life on a new world. Where the first album was simple and hopeful, this one has some darker elements to balance all that hope. I guess time does that to a person.
Writing & Track Notes
I probably should have been doing other things but after Pixel Deep I feel like I was on a roll. I had some changes around the house and for a few days had my studio in the lounge which meant I had the same speakers as the TV which included a Sub. It felt very different writing that way. Odd but different. Out of that came the deliberately bass-heavy “Moving With Courage”. The track had no name at the time and no sense of purpose. I expected to toss it away, or maybe use as a bonus track.
I moved the studio back to where it was and accrued a couple more seemingly purposeless tracks. Till the theme found me. The TV I inherited for the lounge turned out to be a plasma screen and they need screen savers or they start to burn-in after as little as 15 mins! I found two I like, one with a very detailed fish tank and the other a space journey. The space journey seemed more robust so it won. One evening whilst listening to the random tracks I had I let the screen saver run and there was my theme, complete with knowing that this was part two of what I did before. As life would have it the original album was almost exactly 10 years ago. The screensaver* is what you see in the video.
- Virgo 12 Pt 3 – Virgo 12 is a theme I have returned to a few times. I didn’t expect to be back there. This time it is no longer such a lovely place. Human occupation has taken it’s toll and life has become the same mechanized process that the original settlers wanted to leave a few hundred years ago. The idealistic few develop the desire to leave.
- Time To Leave – Rising up out of the industrialized world and into the freedom of space to begin a new life. This track tried to carry all the hope of the first album, as well as that signature brass sound. We are however quietly reminded that the spaceship itself is the process of industry.
- Moving With Courage – Pure traveling music. Yes it is bass heavy, composing with a sub for the first time will do that to you LOL Toward the end the motifs of Trance music (albeit slowed down) and freeform melody are compared.
- Passions – From borrowing modern dance music to borrowing an older form – Hi-NRG or EuroDisco. This was one of the tracks to predate the album concept and I expected no future for it. That is til I listened to the first SpaceShip album and found the similarly bouncy track “Inflight Entertainment”. A friend said he liked the bouncy pieces so doubly in.
- Distance is Time – Faster than light (or warp) drives and the like are very unlikely. Cryogenic sleep is more likely. Space is so huge that travels like this will require far greater commitment than a boat trip from Europe to America did in the 1800s.
- A Few Steps Across Infinity – No matter how far we venture from home, we can only ever take a few steps from our home in one lifetime.
- Sleepbook – I needed a small slightly uptempo track after all that spaciness. This came from the revised Solaris synth I was working on. The idea is that something like Facebook could develop a feature that allows users to still be online even though in cryogenic sleep. Kinda sweet & reassuring and kinda scary.
- Seen Many Earths – This is a big nod to the album “Seen One Earth” by Pete Bardens. The track “In Dreams” was on pretty heavy rotation on the FM radio station I could just receive as a kid in the country. Turns out they made the track a hit.
- Another New World – I have to admit some sense of sense of images from Avatar mixed in with ideas from the Otherworld Sky album. The wonder of finding a new world with all that natural beauty. The ending subtly reminds us about what happened to the last lovely worlds.
- Museum of Travels – Starts with a figure played on a fife sample, which is then echoed by a synth sound that has a lot of complex elements. The grand brass element is back too, but lacking in some of that forward-looking hope. The means of the journey and those before are put away. Something from the past, not to be needed again.
- The Mayflower Gene – Until, of course, the need to start again arises in the next generation of wanderers and dreamers.
To purchase the audio album:
*Cosmic Voyage Screensaver link:
https://www.screensaversplanet.com/screensavers/cosmic-voyage-604/