Back To The Neighborhood is one of my Space Music about space records. It has resonances with albums like “Missions – Journeys In Our Solar System“, “Fallen Leaves“, or everyone’s least favorite record eva, “Run From The Sun“.
The track ideas were taken straight from NASA’s news items. They are simple pieces with an open and cheery feel. I’m not looking to prove anything but my love for Music & Nature; two sides of the same coin.
Tracks:
- A Martian Morning – a Mars rover’s time-lapse images of a Martian day.
- Back To The Neighborhood – coming back to the idea of our home system.
- Ice-Cold Earth – there is a planet out there, a bit like ours, only frozen over.
- Run Past The Sun – Parker Probe closes with the sun, and 31 Atlas passes by.
- Spacer – we seem to have stopped sending people into our neighborhood. I get it is expensive, but what if the opportunity cost is even more expensive?
- Dust In The Solar Wind – telescopes are bringing in images of forming systems.
- Pondering Pandora – a new satellite that looks at exoplanets. We just hope they aren’t looking back. “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”. Watch out, their lasers are bigger than yours.
- Heliopause – the Voyager probes crossed the boundary at the edge of our solar system and found we really do live in a bubble.
Spacer
I want to be a spaceman
Floating in the future all day
Waiting for the aliens
Coming to my weightless can.
No one wants a spaceman
To be too far away
They fear one so far ahead
May no longer answer to Man
Synth Spotters
As usual, all composing, sound design, and mixing was done in Reason Studios Reason 13. During this time Reason was sold off to LANDR an AI Mastering company with fingers in a few other pies. Too early to tell what that brings but I bet it will herald the software filling with AI garbage and lures to use loopz and other AI garbage. We can live in hope that does not happen.
As is my way drums were made in the mix and this time my ADS-8 did a lot of the drumming. I really like how it sounds, and honestly, it is really fast to program once I remember what the knobs do. Best drum synth eva!
A lot of Echo duties were handled by my 4-Lines Later plugin, which suddenly let me do things I had wanted to do for a long time but were a bit of a pain to set up.
The saxamaphone in “Ice-Cold Earth” came from the synth-voice cover I did of Ronnie Milsap’s “Lost In The Fifties Tonight” over Christmas break. It was actually a rather accidental sound in the Milsap song but I knew the same approach would work here. It is not the same sound as I built a new one, still it is close and oddly saxual.
During this time, my partner left. Came home from work one day and said she was off – no discussion. I felt it was coming; it’s there in some of the recent albums, but it is still a shock, shock to the system. Two weeks later, my apartment was mine alone again, naturally*.
Before Ronnie Milsap, I did a synth-voicing of a Foreigner song as an advert for a synth I built. I think it came out friggin’ brilliantly. Again ADS-8 for drums and 4-Lines Later as well as lashings of 6th Dimension which is stupid-huuuge.
Cover artwork is courtesy of NASA and their article on the Ice-Cold Earth.
*and I have spent a week picking small-child’s snot off her walls. Girls are not made of all things nice at all.
Benedict Roff-Marsh 