Music for the stars

I have associated a certain type of music with visions of space and other planets since I was a child. This is what led to me creating my own instrumental electronic music, despite having little in the way of formal training.

An artist at heart, when I first started experimenting with music a decade ago, I soon realised that for me, it was the same as painting – only using sounds instead of colours. But as a synesthete, for me, the sounds I use do have colours and textures. Of course, a degree of technical knowledge is required, as well as a basic musical understanding, but to me, making music feels very much like the same creative process, only with a different medium and result.

In 2012 when I was invited to become first Honorary Musician for the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is), I jumped to the opportunity to be a part of an exciting new organisation with such a passionate and ambitious vision. To be able to promote such a forward thinking vision through my music was the ideal project brief.

To date, I have released four albums in support of i4is:

Future Worlds / Future Worlds Redux

An album based around different visions of the future, from utopias to dystopias, deep space travel and a climate-changed Earth. This was very much an album inspired by classic SF writing such as Arthur C. Clarke, etc. I revisited the album creating the Redux version that was entirely symphonic.

Beyond the Boundary

This album was designed to tie-in with the Initiative’s book of the same name (to which I also contributed a chapter). I have always wanted to make a space travel concept album, and this is it; starting with the mission launch and culminating in a journey into the unknown.

Panorama

If Beyond the Boundary was the journey, then this is the destination. Panorama is music for cinematic vistas and the exploration of alien landscapes. The subtle concept at the core of the album was the discovery of an Earth-like planet.

But how do you make “space music”?

The kind of music that evokes visions of space for me, may not do so for everyone. If you’re not keen on electronic music, then my stuff maybe isn’t for you. But if you’re keen to put styles and genres aside, then the music – being instrumental – should be totally open to interpretation. Granted, I present the albums with an initial concept, but once it is out there, the listener can take it as they wish. 

I’ve always been inspired by space art – hence becoming an artist myself. The work of artists such as David A. Hardy, John Berkey, John Harris, Chris Moore, Chris Foss and Tim White are some of my favourites. Their work takes you to places… the kind of pieces that make you want to step inside the frame and explore. This particular generation of artists have produced incredibly prophetic and visionary pieces, which still resonate and inspire today, and I always look to this work for inspiration – musically and artistically.

And I’m sure my version of synaesthesia helps me decide what sounds to choose; what colours they evoke in my mind, as I’m building up my soundscapes. And in the case of the albums I have produced for i4is, then I’ll look to their own mission statement.

I try to imagine the sights you might see on such a mission and the range of emotions experienced at gazing upon something you’ve never seen or even been able to conceive seeing before. This kind of feeling was particularly well presented in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar – that moment when we first lay eyes on the black hole Gargantua.

Another inspiration is how we’ve recently been able to see the surfaces of Mars and Pluto in vivid detail like never before. This sort of thing leads to me exploring various sounds and atmospheres, and seeing what seems to match whatever I’m looking at. It feels very much like creating a soundtrack in that respect.

But it also needs to play like an album of music to be enjoyed, concept aside. So the real challenge is trying to make something that is heavily atmospheric and thought provoking, at the same time as having some sort of musical integrity. And in the case of the above albums, they need to be worthy of their particular audience’s attention.

So with each album comes a new challenge, and also during each project, new things are learned and discovered. With every album I’ve produced, there’s always a sense of progression, whether musically or technically. So with that thought in mind, I very much look forward to starting work on the next album of interstellar music for i4is…

All of the albums mentioned in this blog (and many more) can be streamed and purchased (in digital format) from my Bandcamp site.

Into the dark...

My album Dark Corners was published via Bandcamp today.

As mentioned in my previous blog entry, the music on Dark Corners is made up of tracks that were originally written for other albums. So in my mind, before it had a title, this was a collection of ‘homeless’ songs. Tracks that didn’t fit in their parent albums, but ones that still had potential and which I felt deserved to be part of my discography.

Dark Corners comprises tracks that originated while I was working on Traces, Sentient City, Panorama and Timeshift, plus a couple of other recent demos. And I wanted it to be very much a “demos” type album, presenting the songs in a slightly more raw state. Not only to allow a slight insight in to my working process but because even in this unpolished state, I felt these tracks all had a certain something, that could easily be lost through overworking them.

But what I hadn’t expected was a common new theme emerging.

When discussing the album with my friend Richard Hayes (whose ears have been subjected to my recent music in all of its states of creation), we’d soon agreed that the music on this album had a darker, more psychological, perhaps ghostly or supernatural mood to it. This was reaffirmed in the sleevenotes Richard later wrote for the album:

“The dark places of the physical world around us may conceal the strange and the menacing.  But much more so do the immaterial and limitless depths of our own minds.”

The music shifts regularly between the contrasting moods of light and dark. Unpredictable, and a refreshing change from the science fiction aspect that drives much of my work, even if some of the music here grew out of science fiction origins.

In-keeping with the more gothic nature of some of the music, for the artwork, I decided to finally make good use of a photo shoot from a couple of years ago with photographer Dave Yeaman taken in Sheffield General Cemetery – a fascinating place dating back to the 1800s, and disused since the 1970s. This was an ideal opportunity to use this kind of imagery.

I usually like to plan out an album – come up with a concept, a title and settle on a general sound palette. Dark Corners seemed to plan itself.

Dark Corners is available now on Bandcamp.

New album: TIMESHIFT

Time flows around us.  It swirls and eddies through our lives, changing our view of what is happening around us every moment, of our memories of the past, and of our hopes for the future.  Nothing stays the same – there is perpetual movement and we may feel helpless in the midst of its flow.

This is an excerpt from the wonderful introduction written by Richard Hayes, for my new instrumental album, Timeshift.

When making an album I nearly always begin with a concept and a title, and work backwards from that. With Timeshift, this was not the case. I had started off composing some new music for the simple pleasure of making music, and from that, other tracks emerged. Soon I was on a roll. But there was no theme, at least back then. And there certainly wasn't an album title.

Themes gradually began to emerge as I produced more music, and one recurring mood was that of night. The images of rainy city streets, illuminated architecture and the way familiar scenes are transformed by the setting of the sun and the onset of night.

This is also the time when we dream, and our minds take us on unanticipated adventures as we visit worlds that we can only see through the medium of sleep. I've always found it fascinating how you can have a dream which lasts for hours or even days – complete with nights in between – yet you've actually had that dream in a matter of minutes.

In my mind, the moods and atmospheres of the music I was making reflected this, but also as the basis for a very Earth-based album, which looks at the passing of time and the general uncertainties you face in life. I've spent a lot of time making music with a space or science fiction concept, so at least for me, it was refreshing to make music that in my ears, felt at home when you're simply walking around town.

At the same time, instrumental music is not unlike an abstract painting, in that the music is open to interpretation, and you can make of it what you want.

As a synesthete, the colour of the music is ever at the forefront of my imagination, and this is often reflected in the album artwork. When making the album, I was seeing a lot of blacks and greens, with occasional shimmering gold. The album artwork came together very quickly – sometimes this is a lengthy process, and hard to get right. Other times, you get it right first time, which was the case here! Once the artwork was in place, I knew it would decide what it wanted to be called soon after. Within the last couple of weeks of mixing the album, the title Timeshift came about.

Now, it's over to you...

Timeshift is available via Bandcamp, priced £7. 
The full album download comes with a PDF booklet.

Cover creation - Forbidden Alliance

The cover art for Katrina Mountfort's début novel, Future Perfect had already caught my eye, being my sort of thing – so when the email came through from Elsewhen Press asking me if I'd be interested in illustrating the cover to Forbidden Alliance, the second book in Mountfort's Blueprint trilogy, I said 'yes' before I'd even finished reading the email.

Anybody who has read Future Perfect will be familiar with this particular vision of the future, where a highly regulated society with a culture based on external appearances, are made to live inside huge Citidomes, following a bio-terrorist attack. There's a clear nod towards Logan's Run in the storyline, which evolves around the discovery of the world beyond the confines of the Citidomes and what kind of people have chosen to remain in the outside world.

Elsewhen Press' own artwork for Future Perfect focused on the divide between life inside and outside of the Citidomes. So having established a variety of environments in the first book, the challenge for the cover of Forbidden Alliance was to expand upon this and somehow incorporate elements of the different environments, from a prison camp to a rural village, the Citidome and a narrowboat on a river.

This artwork also had to be in mono to match that of the first book, so another challenge for me was how to approach the scene without having my usual vibrant colour palette to fall back on.

So I worked up several rough concept sketches, trying out different perspectives and angles, but I found that trying to incorporate all the elements was just too much for a cover – yet they were all vital things to include, so what do you do?

Then it came to me – why not create the scene as viewed from within a prison camp? The simple inclusion of the barbed wire told the viewer everything they needed to know about the viewpoint of the scene, without trying to squeeze in security fences and prison buildings.

As for the other background elements... part of the first book was set in a village in rural Derbyshire called Ashford-in-the-Water, which happens to be a place I know well and have even photographed. So I had my own photos to hand for reference, and the church being the tallest building in the village (also featuring in the book), it was the obvious choice.

I've always had a fascination with the idea of a city encased under a glass dome – ever since watching the BBC's wonderful adaptation of The Tripods in the 1980s. I guess you could call that a benchmark, along with Arthur C. Clarke's Diaspar in The City and the Stars. This is therefore a concept I have previously explored in my work – most recently with Last City, inspired by Clarke's novel, and an earlier piece of retro-futurism, Escape.

However for this cover, the Citidome didn't want to completely dominate the cover, yet it does dominate the landscape. So I was faced with the additional challenge of getting that balance of elements just right.

There is no clear divide as there was on the Future Perfect cover, but the river and the narrowboat instead provide a central focal point for the scene.

Here is the final digital draft, before I started work on the actual artwork.

This was the first time I've read a story which has been partly set in a place I know, so it became all the more real. Having been immersed in Katrina's world with a knowledge of the real location, the process for the creation of this cover felt very natural and comfortable.

And here is the final cover art:

And here is all of the above - in one minute!

Panoramic music

This week saw the release of Panorama, my fourth album of instrumental music in support of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (I4IS). 

While open to interpretation to a degree, my basic idea when composing Panorama, was 'music for a new world'. I was starting to imagine what kind of alien vistas that may stretch out before us, as we take our first steps on a newly discovered hospitable planet. The concept of my previous album for the Initiative, Beyond the Boundary, was space flight and a journey, so to follow that up with the discovery and exploration of a new world – the destination – seemed like a logical step. 

Work on this album actually began in April 2013, not long after I'd released Traces. However, despite working up several demos, I hit a block early on, and it would take a long time - many months - before an album of any form was starting to take shape. 

The first piece of music I made was actually the opening track, Touchdown. This seemed perfect right from the start, as a transitionary track between the interstellar flight of Beyond the Boundary, and the uncharted territory of Panorama. The final mix of the track is almost all the original demo - it is slightly raw and untamed in places, but for me it just worked like that, and over working the track would have risked losing that initial feeling.

Hear Touchdown on Soundcloud.

The title Panorama came quite early on, too. This was music for landscapes and huge vistas. Widescreen images in the mind's eye. And once that title was in place, the music and ideas began to flow, clearing the creative block I'd experienced at the start of the project.

Hear Panorama on Soundcloud.

One of my early plans was to make an album with no drums or percussion at all. This is something I've dabbled with in the past, and really wanted try. But it didn't turn out that way, so maybe the drum-free album will be a future project! However, Panorama does have several sparse, minimal pieces true to my drum-free idea, one of which is Aurora - perhaps one of the most evocative and atmospheric tracks on the album. At some point I was even considering this one for the title track. Aurora was another track from the early stages of the project, which just came out perfectly in one take. 

The main challenge throughout the process was how to make music for a world that I cannot see or visit, but can only imagine?

I spent time looking at the Mars Rover's photographs of the planet surface, my favourite space and SF art, and of course, films, gleaming inspiration from things like the water world and ice planets in Interstellar and even the dream-like sequence at the end of Contact. The list goes on!

But the music also needed a sense of mystery to accompany the notion of exploration and discovery, and those ideas started to flow once I created the middle section of what became Crystal Cavern. Until then, it was just a demo track of the first couple of minutes, lacking direction. And it turned into one of my favourite tracks on the album, also reminding me of the kind of approach I took with my first album, Into the Light, in 2007. 

I'll be the first to admit that Panorama was a difficult album to get right. I even took a break from it for a few months while I made Future Worlds Redux and Sentient City! But giving it some time and distance, was just what it needed, as when I returned to it, all the pieces suddenly fitted together. Once I had made the title track, the rest of the ideas all emerged.

The final album comprises 15 tracks, plus a short bonus track when you purchase the full download. Rise was a piece of music I composed for the I4IS after their involvement in the Shackleton 2 helium balloon project, which saw a probe boasting the I4IS logo travel to 90,000 feet into the Earth's stratosphere, then take a selfie! So while not directly related to the theme of the album, it felt appropriate that Rise should feature in an album supporting the Initiative.

Panorama is available now via Bandcamp.

For the love of books

I’ve been drawn into a book on the strength of its cover so many times – so it’s always a pleasure to have the opportunity to work with an author or publisher, to be able to turn their words into pictures and visualise their worlds for the cover art.

But that comes with a degree of pressure and expectation. There’s the artist’s inner struggle to enjoy artistic license but also (and primarily) to fulfil the brief and correctly interpret what’s in the author’s mind (and indeed the pages of the book). The recipe for success is – unsurprisingly – achieving a balance between the two. After all, we want a happy author and a great cover.

Some projects require a very specific scene or illustration indicative of the finer details of the book on the cover; others may warrant a more abstract approach or a scene that while not actually in the book, is still an accurate representative of the story.

Every artist has their style, and if you’re asked to do somebody’s cover, it’s usually because they like your style, and believe it is right for their book and audience. This simple fact in itself should quash any moments of self-doubt which crop up along the way (and we all have them!).

In many ways, being asked to provide a cover is to be invited on part of the author’s very personal journey of the creation of their book – and hopefully attributing to its success. However, for me it goes beyond being just a job – it’s for a love of books, a huge respect for the author and their creative work, and the simple prospect of creating something tangible. As an avid reader myself, being able to contribute to something that goes on to have a life of its own and reach people all over the world is quite simply, a real privilege.

Sentient City – blog 2

The city – past, present and future – is an endless source of fascination for writers, artists and musicians alike.

It is a theme I’ve touched on in my music before. Back in 2006/7 I made a series of rough demos entitled Metropolis. Anybody who has followed my music for any length of time might remember these, as they were online briefly back then. In fairness, the ideas may have been there, but the music wasn’t! Although I did eventually include revamped versions of two of the better tracks on my After Hours compilation of early material. Maybe back then I wasn't ready to take on the subject. This time, I was ready to get lost in the crowd.

That said, I had no plans to make another album last year, but an interesting discussion with my friend Richard Hayes led to me thinking about how I would interpret the city theme today, but in a way that also left it open to interpretation and exploration. This was followed by some brainstorming, and from that emerged a series of intriguing titles as potential song starting points.

I had established a particular soundscape with last year's Traces album that I liked a lot and wanted to build on. In particular, one of the outtakes, Terrified, had started to take things in a slightly different, heavier direction which appealed to me and this became the starting point for the Sentient City soundscape.

The city is a world in itself. 

And as a creative theme, it brings together a crossover between a reality with which we can all relate, with fiction. While making the music, I’d often find myself thinking about the cinematic cityscapes depicted in films such as Dark City, The Fifth Element and Blade Runner or the literary urban underworlds of Haruki Murakami's books – but also of my own daily commute and observations of city life and the passing gleam of buildings old and new, and the way I’ve watched a skyline evolve and regenerate over time.

Its inevitable that we feel connected to our cities; the places we go, favourite spots, the bits we dislike, and a love/hate relationship with the transformations that occur. 

The city often feels like a living thing. 

Sentient…

Sentient City is available now via Bandcamp.

Sentient City - blog 1

Cities are layered things. 

Look around. There’s always the fascinating notion of peeling back the layers of modernity to uncover what lies beneath. Like when you see a shop being renovated – the current façade or signage comes off, uncovering the remnants of what was there before; a vague outline of vintage typography or peeling paintwork. A little souvenir of the past, given one last brief airing, before being lost again.

There’s also the way that different parts of a city attract different cultures and walks of life. There are the documented histories in local archives and reproduced maps of how things used to be in times gone by. You’re treading on history as you walk through a city whether you like it or not. Layers of history, yet always the present.

Sometimes all you need to do is look up.

Look past the shiny contemporary frontages of the high street and more often than not, you’re met with upper levels in the architectural style of yesteryear. Some cities cling on to their heritage, others favour the new. And many are a hybrid of the two. 

Films and books set in future times often depict cities we know as unrecognisable places from the past. Chrome and glass gradually transform the cityscape; it grows, changes, evolves. It towers over you and becomes unrecognisable. But follow your protagonist down the back streets or underground and you’ll nearly always find a different side. Another face to the city.

When the title of Sentient City came about, that really defined the mood of the album. I wanted something upbeat and dynamic, that captures the energy and bustle of the city – but something that also thought provoking, dark and atmospheric that poses questions.  

Which city? And when? 

And that’s where it’s over to the listener.

Sentient City is available now via Bandcamp.