2014 so far...

We’re already in February which means I’m already a year older. Where does the time go?!

In terms of my own projects, I’ve spent a lot of time so far this year finishing off the TRACES album. Stay tuned for a release date very soon, both on digital download and CD.

In addition to being a very personal project, this album also feels like my strongest work to date and in many ways, the album I’ve been working towards for a long time. Fingers crossed any regular listeners to my music will agree!

I’m still undecided about LonCon3, but I have to admit, I’m unlikely to be going for a number of reasons that I won’t bore you with here! I will however be going to Novacon 44, and I’ll be on the lookout for any other exhibiting opportunities throughout the year. This leads me on to artwork – despite all my best intentions over the Christmas period, I spent all my time working on Traces, so I’m looking forward to working on some long overdue new artwork very soon!

It's also high time I started sending new portfolio samples off to publishers. Above all I'd love to see one of my paintings feature on a book cover.

Meanwhile, momentum continues to grow with the Institute for Interstellar Studies, fas they prepare to launch a new website very soon.

Books. Lovely, printed, real proper books! I’ve recently read THE EXTREMES by Christopher Priest – as with all Priest’s work, this was an absolutely brilliant and gripping read. Unsettling, disturbing and unpredictable. I also read Graham Joyce’s THE SILENT LAND, which was a moving and haunting read. As I write this, I’m in the early stages of reading Orwell’s 1984, which despite being a big fan of Michael Radford’s film version with John Hurt and Richard Burton, I’d never actually read the thing!

Finally, Luke A Smith has given my last album, BEYOND THE BOUNDARY a very nice review, over on his blog. I had a good chat with Luke at last year’s Novacon and was genuinely thrilled when he won several of my pieces of artwork at the auction.

http://lukeasmith212.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/beyond-boundry.html

Following the traces

Although I usually work pretty quickly, my current musical project, Traces, has had the longest gestation time of any album I have made to date. I think it’s around 8 months at the moment, and in that time, the album has evolved at least three times. Each time for the better. With it’s final progression, even though it’s a long way from the original idea I started out with, I do think I’ve made my best album to date.

Having previously produced three space/science fiction themed albums, I did feel it was time to break away from the space thing for a while. Originally I wanted to make a more abstract album, completely open to interpretation. Which as a listener is fine, but when you’ve got to produce it? I felt a bit stuck without a loose concept to base the music on.

And this came from the title track – imagining the invisible traces we leave behind with the things we do and places we go. The music started off as quite downbeat and reflective. This led me to think about memories and dreams, a subject that has long fascinated me. The notion of having another life in our dream world; subconscious alternative realities. 

I really love the dream-like atmospheres and parallel lives in Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s acclaimed work, and I also recently read various works by Christopher Priest which deal with this kind of subject so brilliantly (The Dream Archipelago) and vividly – disturbingly so at times (The Glamour), but engrossing reading all the same. One particular book I tracked down was Graham Joyce’s debut, Dreamside, which takes the concept of lucid group dreaming to the extreme. I’ve found that books more than films influence my music these days, and these have been some of the best books I’ve ever read. I’d like to think the music will do the work of these authors justice, even if they're not directly related to them.

So while Traces is coming soon, though I don’t want to give too much away just yet – but here’s the title track and a vintage style video:

Time to reflect...

So we're nearing the end of another year. I don't know about you, but 2013 seems to have flown by in a flash. I thought I'd take a self-indulgent moment to look back on what the last year brought to the world of The Light Dreams.

In February I released Future Worlds, the culmination of several months hard work and a lifetime's interest in science fiction. I learned a lot during the making of that album, and I'm incredibly proud of it. My artwork and music converged for this release, with one of my favourite paintings, "The World Outside" being used as the album cover (the painting actually illustrates the song on the album of the same name). This was also the first new music I had produced as honorary musician for the Institute for Interstellar Studies (I4IS), so it was a privilege to also promote them with the album. Future Worlds was also my first work to be available on the big platforms such as Amazon and iTunes.

Following the release of Future Worlds, I decided to take stock and look at my back catalogue of demo albums dating back to 2006 – stuff which had been online around the time I was working on them, but that I had taken down around 2009. From these demo albums, I pulled together a new compilation, After Hours, of what I felt were the strongest pieces.

I started working on new music around June, and decided to work on 2 different albums simultaneously. One would be an EP of space music for the I4IS, the other would be a more electronic, dream-inspired album called Traces, a title which had been in my head for a while. Working on 2 music projects meant that when the ideas temporarily dried up for one, I could bounce back to the other, and inevitably this would lead to new ideas on the other album!

I was also invited by the I4IS to contribute a chapter to their forthcoming book, Beyond the Boundary. My chapter looked at the association of space and interstellar travel and popular music culture in the twentieth century. This gave me a perfect opportunity to write about my specialised subjects of the careers of Jean Michel Jarre, David Bowie and Mike Oldfield, artists whose music continues to inspire me to this day, and artists whose work is synonymous with space travel.

This also led to me naming my space EP after the book, as a sort of tie-in. However, as work progressed, Beyond the Boundary EP soon evolved into Beyond the Boundady – the album! The ideas kept coming, so why stop them?!

In the autumn, I started working on some artwork again – this year, I'd only produced one original piece, albeit, it was probably one of my best! But this time I looked back at several earlier works that I never felt were quite finished, and enough time had elapsed for me to see exactly what was required. So by October, I had several refreshed digital paintings I was very pleased with, and all ready in time for the Novacon convention.

Novacon took place in early November, and although it was only my second appearance there as an exhibiting artist, I loved it. I'm already looking forward to next years. It was an absolute honour once again to exhibit alongside my good friend and renowned space artist David A. Hardy, and it was great to talk to the people visiting the art room. I'll admit, I'm not the best when it comes to spontaneous social interaction, but at Novacon, you can literally talk to anyone about anything! What's more, my work did very well in the auction, which I hadn't expected. This was not only very rewarding personally, but a huge confidence boost.

My artwork and music converged yet again at Novacon, as several of my albums were playing in the art room, and the newly-completed Beyond the Boundary had its first public airing.

I released Beyond the Boundary on Bandcamp at the start of December, its real aim to help raise the profile of the I4IS. I'm working hard on the Traces album and also have ideas for new artwork. So although the year is almost over, my work here is almost certainly not done! I have a good feeling about 2014…

Turrican - the music!

Anybody of a certain age will remember the Commodore Amiga computer with a certain fondness. In the late 80s and early 90s, it was head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, and the home computer to have. It offered sound - in stereo. And hundreds of colours. You could even upgrade the RAM to a whopping megabyte!

But thanks to the Amiga's superior graphics and audio capabilities, with it came a plethora of outstanding games. As a teenager of the early 90s, I spent many days huddled in the corner of the lounge, plugged into my Amiga, whether it was my early forays into digital art and music production, or hours spent gaming.

Out of all the hundreds of amazing games, one clear favourite would emerge for me, and that was the action-packed platform adventure, Turrican, originally published by Rainbow Arts in 1990. My friend Tony had gone on about this Turrican game for ages, and when my 13th Birthday came, along with it, came Turrican, in his chunky silver robo-armour.

Not only did the game take you through another word on an exciting and explosive journey, but it had the best computer game music I had ever heard - composed by the mysterious Chris Hüelsbeck (in the following years, Hüelsbeck's fantastic music would accompany many a great classic game). Over time I became as addicted to the music in the game, as I did the game itself - to the point where I'd stick a tape recorder in front of the TV speaker and record the music to listen to, when I wasn't lost in the world of Turrican.

In 1992 and 1993, we had two more Turrican games, both with fantastic music, but it was always the original game's soundtrack that both stuck with me and would ultimately inspire my own music.

While the Amiga is (very sadly) long gone, Turrican has lived on through various games and of course, its fans, whom like myself, have maintained a certain adoration of Hüelsbeck's music. Therefore it came as a pleasant surprise in 2012 when, due to popular demand, Chris Hüelsbeck announced a Kickstarter campaign with the plan of re-recording all the Turrican music into one big anthology.

The campaign was a huge success, and as a result, we now have a lot of very happy Turrican fans, myself included! The anthology has its own website, and each volume of the anthology is now available on Bandcamp as a digital download.

Not only do we have fantastic and faithfully recreated artwork, but we have all the music, bigger and better than ever and still sounding as fresh and exciting as when I first heard it 23 years ago.  I've spent the last couple of weeks reliving memories of being lost in the Turrican worlds for hours on end. The soundtrack to every level, the end-of-level boss musics, game loader tunes, the intro and outtro - they're all here, and more. And it's brilliant.

The Turrican games boasted a level of creativity and perfect playability that most other platform games could only dream of, but I'm sure that the soundtrack was integral to the game's success. It certainly wouldn't have been quite the same without it. Chris Hüelsbeck first issued a selection of updated recordings of the music on CD in the mid-90s – while finding video game soundtracks on CD is fairly commonplace nowadays, back then it was almost unheard of, which says something about the demand for both his work and this game. So it's really fantastic that all this time later, we can enjoy the music all over again.

I dare say you do need to be a fan of the game to appreciate this kind of music, but for us fans, it holds a very special place indeed. Great job, Chris!

BEYOND THE BOUNDARY: track by track

The mission of the Institute for Interstellar Studies is to foster and promote education, knowledge and technical capabilities which lead to designs, technologies or enterprise that will enable the construction and launch of interstellar spacecraft.
We aspire towards an optimistic future for humans on Earth and in space. Our bold vision is to be an organisation that is central to catalysing the conditions in society over the next century to enable robotic and human exploration of the frontier beyond our Solar System and to other stars, as part of a long-term enduring strategy and towards a sustainable space-based economy.

…these are, in brief, the mission and values of the Institute for Interstellar Studies. As their honorary musician, I really had to think about how to translate this vision into music. Not only into a suite of songs that reflect this ethos and ambition, but as a solid album of interesting and exciting music. When the I4IS announced their forthcoming book, Beyond the Boundary, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to connect the dots and make an interstellar album that would promote both the institute, their thinkers, visionaries and artists and the book.

Beyond the Boundary (the album) was released last week on Bandcamp. Here’s some of my thinking behind the songs…

The Stars Await

This track is based on one of my earliest demos, a track called “Birthline” originally from my first ever attempt at space music, in 2006. I always felt there was potential in this piece and it was a case of finding the right opportunity – and this was it! But while the original demo built into a longer, rhythm-based song, this version serves more like an intro to the whole album, keeping only the first part of that original demo, now completely reworked. An interstellar atmosphere of resonating choral vocals gradually build up while we hear distant communications from astronauts, culminating in an exchange between Mercury Hub and starship Prometheus, beginning its interstellar voyage.

Beyond the Bounday (Part One)

For the title track, I wanted driving beats, catchy riffs and a real sense of dynamism and excitement. The fusion of symphonic and orchestral styles continue the soundscape I established on Future Worlds, but this track really shifts things up a gear. I wanted to create an anthem to the stars, full of optimism and adventure. The choral vocals reprise towards the end of the track and I also introduced some electric guitar sounds which would continue throughout the rest of the album.

Halo Orbit

In contrast to the previous track, "Halo Orbit" is an ambient yet cinematic piece; dark, cold and haunting. I wanted it to sound as blinding as starlight and as vast as space. 

Stasis

This track was the first to be composed for the album, and makes heavy use of Korg’s classic M1 and Wavestation synthesisers, the big, warm tones of which lend themselves perfectly to a science fiction soundtrack. "Stasis" is the album’s most chilled-out piece, a steady, flowing piece to take you on your interstellar journey. I wanted the music to reflect the colours of space, and the ever-changing sights of galaxies and nebulae.

Afterglow

"Afterglow" picks up on the subtle hook in the end of "Stasis", taking us once again into new territory. The origins of this track actually came about in 2012, when I worked on a long demo of evolving styles, entitled Chrysalis. This was more like a musical sketchpad or dumping ground for ideas – from that emerged “To the Stars” (on Future Worlds) and "Afterglow".

Beyond the Bounday (Part Two)

My favourite track on the album, and actually one of the last to be written. Until this point, the album was going to be an EP, but once this track was coming together, it was clear that a full album was in the works! There is a slight prog rock feel to this epic track, as it goes through 3 stylistic evolutions, gradually building up to a dramatic, thunderous finalé. Again, I wanted to create something powerful and anthemic to compliment "Beyond the Boundary (Part One)". I think there’s some of my best work to date in this track – very proud of it.

The Crossing

A heartbeat percussion leads into this groove-driven chillout track. This was the final song to be composed and was really designed to be a short transitionary piece between the previous and final tracks. After a mellow start, this song takes an unexpected turn towards the end, adding a feel of drama and uncertainty before heading off into the unknown territory of the closing song.

Into the Unknown

A dark and menacing close to the album. While overall, I wanted to create a suite of tracks that reflect man’s interstellar goals and starbound ambitions, ultimately, we don’t know what’s out there – and I wanted to bring back a sense of tense uncertainty, as we enter unchartered territory. I had also been working on a painting showing a starship heading towards a black hole (as featured in the digital booklet which accompanies the full album download) – it seemed fitting to leave the album with questions left unanswered. Although I wanted to close the album with a sense of mystery, I did want an upbeat ending, so this track (which clocks in at over eight minutes) does accelerate into an energetic crescendo, as we cross beyond the boundary and into the unknown.

Going beyond the boundary...

Ever since I started making my own music, one of my ambitions has been to make an album of space travel-themed music.

My first attempt at this in came in 2006, when I put together a set of demo tracks entitled Discovery. Despite being a rather amateur attempt, the ideas were there, but it wasn’t quite the album I had in mind. A second set of half-formed demos came in 2009, under the working title of Voyage, but at that time I had run out of steam, and decided to put music on the back burner for a few years, while I focused on my artwork.

Following my science fiction-inspired album Future Worlds, and appointment as first honorary musician for the Institute for Interstellar Studies™ (I4IS), the time felt right again to have a go at the space album. Beyond the Boundary would be a project specially composed for the I4IS and to help raise awareness of the institute and its forthcoming book of the same name, to which I also contributed. It’s worth noting, that I borrowed their title for this album, so the two would tie in!

I’ve written a lengthy chapter about the connection between popular music and culture with space travel. I’ve gone into detail about the association between space travel and the music of artists such as David Bowie and Jean Michel Jarre among others, and the influence their work has had on my own. This is a theme with infinite creative possibilities, and also one that instrumental music best lends itself to. One particular benchmark album for me is Mike Oldfield’s The Songs of Distant Earth, which is a work of pure majesty, partly charting the evolution of the world, and partly based on Arthur C. Clarke’s epic book of the same name. 

I’ve been working on two different albums over the last eight months or so. When I’ve been stuck for ideas on one, I’ve worked on the other. This could have been a disastrous approach, but it actually worked very well for me. Beyond the Boundary is the first of the two albums to be finished. In fact, my original idea was simply to produce an EP of six tracks, but this gradually evolved into a fully-fledged album. I realised it was getting into album territory once the running time went over twenty-five minutes (your maximum EP running time), so six songs became eight. One of the album’s strongest pieces – Beyond the Boundary (Part Two) – actually came together very late in the process. Sometimes it happens like that. The album does actually include two of my older demo tracks, which I have revamped and completed for this project – one of which was originally on Discovery, so it’s nice to see it finished and given a home!

So Beyond the Boundary is an album with multiple missions – to take the listener on a journey beyond the stars, to help raise the profile of I4IS and promote the upcoming book. And to further this, I’ve been working on a digital booklet to accompany the release. You’ll get this when you buy the full album download from my Bandcamp page. The PDF booklet features stunning artwork from space art legends Adrian Mann and David A. Hardy, whose work also adorns the front cover of the release.

Beyond the Boundary will be available from Bandcamp from the 2nd December, with a possible wider release to follow.

Afterthoughts on Novacon 43

A belated blog following this year’s Novacon...

The Park Inn hotel in Nottingham has been the home to this long-established convention for a number of years now. Despite being only my second Novacon, I’ve settled in and started to feel like one of the Novacon family. As the UK’s longest running SF convention, there are a lot of familiar faces. A "same time next year" sort of affair, but in a good way – who can complain at an annual get-together of likeminded folk? And despite attendance numbers being down on last year (possibly due to World Fantasy Con just a week or so earlier), we had some new, young – yes, young – faces in the crowd.

Speaking of demographic, it’s safe to say that most attendees fall into a certain age range. And I’m not really one of them. At some point in my brief absence from the art room, I was described as “the dark-haired person without a beard!”. But what I love at Novacon is the fact you can strike up a fascinating conversation with absolutely anyone. We all have one thing in common, and that is a genuine love for SF, particularly when it comes to literature. Whether you want to chat with authors, or browse the rare, new, classic and vintage titles in the dealer’s room, it’s all there.

Having tested the water last year and exhibiting a small number of artworks, this year, I quite a lot – 19 pieces in total. And the fact that I returned home with just four, clearly indicates I’m doing something right. The art auction on the last day came as a huge confidence boost to me, as I didn’t expect to sell quite as much. This does mean that for next year I need to do some new work! But it was very rewarding on a personal level, and even if I hadn’t sold anything, just being able to talk about my work with the visitors to the art room was great. All these pieces of work that I’d done over the last few years, finally printed, mounted and up there on the walls for all to see and assess. 

As the artwork at Novacon operates on a bidding system for the auction, it’s really interesting to see which pieces of your work get bids – and now many. It is sometimes fascinating to see that the pieces you think might be your most appealing don’t get any bids and a piece you were perhaps less confident in, does! There are many lessons to be learnt in exhibiting your work at an event like this. Novacon generally attracts between 200–300 people, so it’s a good size audience. Although more people are likely to see your work at a bigger event, there’s a high chance they’ll spend less time looking at it or return for a second visit.

I really enjoyed talking to everybody who came to my stand, and I’m truly grateful to everybody who placed bids on my work, and those who walked away with a piece or two.

Over the course of the next year, I plan to work on new artwork, for display LonCon3 (all being well) and of course, Novacon 44. See you there!