Sum I: Nostalgia Galaxy (2023)

 

First in the series with a piece of music for each month, beginning in September (when the summer "leaves"). The month is determined by when I first began the piece or when I finished it.

It will have an overall SciFi theme: In the future when space travel may take months or years, what is the meaning or feeling of a month, when outside the capsule window is the blackness of space and the bright sun, no atmosphere, no rising or setting sun or changing seasons?

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January 9, 2024

As I've been watching the coverage of the Boeing 737 Max issue with the door that blew out, I was thinking about the just-in-time manufacturing process. As I've been doing the mastering, I realized this is how I made the album--tiled together as a mosaic. I wasn't always looking at the overall picture other than the concept. The recording process took place over a year in bits and fragments whenever I had time--which is different from the usual way of doing an album which can take perhaps a few days or months. But when it starts to take place over a year, it starts to feel too disjointed. Now that I'm doing the mastering, I'm finding the rough areas that need smoothing. This smoothing and polishing could go on indefinitely and at some point, you have to set it free, but obviously not something you can do with a commercial jet.

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January 19, 2023

After running through various possibilities of what I could do with the Nostalgia Galaxy concept, I think it's starting to suggest that it's going to be something that's strictly sequential, where it opens with some kind of an Overture, as an opera or a symphonic work. I know that sounds cliche, but it seems like that's where it wants to go. I had thought about starting it not in January, but in September. The idea is that there's this space mission that takes a year-round trip and liftoff would be in September, but perhaps it makes more sense to start it in January.

The two or three January tracks that I have been working on mean they are tracks that I have started in January of whatever year. Some of them go back to 2016 or 2015. The (cliche) mood for January is sort of cold and gray, and the tracks do evoke that. It's a dense wall of sound, which is not exactly what I want. I can't seem to find much "space" (pun) in it. I've done five or six mixes to try to open that up, but when I open it up I lose the vibe of it. I think I'm going to stick with a wall of sound--maybe increase certain frequency ranges to make certain instruments stand out more. In terms of the Overture, there was a piece I wrote back in 2016 titled Delos, a short symphonic piece about a minute long based on the polychord Cm/D with French horns playing the C minor chord with some high strings and a low D in the basses. I thought that would be a good January-ish intro when they leave on the mission.

It's going to be interesting to see how this comes together. The plan is to release a track each month. Peter Gabriel is doing something similar where he's releasing a track on each full moon. I think it's a good framework. The more that I've worked on art and music simultaneously, I see the value in having frameworks as the scaffold. This way you don't always have to make big decisions. You don't have to sit around and wait for magic to happen. You have a good idea of how it's going to progress and some kind of expectation of what it is.

This morning I came up with some ideas for the visuals. I'm using a color-coded system: January is white, February is an off-white, March is a pale pink, April is a mauve, May is a light green, June is a bright green, July is a deep red, August is red-orange, September is a deeper orange or burnt orange or burnt sienna, November is a gold color and December is a gray. A black dot is used as a month marker, arranged diagonally, suggesting the movement of the sun or moon across the sky over the course of a year, sort of like Peter Gabriel's full moon releases.

Album Website

Preliminary mixes:

January:

 February:

 March:

 

 April:

 

 May:

 June:

 July:

 August:

 September:

 

October:

November:

December: