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| Track list: 1. Hymn 1 (Through the Barometric Sun) 2. The First Glimpse of the..... 4. Crysanthenum Ocean 5. In the Outer Reaches 7. Endless Glass Metropolis 10. Silence 11. Dream (The 49th Sheep) Running time: 48 minutes Released: 2007 |
A quick follow-up to The Barometric Sea, I can only guess that The Barometric Sun was meant as a companion piece, especially as it was within a year. I have 7 tracks from this disc. 5 are free right now, and 2 must have been in the past.
It has been a busy week, so I haven't got to many of these. Out Monday, guests Tuesday, unexpected co-op with a friend on Wednesday and my weekly Blood Bowl game on Friday. I did squeeze in a post on Thursday though. Today was a family birthday so it has been tough to find time to just sit and listen until now when I have that chance. It is late(ish) on a Saturday evening and I have just watched something about rebuilding a Spitfire - I am suitably relaxed.
The first impression generated by Hymn 1 is good. There is more body to this than some of the other Deepspace pieces I have on file and that is appreciated. It is still a soundscape, still inherently lonely, but the depth adds warmth to that so it is not so stark and distant as I felt some of The Barometric Sea was. Less ice floes, more beach or valley flooded with morning light. Some chimes kick in near the end that remind me of those of Big Ben which is an odd juxtaposition, and then we move on to a first glimpse of something. Here the artist proves that, like my younger self, one can be careless when typing an ellipsis. I swear I always used to end up with four periods, here he uses five. The track itself carries on the theme. It felt like a return to emptier sounds for a brief moment, then the additional embellishments showed up, including sampled (?) voice - choral singing by the sound of it. This definitely evokes Vangelis with the atmosphere created totally in line with the Blade Runner aesthetic. The song feels like it goes on forever, but it is actually shorter than the first track. I suspect that means that under the general appeal of the image it creates there is not too much to sustain affection. In any case, I am glad when we move on.
Crysanthenum Ocean - oops, looks like that is a typo in the title - feels like sci-fi videogame music from a downtime cutscene or, more likely, a front-end menu. It seems to fall into a cyclic pattern that fails to enthral. The warmer tone is still present but the ambience of this one is flat for me. What follows is more bombast than I would have expected, louder and stronger notes than have been stock-in-trade until now. This is a nice change, with the intricacies introduced in the fades, the lulls. I realise that I use "swells" a lot in writing - but perhaps I do genuinely see music as waves, building and crashing, rippling and calming. It feels truly appropriate here as there is the sense of a crescendo then a diminuendo on each tonic shift. It creates a really comforting sound space, an aural pocket of calm, a rhythmic effect of relaxation. I like this a lot, right up to the point where it seems to dead-end very suddenly. That ending was a shocker.
LastFM has b*****ed itself up again - it seems to do this if I remove a track from my library whilst it is in an active playlist - and thinks I am hearing Silence when actually it is Endless Glass Metropolis. Too bad, I was going to tag the title for its awesomeness. I would not want to live in a city of glass, but the image that generates is certainly one in keeping with the future/sci-fi ideal, supported by the sounds crafted here. I should really pass on these tracks to the gamers I know who love sci-fi RPGs, I think they would get far more atmospheric use of them than I would as I have never been particularly drawn to that genre (as a whole). Actually, I'll be fair on LastFM, looking more closely it seems to be picking up the problem from WMP giving bad information. You might have thought that the player would load the info of the track when the track starts, not somehow manage to display the info for another track altogether because it pre-loaded it then somehow skipped in the playlist. Actually I would have thought that, until I started working in software design by accident and optimisation (and some methods to achieve it) became a relevant concern. Still, it is an error.
Silence is not, well, silent. It is certainly emptier than the other tracks thus far but even then it contains some pretty bold notes. It feels slower rather than colder or less involving, no obvious rise-fall-rise-fall wave pattern here - more a sense of pulses through empty space. There are background transitions and a reverb effect that underlies most of the piece but they fade and merge together. We wake up from Silence and enter into a Dream. It does not immediately strike me as dream-like or particularly relevant to sleep though after a while it does pick up that sort of fuzzy, intangible quality that is alike the soft focus effect often used visually to depict dreams on screen. It also breaks down as a theme a bit by the halfway mark and feels like a different piece to the one I was listening to a moment ago. I do not really care for the switch initially either, but it pulls around. The second half of the piece then rushes by in a sense of swirls and twirls, to the point that when it ends I am abruptly catapulted out of whatever semi-conscious state my mind had fallen into.
Overall, I think this was better than The Barometric Sea, but less good than Another Empty Galaxy; I like the warmer sounds and appreciated the visuals my brain supplied on hearing it more than the cooler, isolation-based ones that accompanied the last post. I would not say Deepspace is genius, but he has something in these pieces alright that can really make for surprisingly engaging experience.
It has been a busy week, so I haven't got to many of these. Out Monday, guests Tuesday, unexpected co-op with a friend on Wednesday and my weekly Blood Bowl game on Friday. I did squeeze in a post on Thursday though. Today was a family birthday so it has been tough to find time to just sit and listen until now when I have that chance. It is late(ish) on a Saturday evening and I have just watched something about rebuilding a Spitfire - I am suitably relaxed.
The first impression generated by Hymn 1 is good. There is more body to this than some of the other Deepspace pieces I have on file and that is appreciated. It is still a soundscape, still inherently lonely, but the depth adds warmth to that so it is not so stark and distant as I felt some of The Barometric Sea was. Less ice floes, more beach or valley flooded with morning light. Some chimes kick in near the end that remind me of those of Big Ben which is an odd juxtaposition, and then we move on to a first glimpse of something. Here the artist proves that, like my younger self, one can be careless when typing an ellipsis. I swear I always used to end up with four periods, here he uses five. The track itself carries on the theme. It felt like a return to emptier sounds for a brief moment, then the additional embellishments showed up, including sampled (?) voice - choral singing by the sound of it. This definitely evokes Vangelis with the atmosphere created totally in line with the Blade Runner aesthetic. The song feels like it goes on forever, but it is actually shorter than the first track. I suspect that means that under the general appeal of the image it creates there is not too much to sustain affection. In any case, I am glad when we move on.
Crysanthenum Ocean - oops, looks like that is a typo in the title - feels like sci-fi videogame music from a downtime cutscene or, more likely, a front-end menu. It seems to fall into a cyclic pattern that fails to enthral. The warmer tone is still present but the ambience of this one is flat for me. What follows is more bombast than I would have expected, louder and stronger notes than have been stock-in-trade until now. This is a nice change, with the intricacies introduced in the fades, the lulls. I realise that I use "swells" a lot in writing - but perhaps I do genuinely see music as waves, building and crashing, rippling and calming. It feels truly appropriate here as there is the sense of a crescendo then a diminuendo on each tonic shift. It creates a really comforting sound space, an aural pocket of calm, a rhythmic effect of relaxation. I like this a lot, right up to the point where it seems to dead-end very suddenly. That ending was a shocker.
LastFM has b*****ed itself up again - it seems to do this if I remove a track from my library whilst it is in an active playlist - and thinks I am hearing Silence when actually it is Endless Glass Metropolis. Too bad, I was going to tag the title for its awesomeness. I would not want to live in a city of glass, but the image that generates is certainly one in keeping with the future/sci-fi ideal, supported by the sounds crafted here. I should really pass on these tracks to the gamers I know who love sci-fi RPGs, I think they would get far more atmospheric use of them than I would as I have never been particularly drawn to that genre (as a whole). Actually, I'll be fair on LastFM, looking more closely it seems to be picking up the problem from WMP giving bad information. You might have thought that the player would load the info of the track when the track starts, not somehow manage to display the info for another track altogether because it pre-loaded it then somehow skipped in the playlist. Actually I would have thought that, until I started working in software design by accident and optimisation (and some methods to achieve it) became a relevant concern. Still, it is an error.
Silence is not, well, silent. It is certainly emptier than the other tracks thus far but even then it contains some pretty bold notes. It feels slower rather than colder or less involving, no obvious rise-fall-rise-fall wave pattern here - more a sense of pulses through empty space. There are background transitions and a reverb effect that underlies most of the piece but they fade and merge together. We wake up from Silence and enter into a Dream. It does not immediately strike me as dream-like or particularly relevant to sleep though after a while it does pick up that sort of fuzzy, intangible quality that is alike the soft focus effect often used visually to depict dreams on screen. It also breaks down as a theme a bit by the halfway mark and feels like a different piece to the one I was listening to a moment ago. I do not really care for the switch initially either, but it pulls around. The second half of the piece then rushes by in a sense of swirls and twirls, to the point that when it ends I am abruptly catapulted out of whatever semi-conscious state my mind had fallen into.
Overall, I think this was better than The Barometric Sea, but less good than Another Empty Galaxy; I like the warmer sounds and appreciated the visuals my brain supplied on hearing it more than the cooler, isolation-based ones that accompanied the last post. I would not say Deepspace is genius, but he has something in these pieces alright that can really make for surprisingly engaging experience.
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