Voxels are these square things you can use to represent three-dimensional space. They’re like pixels but in 3D.
Voxels are used in 3D games and brain imaging. Minecraft has voxel blocks you can use to build cool stuff, virtual stuff. Legos are like voxel blocks in real life.
Voxels are cool. Square, but cool.
The Voxel EP is now available on Spotify, iTunes and all major digital distributors.
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You can run and you
You surely can hide
You, the fleet-footed hare,
Can run from the sky
Dive deep enough
You can crouch in the rough
The green never
Has had this mesmerizing sheen
Rolling in the hay
Diving like Scrooge
This, my friend, this is life
In livelies hues
Sun ups the pace
Speeds up in the race
You see, rules are
It’s finders keepers all the way
At this rainbow’s end
Hid in the pot
A green hanging, ticking fish
Thrones wrongly got
Looking glass games
Don’t quite work with true names
You see, rules are
It’s finders keepers all the way
The last song from Voxel EP.
The EP will be released digitally on July 2nd. It will be available on Spotify, iTunes and major digital distributors.
The morning star is rising again
Reborn out of a candle flame
It is but just a silly game we play
Seconds chasing one another
The time draws near but scarce few bother
It is but all these silly games we play
The honey tongue spins sweet little lies
Rumpelstiltskin in disguise
It is but all these silly games we play
Pawn and bishop play as equal
The golden yarn shines lustrous to all
It is but just a silly game we play
From Voxel EP.
Jenny’s got a brand new song
It keeps on playing in her head
I guess she liked it first
But now she’s hoping that the song would go away
It’s always so easy to crave
All tomorrows that will save
From the silence that life still
Feels like today
The thing is that no matter what she does
The song sits stuck tight in her head
It’s numbing repetition makes her think
It’s like these days, their all the same
She walked into the diner
Humming to the song and missed a change
The world slipped for a moment further from her
Gave the change the space to grow
It’s always so easy…
Now Jenny sees the change she’s brought about
By humming to that sticky tune
The contrasts have grown deeper
Sunlight scatters in a new, peculiar way
She looks out of the window
At the people hurrying down the street
And no one stops to note her Mona Lisa smile
She knows how they must feel
It’s always so easy…
Jenny’s got a brand new song, and then stuff happens.
From the new Voxel EP.
Any music is really a network of ideas. At the heart of Launchland is the deep influence of the music of Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Also, many songs have been directly influenced by film music and classical music.
“Row Row Row Your Boat” references a scene from (yes, I know the movie sucked but anyway) Star Trek V where Kirk and Bones are singing the song and Spock is wondering about the ritual. The song itself goes way back to stuff like Brian Eno’s Apollo and Jarre’s Waiting for Cousteau. It’s also a hat tip to Joel Goldsmith’s outstanding Stargate Universe score, which I loved to death. (It’s funny but I just realized that you can hear tones from that score on “Tau Ceti Center” too, which was directly influenced by Goldsmith’s dad Jerry.)
“Aldebaran” began with playing with a Top Gun-ish sound on the Yamaha SY99, which led to this amalgam of the “Top Gun Anthem” by Harold Faltermeyer, “Main Sequence” from Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis and “Chariots of Fire” by the same.
“Quantum Thief” – a nod to my countryman Hannu Rajaniemi’s mind-blowing novel by the same name – steals or borrows (you name it) from the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony and from Clint Mansell’s Moon soundtrack. The flute melody is a nod to Ennio Morricone’s mindblowing and chilling soundtrack for The Secret of Sahara. (Which I last saw as a little kid and loved back then.)
“Stella Maris,” another name for the VIrgin Mary, is of course an obvious nod to Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria,” which is in turn based on Bach’s “Prelude no. 1” from the Well-tempered Clavier. Another Bach song is also a direct influence, namely the “Air on a G string” (which is actually an adaptation by August Wilhelmj, but anyway). The bassline turnover between verses was actually a carbon copy of the Air at first (going G, A, B, C, D, F, E, D), but then I changed it to a straight G major scale since… I don’t know. To make it slightly different after all. Why do you make these choices in music anyway?
To complete the circle, “Approaching Delta Pavonis” nicks a synth comp from Jarre’s “Magnetic Fields I” (an amazingly majestic song), one that the impOscar’s default preset just cries out to play with a little added portamento. (And yes, while tweaking is amazing, there is nothing wrong with playing with default presets when they fit. Ask Vangelis.)
I know a musician should not write analyses like this about their music. The music should speak for itself. But really: this is almost as much fun as writing the actual music. And anyway, there is so much left to discover in the songs even with this anatomical study that I think I haven’t spoiled all the fun.
To wrap up, Igor Stravinsky once said, talent borrows, genius steals. The rest of us, we just make music we love to listen to.
(And yes, my musician friends always told me I think too much. So there.)
The reason we could not find the AI’s was that the AI’s were not somewhere. They were everywhere.
Like River Tethys, the Grand Concourse flowed between military sized farcaster portals two hundred meters high. With wraparound, the effect was of an infinite main street, a hundred-kilometer torus of material delights. One could stand, as I did that morning, under the brilliant sun of Tau Ceti and look down the Concourse to the nighttime midway of Deneb Drei, alive with neon and holos, and catch a glimpse of the hundred-tiered Main Mall of Lusus, while knowing that beyond it lay the shadow-dappled boutiques of God’s Grove with its brick concourse and elevators to Treetops, the most expensive eatery in the Web. (Dan Simmons 1990.)
Songsworth: Tau Ceti Center
You are at the very center of the Universe. And you. And you. And you. And…
“Turtles all the way down,” or “The Infinite Turtle Theory,” refers to the infinite regression problem in cosmology. This problem originates with the unmoved mover paradox. The turtle in the anecdote refers to the notion common in primitive cosmological mythology, that is to say, that the flat Earth was supported on the back of a giant World Turtle.
This is not rock music.
By morning we are each spectators in our own cinemas.
The reality we wake up to is gradually mixed up with chrome-tinted virtual reality, augmented reality, alternative reality, enhanced reality, unreal reality. Worlds of light where light is more real than the real. Life, game, fiction, film all merge together into a texture of purposes and ideas and hopes and wishes. Enmeshed in the net is the Man as the node in a cyberpunk fantasy become reality. The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.
This is not rock music.
songsworth.com 