RPMChallenge 2015 Part II: Nebulosity (Deep Architecture)

Nebulosity (Deep Architecture), the first track from Impossible Universe, has a couple of inspirations.

I started writing it during some composing and rehearsal work for another band I've worked with called Kalaban. We were working on one of the tracks for an upcoming release, and Randy Graves, Kalaban's guitarist and composer, kept getting this error while working on it in Logic Pro X:

Deep Architecture. Please unpack some files.

...uh...how very helpful! Google was of little help, and what help Randy did find didn't seem to fix the problem.

However after seveal weeks of fighting this particularly nasty and cryptic error, Randy finally solved it; I however don't remember the cause or the solution. Anyway, I'd been wanting to write a laid-back house-y track, and this incident and it's strange error prompted a track, and it's working title was the aforementioned "Deep Architecture."

So the rules of the RPM Challenge state that one needs to complete 10 songs or 35 minutes worth of music in the month of February. One can complete and already-started track and count it during that time. So since "Deep Architecture" was about half-complete, I decided to "repurpose" it for the challenge.

---

One astronomical object visible in the Northern Hemisphere's fall and winter sky that has always been interesting to me is The Pleiades. It is a star cluster within the constellation Taurus, and it's also called M45, The Seven Sisters, and, in Japanese, Subaru (if you look at the logo on a Subaru, you'll see that it's...seven stars....)

There are several interesting historical and mythological bits about The Pleiades:

• Halloween is believed to originate from a Druid rite that coincided with the midnight culmination of The Pleiades, that is, when it reaches its highest point in the sky - at midnight.


• The Zuni of New Mexico call the cluster "The Seed-Stars", and use it's disappearance from the evening sky in the spring as a sign that it's time to plant seeds.


• "Pleiades" in Greek may mean "to sail." The Greeks used the star cluster's appearance in the morning sky before sunrise as the opening of the navigation season.


• And of course the Greeks had a myth about the star cluster's origins. You can find the complete myth here. (1)

And here are the facts:

• The Pleiades is an open cluster, consisting of mostly hot blue stars formed within the last 100 million years.


• It is 444 light years from us in the direction of the constellation Taurus.


• The faint glow around the cluster, called a reflection nebulosity, is not dust in the vicinity of the star cluster, but is dust in the interstellar medium that the stars are now passing through.


• The names of the nine brightest stars in the cluster are: Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, Alcyone, Atlas, and Pleione (these last two are the seven sisters' parents). (2)

As you can see from the images above, Pleiades does have a nebulous quality to it, something I didn't realize until I started researching the subject of Impossible Universe's first track.

The word "nebulosity" kept appearing in the research I did. I decided that would be the title. I also decided to keep the working title because to me, the universe and its myriad features represent "architecture" on the grandest scale imaginable, beyond our mere mortal capacity to understand and fathom.

Nebulosity (Deep Architecture), then. The first track on Impossible Universe.


(1) http://earthsky.org/favorite-star-patterns/pleiades-star-cluster-enjoys-worldwide-renown 
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades

RPMChallenge 2015 and the Impossible Universe

A good friend of mine introduced me to the RPM Challenge late last year. In a nutshell, the challenge is to record an album's worth of music during the month of February -- 10 songs or 35 minutes worth of music.

As soon as I decided to accept it, I knew what the album would be about -- and so "Impossible Universe" became my RPM Challenge project for 2015.

As you may or may not be able to tell, my fascination with astronomical topics runs deep, and this album's concept is the first of many that explores our amazing universe.

---

2014 turned out to be one of my most musically stagnant in recent years, thanks primarily to a crappy day job that seemed to suck the creative life right out of me. Even after I left that place in the fall of that year for a *much much* better job, I still struggled to get anything done musically.

There's nothing like a challenge or a goal to push and prod one to activity, and the RPM Challenge did just that.

Now, a few days before February 1st, I settled on the track listing for the as of yet unnamed album:

• Track 1: Nebulosity (Deep Architecture)
• Track 2: The Pillars of Creation
• Track 3: Twin Jet
• Track 4: M31
• Track 5: Hymn for the Universe

One of the caveats of the challenge is that tracks just need to be completed and releasable in February. I had been writing track 1 under the working name "Deep Architecture," and track 5 was only a 16-bar chord progression.

With that, I began. I found these images of to use as inspiration during the writing phase:

The Pleiades

The Eagle Nebula

Twin Jet Nebula

The Andromeda Galaxy

The Ultra-Deep Field

With such wonderful, beautiful, awe-inspiring images of these elements in our universe, this project was shaping up to be a fantastic experience.

More to come.....