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.....