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.

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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