RPM Challenge 2015 Part V: M31

M31, or the Andromeda Galaxy

Impossible Universe Track 4 -- M31

So yeah, track 4 is named after the Andromeda Galaxy, well, the "official" name of the galaxy, which is also my musical moniker. This galaxy's name has some historical meaning for me, so read on....

The Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31) is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way. It's only 2.5 million light-years from us, and gets its name from the area of the sky in which it can be found, in the constellation Andromeda.

We are expected to collide with Andromeda in ... 3.75 billion years, at which time the two galaxies will combine to form one great elliptical galaxy. We'll have to see if that actually happens.

When I started a Mannheim Steamroller cover band in high school, there were initially four of us: my brother Brett on bass guitar, recorder, french horn; friends Joseph Hawkins on keyboards and David Kinard on drums, and myself on keyboards and arrangements. After the Sophomore assembly which brought us together, we competed in the Davis County Fair talent show. We didn't have a name for ourselves, and my cousin Brad Mottishaw suggested "Andromeda." Well astronomy was a hobby of mine, and it sounded pretty cool, so we went with it.

Andromeda's 1st incarnation in 1983.
L to R: Joseph Hawkins, Brett Tippetts,
Kyle Tippetts, David Kinard

We ended up winning 1st place in our category and went on to compete in the Utah State Fair talent show, many school assemblies and other community performances, and even did a live radio broadcast in Evanston Wyoming, where a Golden Retriever sauntered on to the stage. Fortunately it was radio, so no harm no foul, and it kind of brought the rural ambience of Evanston into the auditorium.

Nice touch.

I should mention that by the time we did the radio broadcast, the band had a few more members: Mark Steiner on EVI/Trumpet, Lonnie Nybo on keyboards and oboe, David Long and Cathy Brande on Keyboards, and several members of the Davis High School Band and Orchestra. Clif May and Todd Leishman provided excellent live sound.

We even got invited to perform at the 1985 Stadium of Fire (we had Douglas Spotted Eagle do the live sound for our final performance at the end of the 1985 school year since Clif and Todd weren't available to do it. Doug got us the gig. Alas, since most of us graduated that year, we couldn't pull it together. One of the biggest regrets of my musical undertakings).

Close-up of M31. This shows about a 61,000 light-year piece of the galaxy.

Probably TL;DR, but when I started doing music again 25 years later, I wanted to use the same band name, Andromeda. But, I found that there was a Swedish progressive metal band using it. But rather than give up on all the history, I chose to use the "official" name of the Andromeda galaxy, M31.

I wanted this track to be an upbeat, trance-y/house-y tune. At the break, I imagined what it might be like to be floating in space, thousands of light-years out from M31, watching it in all it's glory.

I don't believe in coincidence. I don't believe that any of these wondrous, fantastic, unbelievably beautiful things in our universe are just coincidences, that they just "happened." That is what is impossible.

What is possible, and I believe what is most certainly true, is that all these things, including our galaxy, solar system, our planet, and even ourselves were purposely created by the Great Creator, God.

And so, M31.

RPMChallenge 2015 Part III: The Pillars of Creation

The Pillars of Creation

Impossible Universe's second track. The Pillars of Creation.

This cosmic spectacle was discovered when the Hubble telescope took the first close-up pictures of the Eagle Nebula in 1994. (1) This particular part of the nebula got the name "The Pillars of Creation" because of the stars forming in the dust and gases that make up these pillars.

I've seen this picture many times: NASA's APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day), Space.com, Pinterest...(yes I have a Pinterest account with an Astronomy board...you can check it out here). But as I was searching for inspiration for this project, I ran across this again and was mesmerized by this particular close-up of the nebula.

The Eagle Nebula (M16).
The Pillars of Creation are just
off-center to the left.

Eagle Nebula is about 7000 light years away from us and can be found between the constellations Serpens and Sagittarius. The entire nebula measures 70 light-years high by 50 light-years wide, with the tallest of the pillars being about 4 light-years high. (2)

Each of the "finger-like" tips of the pillars are larger than our solar system, and contain dense knots of gasses, and stars are being formed inside some of these.

I wanted to evoke the feeling of being in some sort of space vessel floating amongst the gas, dust, and newly-forming stars. I imagined the sheer size and majesty of these pillars of creation, and what it might be like to be much, much closer to them. I realize that if we, in our imaginary spacecraft, were closer somehow, it probably wouldn't look much different than where we are now on earth, considering the sheer immensity of just that one four-light-year pillar.

Still, the song is meant to be just that; a moment in time, a snapshot of floating amongst the majesty and wonder of The Pillars of Creation.



(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillars_of_Creation
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_Nebula

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