Magellan by Simon Slator

Curated Release #3

Inspired by the album of the same name by Mike Oldfield (as well as a love of science fiction), one of the few books I've read more than once is Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth". Naturally, I couldn't help wanting to make some music based on the book, but wanted to distance it as far as possible from Oldfield's. Hence why it takes some of the techniques and theories I use to create ambient music, and turns it into a space/sci-fi epic with a little Berlin School thrown in.

The first track depicts the departure of the spaceship "Magellan", carrying a colony of the last surviving Terrans away from Earth, which is soon to be destroyed by the Sun's premature supernova.

Their destination is an ice planet called Sagan 2, which will take the Magellan over 500 years to reach. As such, the surviving Terrans are all in a huge chamber called the "Hibernaculum" (Track 2) where they remain frozen and motionless throughout their journey.

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An alternate, unedited version of the album is included as bonus tracks. In its original form, the album ran for almost 40 minutes but this was later edited down to a lean 30 for release. At the time, I felt some of the sections went on a bit too long and it killed the pace significantly - it wasn't something you could 'zone out' either. When reviewing the album for this re-release, I listened back to the unedited version and re-evaluated it, but my impression of it hadn't changed: the thirty-minute version is still my preferred version, and the unedited version is released here for the very first time.

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Little known trivia: I wanted to create a follow-up to this, based on a section from the middle of the book. It never came to be, but two of the pieces I wrote became part of "Overboard", released by Aural Films later that year

https://auralfilms.bandcamp.com/album/overboard

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"Slator’s cinematic music is vibrant, symphonic-oriented and epic in form, cruising in a soft soaring (sometimes even elegant) fashion through cosmic vastness in an evocative, captivating way." -- Bert Strolenberg, Sonic Immersion (http://www.sonicimmersion.org/simon-slator-magellan)

"These two pieces are truly expansive, based on shimmering widescreen pads and delicate sequencing similar to the sound of latter-day Klaus Schulze at his finest." -- Allister Thompson, Make Your Own Taste (https://makeyourowntaste.com/2014/08/19/august-netaudio-revue-2/)

That bloke who used to make nice music like "Four Patterns", then went all dark and psychedelic and droney and all that 'evvy stuff.

Simon Slator's Spontaneous Musings
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