Forgotten Melodies by The Space Cadet

With “Forgotten Melodies” Julien Foster aka The Space Cadet blurs the lines between fact and fiction, past and future, space and time…

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Drawing inspiration from historical songs dating back over 3000 years, on Forgotten Melodies, The Space Cadet explores music from the ancient past with a modern style blending intricately designed ambience and hypnotic neo-classical composition. New material was developed during the recording sessions, inspired by the old melodies and history learned while researching the project. Thus some of this work is really quite old while some of it is purely fictional.

About each track:

Wabi Sabi Sauce: An imaginary sauce made from the concept that a blend of aesthetics delivers the best tasting cup of tea. A letter from the heart.

Seikilos Epitaph: The oldest song which we (humans) have preserved in it’s entirety, the Seikilos Epitaph is from a tombstone roughly 2000 years old from Ancient Greece.

Uncanny Valley Board of Tourism: An excerpt from a cassette tape which used to play in the lobby of the tourism offices when Sir Seascape worked there. An excerpt from his personal archive.

H6 Hymn for Nikkal V.1: This song is from a collection inscribed in cuneiform writing in stone tablets found in the ancient city Ugarit in modern day Syria. It was created by the Amorite people in approximately 1400 BCE (over 3000 years ago). It is considered the oldest mostly complete musical notation. The song is dedicated to the goddess of orchards Nikkal, wife of the moon god Yarikh.

Omnitorium Number 9: The Omnitorium graciously preserves ancient melodies which were lost before the advent of written musical composition. This ninth entry in their catalog is from the Upper Paleolithic Period.

Dollhouse Exorcism: A song often played or sung in the Victorian era to ward off the spirits of dead children inhabiting an object of value or family heirloom which one might not want to simply burn or throw in a river.

Sir Emerald Seascape The Third: The honorable E. Seascape is one of the foremost experts in ancient arts and his oeuvre was singularly significant to the work on this record.

Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence: This song’s lyric supposedly dates back to the fifth century and is thought to have been penned by St. James the Less, first Bishop of Jerusalem. This adaptation is based on Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1800s arrangement, borrowing heavily from the medieval French folk melody “Picardie.”

Café Lunaire: Down the street from the Omnitorium and Sir Seascape’s office is this great little bakery/coffeeshop that fueled the research period of this project. This one’s for them.

Kogoo: This melody is derived from a sequence of frequency equivalences intricately applied in the calibration of an enigmatic musical relic of mysterious provenance. The historic instrument emerged from the depths of a trove of Mesopotamian treasures, transcending by leaps and bounds the technological prowess of the ancients who wielded it over 3500 years past. Carbon dating, unveiling an age far surpassing initial estimations, shrouds the instrument in an aura of enigma, casting doubt upon its very origins.

Empty Fields Forever: One day the personification of Death dropped by the studio to hear some of the arrangements and this was the ensuing jam we recorded. We had a good laugh that day.

Nikkal Variation 2: The Hymn to Nikkal is so old, ancient music experts disagree on how it should be translated into modern notation. I’ve chosen to adapt several versions to illustrate how despite knowing the Hurrian Songs to be written music, we have lost the ability to perform them accurately.

Time Drag Dilations Part III: By comparing two energy states, we can express time dilation as an energy ration, allowing non-experts to better understand time dilation over the course of their auditory time travel experiences. This song acts as a harnessing mechanism to prime re-integration.

A Chronicle of Great peace Played On A Chess Board: A scoring of the famous chess game depicting the events found in medieval Japanese military chronicle Taiheiki, The Chronicle of Great Peace.

Parfum Sommeil: the smell of drifting off into dreams or perhaps floating away in outer space.

Tao Factory: A field recording made on location where The Way is manufactured.

The Space Cadet is multi-instrumentalist Julien Foster's ambient trip hop project. Drawing inspiration from psychedelic music, comics and culture, his output is a distillation of synths, samples and real instrumentation into swirling soundscapes and smokey beats.

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