Exosphere by Trenches of Hadal

Named after the outermost layer of the Earth's atmosphere, this album serves as a foil to the dark and crushing pressures of Kermadec. In complete contrast to the inescapable depths of the Earth's oceans, this set of songs convey environments that are light and diaphanous, as well as violent and tempestuous. Melody fragments and structures shift and dissolve like the winds of multiple atmospheric fronts falling through the skies– sometimes obscured in clouds or the night sky, sometimes iridescent with the light of the sun fractured into rainbows, sometimes streaked with lightning, and sometimes immersed in pummeling rain or hail. But always vast, expansive, infinite.

The exosphere of the Earth is not so much a barrier marking where our world ends and outer space begins, but an interface– where solar rays are absorbed, or cosmic radiation showers on the low density air particles before coruscating into great auroras at the poles.

This area still signifies one of the few areas of the Earth where no organism can survive unless aided by advanced technology. Like Kermadec, it represents an extreme environment, but in opposition to the ocean trench, it is devoid of any living matter. Life can eke out an existence in Kermadec in spite of its inhospitable nature, but fails to materialize in the exosphere. A layer of the thinnest atmosphere, occasionally glistening with light, where lone molecules of hydrogen and helium traverse into the cold, infinite vacuum of space, completely precludes any and all life.

And because there is no life, there is no death. There is no end. Only the skies caressing the vastness of space.

While Kermadec is about holding on, the exosphere is about letting go.