Zenith: Unto the Stars: "Tangential Part 1"

While the world waits for Ridley Scott to revisit/further fuck up the Alien franchise, bedroom composers everywhere are dabbling with retro sci-fi scores. Terry Davey is one such nut, imagining a future of successful Europa landings. He’s also imagined the music they should pack in the time capsule: something a lot less rousing than “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on Voyager but mindful of the films that left Earth before him. It takes guts, still wanting to map the outer cosmos after the scare stories fed to us by Hollywood. Apollo 18 said we stayed off the moon as it’s secretly crawling with spiders, undeterred, aims straight for Jupiter, expanding on those blurred orange photographs with domes, humanoids, and meditation.

Although his ambience might seem timeless on the surface, Davey’s space music has a Cold War feel to it, his sound filled with the mood of Silent Running instead of the runaway pyrotechnics of Transformers. “Tangential Part 1” is made from analogue Yamahas, meandering like Jean Michel Jare if he’d been forced to compose music on a sundial. Peripheral beats, eerie tones, and the odd geyser edge things toward ambient house, but otherwise this is a gas giant; something the nerdiest of astronauts might play as he steps onto a new landscape. It’s good to know there are stargazers/composers out there who still think the heavens are peaceful. Obsessives would know there’s so much debris approaching that the ozone layer should be fitted with sieves.

[MP3]