Act 2: Zero
Author: Nate Cull
Playlist Notes: Novas 1: Radiant Energy Act 1
The Overture is complete. The curtain rises.
It is an alternate 1982. The Cold War is about to get extremely hot.
Act 1: Ground
Playlist Notes: Novas 0: Tomorrow (Minimum Viable Future)
(previously)
This is the Overture to the cyberpunk opera I first began writing? editing? arranging? around 2014. A revised 2019 edit that cuts it down to the ten best songs.
The patrons file into the opera house. The orchestra sits.
The opera house is decorated with some kind of weird mauve and cyan blobs on a badly rendered checkerboard – NO! This is ’80s cyberpunk, not ’90s. The opera house is decorated tastefully with neon primary-coloured wireframes of pyramids and spheres on a plane, thank you very much.
It is 1982. One of the 1982s, at least…
Novas Overture: Tomorrow (Minimum Viable Future Edit)
Playlist Notes: Mixtape of the Found Decade
In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of
enthusiasm for anything like “career,” I found myself dusting off
my twelve-year-old’s interest in science fiction.
Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London.
I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried
deep in society’s flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow,
a sign. And I began, then, to write.
So I started out deliberately not trying to extend the Novas Cycle, and I ended up creating five new Concept Playlists. But I think it’s done now.
Record scratch, freeze frame.. the what now? Okay. Let’s start at the beginning.
A few years ago I started idly searching Youtube and stumbled over a treasure: offbeat 1980s New Wave and synthpop songs. Some from bands you’ve heard of. Some that you may never have seen. Some which stirred faint memories. Some which were completely new to me. So I started collecting them, and then I started blogging a few. Meanwhile, I started putting them into playlists.
Continue reading “Playlist Notes: Mixtape of the Found Decade”Playlist Notes: Eclipse Suite part 2 (Lighthouse, Sun)
On the week before the July eclipse I finished the third of the Eclipse Suite, which went right out into far-future sci-fi. Because I realised I had three songs from about 1978 about ‘space lighthouses’, and what were the odds? And they needed a story to put them in. And it came together and I love it.
But that one was all male voices, for some reason. And so a couple months later I went looking for its female counterpart, the fourth quadrant of the wheel. It didn’t turned out as science fiction so much, but I found it.
Continue reading “Playlist Notes: Eclipse Suite part 2 (Lighthouse, Sun)”