Category: Music

(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)

Continue reading “Playlist Notes: Novas 0: Tomorrow (Minimum Viable Future)”

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.

William Gibson, 2002

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”

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)”

So back in July there was an eclipse, and the sky put on quite a show. A total lunar eclipse near dawn combined with Mars at its brightest in 15 years, with Venus, Jupiter and Saturn also bright and in the same sky. The result was several weeks of skygazing… and with that, seemed to come inspiration.

A suite of four concept playlist albums was the result (three before the eclipse, and one after).

Continue reading “Playlist Notes: Eclipse Suite part 1 (Cosmic, Wheel)”

So after completing the ‘Tomorrow Trilogy’ (quadrilogy? though really only parts 2, 3 and 4 are a true trilogy; I think of 1 as an overture), I… made some more.

I had songs left over, and feelings I wanted to explore. They turned out to fall into two ‘double albums’ of 20 songs. The first one, ‘Movies/Stars’ is a sequel of sorts to… Playlist Zero, ‘Go Forth’. The second, ‘Machines/Ghosts’ is much more directly a companion to Tomorrow.

Continue reading “Playlist Notes: Movies, Stars, Machines, Ghosts”