Notes on the "Juno" EP by Distance to Jupiter

The new 4-track EP "Juno" by Distance to Jupiter was released on November 22nd, 2016. It was recorded May through October, 2016, with final processing of both audio and visual components throughout November.

Juno is a spacecraft that left the Earth in 2011. Launched by NASA/JPL, its primary purpose was to unlock the secrets of the solar system's largest planet: Jupiter. These are some background notes about the tracks.

Juno (Five-Year Journey): Track 1 represents the cruise phase, with the listener along for the ride. It took Juno five years to reach Jupiter after launch. The spacecraft existed in a state of hibernation for most of the trip, but at certain key junctures, Juno awakened to perform course corrections or other scientific activities. The metallic drones, chirps, and chaotic string sequences represent the deep space network NASA uses to communicate with its spacecraft; the day-to-day; the maintenance. Then Juno slept, to await arrival. When she next opened her eyes, Jupiter loomed ahead. Around the 3:30 mark of the track, epic swells engulf the listener as the spacecraft begins to pierce the solar system's strongest magnetic field and most lethal radiation belts.

Juno (Orbit Insertion): Track 2 represents Juno slowing down, and the beat gives us the reference. We’re about to go into orbit. Radiation is increasing. Each moment could bring disaster. Tension is mounting, not only on the spacecraft, but back in mission control in Pasadena, CA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But there is beauty here - staggering vistas of the solar system's largest planet. The plaintive melodic sets of tones that hover above the beat are the voice of Juno. The synthetic guitars herald the stresses of orbital insertion. Tempo doubles. The pace quickens. And a droning guitar greets us like a protesting howl, the voice of secretive Jupiter itself. A conversation ensues between Juno and her estranged husband. Juno is in orbit now.

Juno (Unlocking Secrets): Track 3 represents the regular communication between Juno and NASA via the deep space network. It is constant. The spacecraft is performing its science duties, pulling in data, probing the secrets which are locked away within Jupiter’s massive atmosphere. This track is all about discovery. Out of the data stream comes a clearer picture - one of beauty, chaos, and unimaginable forces. The background noise - an atmosphere - is a sea of data waiting to be explored. The unearthly swells are measured, relentless, beautiful, repeated. Understanding grows at 2:20; the picture becomes clear as an alien arpeggio fades in. Secrets are unlocked with a key of astonishing complexity - the Juno spacecraft itself. The track fades, and Juno’s time is up.

Juno (Deorbit): Track 4 represents the fact that all things must end. For Juno, the end will arrive during its 37th orbit of Jupiter. A deorbit burn will be executed, placing the spacecraft on a trajectory that will reset its point of closest approach to the planet to an altitude that is below the cloud tops at 34 degrees North Jupiter latitude. Juno is not designed to operate inside an atmosphere and will burn to ash. She will be studying her mate throughout this final plunge, sending data back to us for as long as she can. The haunting strings of a bandura mix solemnly with the sounds of impact, of thunder, and the sounds of distress. A strained arpeggio grows as the pressure and heat rise. Juno sends her final batch of data. We can’t follow and witness only a thunderous, fiery implosion in the fade.

The Curious Proceedings of "Sentient Vortex"

Most Distance to Jupiter tracks begin in the unconscious. They begin as fragments, splinters, particles, sometimes with words or phrases attached. I've often called them proceedings, for lack of a better term. I find wisps of melodies or chord progressions in my head sometimes when I wake up in the morning. They are stuck, repeating, and they force me to stumble sleepily into the studio where I attempt to rescue them from the inexorable oblivion that consciousness brings. Months can then pass, as these proceedings pile up on the computer. Eventually, there comes a sudden urge to sift through them all, and work begins on a new collection of tracks.

Philip K. Dick was an American science fiction novelist (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982). I'm a huge fan, but that wasn't always the case. In high school, I found his prose to be an impenetrable wall. I didn't possess the elasticity of thought that was required to truly get into his work until much later in life. Today, I'm fascinated by Dick's life, and by what he put himself through to produce his work. Dick once wrote and published seven novels in a single year. He'd often produce work that required little to no revision. Finished prose simply flowed from his mind, through his hands, into his typewriter. His biographers have suggested he suffered from the best form of hypergraphia, a so-called uncontrollable "desire to write" brought on by issues with the temporal lobe of the brain, perhaps due to amphetamine abuse, or a bit of schizophrenia (if such a measurement applies). No matter the cause, the reality is this: he was a beast of a writer. He could finish an entire novel in a month, and these hallucinatory texts still reverberate today. Based on his visions, Dick once postulated that the universe was made from information, decades before this notion became a core tenet of the Holographic Principle (itself a property of cutting-edge string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity theory). I'm still amazed by the volume of Philip K. Dick's output. After reading various Dick biographies, I realized my workflow for creating music wasn't dissimilar to his for writing novels, especially during the period 1999-2005 when I released eleven albums, five in the year 2000 alone. I don't know if there's even a term for an uncontrollable desire to make music. That said, some very curious things occurred in 2015 while working on Sentient Vortex, the latest Distance to Jupiter album. I spent the early parts of the year skimming or rereading some of Dick's novels, mostly in preparation for Amazon Prime's adaptation of Dick's Hugo award-winning novel The Man in the High Castle. At the same time, I started rummaging through the dream fragments of music I'd been collecting.

I worked on Sentient Vortex for seven months, from early May to mid-December, 2015. Ultimately, eleven tracks emerged. In the end, two never made it (they had "health problems"). A third was jettisoned quite late in the process, in mid-November. The eight tracks that remained all had strange words associated with them. These were part of the original dream fragments. I'd use the words to name the blocks of MIDI data in Logic Pro X (music production software). This allowed me to preserve these dream words along with the melodies, and ultimately, they became working titles for each track.

In mid-November, after binge-watching The Man in the High Castle series (fantastic!), I found myself digging through the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick looking for clues. I am unsure what I was looking for, but as I flipped around, opening the heavy tome at random day after day, I'd find sentences that contained the words I used in the temporary track titles. Statistically-speaking, this isn't exactly unexpected; these are all fairly common words. But the sentence fragments in the Exegesis made much better track titles and truly fit the moods of the music. My one regret is that I didn't make a note of the pages I found the sentences on (it didn't cross my mind; the published Exegesis is a gargantuan work, a mere chunk of the thousands of handwritten pages that constitute the original, and which even now hasn't been fully transcribed or published in any form). I found a searchable version of the Exegesis online and input the final track titles, but they can't be located. I can find the words, but they appear in different orders. This delighted me. It's the kind of thing PKD's otherworldly sources of enlightenment might have subjected him to as he struggled to come to grips with the life-altering events he experienced in March, 1974. In the case of these track titles, the fact that I now couldn't find the exact phrases within a searchable form of the Exegesis amused me greatly. It's as if the words I'd found had rearranged themselves, or been rearranged by one of PKD's otherworldly intelligences (or PKD himself?). Sentient Vortex was inspired in no small part by Dick's body of work. The mental imagery he conjures, especially in works like VALIS, Ubik, and A Scanner Darkly, is often difficult to shake off. Sentient Vortex is about disparate fragments of "dream melody" finding a form in reality. It's about barriers breaking down between worlds, mysterious places and things, and celebratory rhythms that evoke distant times, either in the past or the future. Here, then, is Sentient Vortex (note, if you're reading this before 12/21/2015, not all tracks will be available for streaming):

The next Sentient Vortex curiosity occurred during the creation of the album's cover art. The piece developed over a matter of a few hours. It consists of four layers: a symmetrical star field (background), a blue layer, a red layer, and the text/logo layer (foreground). No real revision was required except for some positioning of the text elements. The whole thing just sort of happened. And the eeriest element is the "sentient vortex" itself. The blue layer. The face.

Curiously, if you look closely at the center, a five-pointed star emerges (slightly blur your eyes, you'll see it). What's odd here is that my original idea for the cover was that it would be based on simple linear forms. The plan was to place a large, hollow circle on a black background, and within it, a smaller off-center hollow circle. I was going to map the position of the smaller circle to the exact position of the planet Jupiter's great red spot. The outer circle would represent Jupiter's atmospheric perimeter. I had an urge to drop a five-pointed star within the smaller circle, to form a pentagram (potentially inverted) or pentacle. I had collected a series of pentagram images for reference, as well as some high resolution images of Jupiter from JPL to use as a positional guide. The initial version of the cover amounted to nothing more than an uninteresting framework, so experimentation with fractally-generated vortexes ensued. I found a lovely construct almost immediately, and started playing around with it. I duplicated the layer and flipped the copy along the horizontal axis. Suddenly staring back at me was the "face in blue":

Not only did this eerie thing instantly satisfy the "sentient vortex" theme, it also met my desire to place a five-pointed star somewhere within the design (though not inverted, unfortunately). After a few color enhancement passes, the organic five-pointed ideogram became more apparent. The red layer was another simple randomized fractal rendering, horizontally duplicated to frame the blue face. The fact that the face emerged instantly, from the very first random mathematical seed I generated, is very "phildickian," and a testament, perhaps, to the power of the sentient vortex we all wander through as we sleep.

Sentient Vortex comes out on December 21st, 2015. Pre-orders are available now. The full 24bit/96kHz album comes with a thematic digital booklet and copies of the album's cover art - perfect for whichever era the listener/time traveler is computing in (aspect ratios include 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10, featuring resolutions as high as 5120x2880; yes, I'm looking out for you iMac 5K owners)! Note: more tracks will be revealed over the coming weeks as the release date gets closer.

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A Skeleton Key to Distance to Jupiter's "Long Shadows"

On July 31st, 2012, I walked from the backyard of my parent's house into their carport. I'd been in the small guest house outside for many hours, and the passage from this outer building to the carport is mostly covered, so I could not see the sky. As I walked to my car, which was parked next to my dad's SUV, something seemed very strange. It was a typical blazing hot Arizona day, and yet, all around, the landscape was in shadow. However, beyond that shadow, all was bright. Confused by what I saw, I walked into the light and looked up. In the sky, directly between the blazing star at the heart of our solar system and the house I grew up in, was a lone, ominously black cloud. It cast a column of shadow directly onto the property. The sky was a brilliant blue in every direction. There was not a single cloud in the sky - except for this one.

This photo has haunted me since the moment I took it. This was a mere three months before my father died of complications (read: gram-negative bacterial infection) from liver cancer. Throughout the year prior, I was at my parent's house daily, operating a business from the converted guest house out back. I'd been watching my dad purging his belongings for weeks. Each day, as I'd arrive, I'd see him in the carport, filling the back of his SUV with an endless stream of things from his life, which he'd then drop off at the local Good Will. I never let it get to me, because we all knew he was quite sick, but those moments were far more haunting than I realized, for they colored everything, coating each day with a form of dread I'd never experienced before. So when I saw the long shadow in the sky that day, I knew something was coming. My dad's "purging of his possessions" phase was over; it had ended that week, in fact, and he hadn't been as active around the property. This acre lot had been his long form project since the family moved in, back in July of 1977. Being a civil engineer, his will to shape the landscape ruled his existence. He'd always been outside, working, digging, crafting, shaping, and engineering. He'd entered a new phase, however, where his energy was low and he often remained couch-bound, trapped between his failing liver and the curse of my mother's addiction to the relentless mediocrity of daytime television - a blessed noise to her which seemed to act like a protective barrier between herself and reality. An infection seemed to take hold of my dad on October 26th, 2012. I was almost home (25 miles away) when I got the call from my mother that something was profoundly wrong, and I quickly turned around in rush hour traffic. Two days later, shortly after midnight on the 28th, he died.

In January of 2013, I began work on the sixteenth Distance to Jupiter album, code-named "October Mind." This title, I suspect, was a nod to my dad's death, since the words had manifested during one of my silent commutes after he died, and then bounced around in my head for months. The music that was emerging, however, was incredibly difficult to dissect or understand, and it wasn't until the first anniversary of my dad's passing that the tracks began to evolve at a panic-inducing pace. From October of 2013 to the last day of the year, these seven tracks took their final form (they are unrecognizable when compared to their earliest incarnations). Track names and order had been set, so the next step was to find the album title. "October Mind" now felt worn out to me, but as I listened to the final mix of track #6 ("Long Shadows"), an array of visuals filled my mind's eye. Columns of shadow bled from a darkening, innermost sky. It all became understandable:

I then turned my thoughts to the cover design. I had been experimenting with older artworks (based on custom filters using integer maths) from the late 1990s and early 2000s, trying to repurpose them into something that captured the moods of the music, but as I rummaged through my digital archives, I strayed upon that series of photos I had taken of the long shadow darkly cast upon my childhood home. I had never explored these images. I had taken them, and simply forgotten they existed, subtly frightened to look too closely. Would there be an obvious pattern? A leering gaze from a reaper in the sky? As I explored each photo, I couldn't help marveling at the occurrence itself. This bizarre, singular black cloud that had been so ominous and direct in appearance and meaning was truly stunning to behold. On that day, the temperature had eclipsed 100 degrees, and though the historical record shows scattered clouds in the region, at this moment, there was just the one.

The final image has been heavily processed. The orbs of light and the lens-like structure that surrounds the cloud is a nod to the camera itself (an iPhone 4S), which preserved this event. It also recalls the eye, perhaps both of the viewer and of this unknowable "thing" in the sky. The design is bisected on the horizontal by the logo and title. The DTJ logo has always been rendered in Arial Black Regular (a seemingly irrevocable design decision steeped in the long ago, circa 1996); the title was rendered using the font Eurostile. The image ultimately denotes light (top; above the cloud) and dark (bottom; below the cloud), and perfectly captures the mood of the seven tracks that make up the album. I still don't know if this finished piece honors the situation I found myself in at my dad's side in the hospital, just a few short months after the original photo was taken.

As I raised my camera towards the sky on that hot summer day, the cloud felt like a gentle but ominous warning, on a scale that dominated the firmament. The final image, I hope, captures some sense of that, but there is an echo of something else. Though my dad suffered from liver cancer and its complications, his official cause of death was listed as respiratory failure. The truth behind that failure, however, was the gram-negative bacteria that resisted everything the doctors threw at it, even experimental antibiotics. So the circular form you see in the image is also a bacterial cell, the perimeter a plasma membrane, the interior a frightening cytoplasmic mix. Making music is a form of escape, and while none of the tracks on the album are specifically keyed to this interpretation, the presence of gram-negative bacteria in our world is an idea I've been running away from since the day my father died.

The majority of Distance to Jupiter albums all represent a form of personal escape for me: not only of past events and present struggles, but of future potentialities. My father's end was something I knew was coming, and it had been inducing existential panic since 1999. Now that this overarching event has come to pass, it isn't clear where the Distance to Jupiter project will go next. New aural impulses are emerging, but everything feels different.

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The origin of "Distance to Jupiter"

On October 23rd, 1999, the planet Jupiter was very close to Earth. Jupiter was at opposition (opposite the sun as seen from Earth). This opposition occurs every 12 years or so—it's happening again this October—but the distance to Jupiter from Earth varies. On this particular day, the distance was about 3.96AU (592,407,567.93 kilometers, or 368,104,996.78 miles). I was at my parent's home, in their backyard, with a telescope (a 9" reflector), gazing up at Jupiter and its sparkling moons. I'm not sure exactly when, but at some point during this simple run of observations, I had come to the decision to start releasing experimental electronic music. I know that makes little causal sense, but I had always been drawn to music which tied itself thematically to the wonders of the Solar System, perhaps the result of growing up to the tune of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I owned the soundtrack to that series and I'd usually fall asleep each night listening to Vangelis' "Alpha" and "Heaven and Hell, Part 1" on perpetual loop, my mind voyaging out there, watching safely from my spaceship of the imagination as inscrutable space empires waged war on the other side of the Milky Way.

So on this cool, October night in 1999, I found the phrase "distance to Jupiter" stuck in my head. The media had hyped this moment (Jupiter's proximity to Earth), and perhaps that's why these words were lodged there. But my mind was oscillating between two powerful forms of awe: 368 million miles was an immense distance, but it was also minuscule, especially when compared to more distant planets, objects, or other stars. I remember thinking that someday, a journey of 368 million miles would seem trivial to the human species; that at some moment in the future, a sight-seeing day-trip to Europa would be common for the citizens of Earth.

The distance to Jupiter is important in other, less-fanciful ways, too. The planet is close to the inner Solar System, and it possesses a vast gravity well. Many astronomers believe this casts Jupiter in the role of protector, partially shielding the planets closer to the Sun from comets and asteroids; some astronomers believe that Jupiter has the opposite effect—drawing comets from the Kuiper belt dangerously toward Earth. Either way, the distance to Jupiter from Earth might affect our survival or destruction. Beyond Mars, Jupiter and its moons could harbor extraterrestrial life. There is evidence that the moons Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto possess underground oceans of liquid water, capable of possibly supporting simple plants or micro-organisms. All these ideas are tied, in some way, to distance.

Yet after returning home that evening, those three words—"distance to Jupiter"—did not immediately coalesce into a designation for my music project. Even though I'd been recording tracks since 1996, it had simply never occurred to me to "name" the project, since my rig was so crude and simple. It consisted of a solitary Roland MC-303 Groovebox (music sequencer/synthesizer) and a consumer-grade Sony Minidisc deck. I had tied these two devices together to record live performances. As awful as that might seem, the performances themselves were constructed with loops—sequences of notes and rhythms—not just single tones or random keyboard wanderings. The loop-based approach led to surprising complexity, and the maximum approach to minimalism on the hardware side led to focused creativity. Thus, inspired by visions of Jupiter, I cracked open a fresh MiniDisc and inserted it into my deck to try to capture some of what I had been feeling a few hours before. The unit asked me to name the disc, and I pulled my keyboard close. Those three words emerged—perhaps solely as an honorific—and I've never once reconsidered the project's name.

Later, I extracted the music from the MiniDisc and brought it to my friend Chris Bailey, who put a final mix together. I called the album "To Sleep To Music" (a nod, perhaps, to that habit of childhood) but the title's palindromic quality then caught my eye, and "Music To Sleep To" was released via MP3.com on October 31st, 1999.

"Monstrous Fire" Now Available; "Lines in the Sky" remastered!

The 14th Distance to Jupiter album Monstrous Fire is now on sale for $5USD! Available for immediate download in your choice of 320k mp3, FLAC, or just about any other downloadable format you could possibly desire (seriously). Find it here!



Also available: remastered and updated edition of Distance to Jupiter's 13th album Lines in the Sky (2009). Contains two previously unreleased bonus tracks ("Destiny" and "Distant") from the original recording session. $5USD. Find it here!

A Description of "Monstrous Fire" by Distance to Jupiter

This is the 14th Distance to Jupiter album. Put on your headphones, turn down the lights, and close your eyes for 44 minutes. Listen to the whole thing using the widget above, with accompanying notes below.

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Track Notes

Track 1: Sleep. The origin of "Sleep" (known as "Hypnos" during prototyping, but originally titled "What The Fuck Is This?") can be traced back as far as January 8th, 2009, though work was not resumed on this track until almost a year later (December 31st, 2009). This track was the first track recorded for the prior album Lines in the Sky (2009), but it was quickly abandoned, despite its imagery and potential (it did not seem to fit that album's "electro-medieval" undercurrent); thus, it became the perfect starting point for Monstrous Fire, and there was never any doubt that it would be the first track on the new album. It offers a solid departure point for a distinct new direction.

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Track 2: Hidden Reality. This was the sixth track recorded. It emerged swiftly, almost fully-formed, during a rainy, windswept winter day in Phoenix, Arizona (2/20/2011). The track's title relates to its inspiration: the book "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene, which I had just finished reading; and that, coupled with attendance at the most recent Origins debate, had really pushed my mind into the deep end of the cosmos. When I awoke the next day, I really had no idea that by dusk this track would exist. Though it experienced some subtle iterations in the weeks that followed, these were primarily related to the final mix. The initial sequence of notes—sadness—manifested at random, as my hands fell on the keyboard. I'd been thinking about Hugh Everett and the effect his "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction" (later called "many-worlds") had had on his life and career. I find it fascinating that Everett stopped his research in theoretical physics after obtaining his Ph.D.

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Track 3: Quantum Man. Work on this track commenced the day after finishing Lawrence Krauss's new book on Richard Feynman called "Quantum Man". The track, the 5th recorded, has a distinct structure, with a sort of analytical tone slowly being overtaken by a far more alive sound—that of a buzz-laden guitar. It mirrors a pattern that Krauss points out in the book about the way Feynman lived his life. He was a man who embraced simultaneous life paths (like particles in quantum physics itself). The imagery in this track attempts to embody that simultaneity. A Nobel laureate's life and the life of a rock star inextricably commingled—bound by the distant echo of applause from a Nobel Prize ceremony now lost in time.

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Track 4: Forgotten. This track (the 10th recorded) emerged from the up-tempo wreckage of the second track recorded in the Monstrous Fire project (a track which never made it beyond prototyping). Dropping the tempo considerably and jettisoning most of the performance, I discovered there were some truly mind-expanding note progressions hidden in the murk. The vibrating bass drone was of particular interest, and it seems to hit all the right regions of the brain in just the right ways. The place this track describes is a forgotten one. It speaks of the ruins of a vanished civilization, carved into the black stone of a frozen continent.

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Track 5: Monstrous Fire. The title track, recorded late in the project (12th). The imagery here is subtle, backed by a driving electronic tempo, evoking trance-like feelings; this is a meditation session aboard a faster-than-light star ship. This is a journey into a distant planet's unexplored countryside beneath a darkening sky. The title emerged from a curious bit of synchronicity. Back in 2008, the bookseller Barnes & Noble released a gigantic tome of H. P. Lovecraft's work, called "H. P. Lovecraft: The Fiction." It's a feast for any Lovecraft fan (1,100+ pages). Despite already owning a set of the definitive Arkham House editions of Lovecraft's work, I grabbed a copy without hesitation and promptly forgot about it once I lugged it home. So years later, as I listened to what would become track 5 ("Monstrous Fire") through headphones, I stood before my bookcases. I had the track on repeat, listening to the final mix, and I randomly took down the Lovecraft tome. However, I had just glanced at my computer screen, noting the track was 6:14 in length. I am not sure why, but I turned to page 614 in the book, and the first two words on the page were "monstrous fire" - but more than this, as it turns out, this passage is from my favorite H. P. L. story of all time: "The Colour Out of Space" - and in fact, it's from the very paragraph I often cite as to why. Here's a clip: "...the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well—seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism." Monstrous fire, indeed.

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Track 6: We Have Always Been At War. Another dark scene, documented, presented, and processed: war. The last track recorded, the initial three notes were found in an abandoned project file from some earlier point, akin to some blasted out warehouse in the middle of a battlefield. When transformed from guitar into a brooding synth, the track took off. The images presented are of war approaching, at first on a horizon, but coming ever closer, until finally it's right outside your door: machine gun fire, explosions, roaring jet fighters, and the shouted orders of soldiers on the run. The title did not occur to me until I was listening to the final mix. Those who've read George Orwell will understand the reference. In keeping with the theme of synchronicity at work in the Monstrous Fire project, I had started to feel vaguely creeped-out by this track, having listened to it so many times. I'd been upstairs for four hours and decided to head back down into a darkened house. The room below was bathed in a subtle gray-blue tone by the television. When I realized what was on screen, all I could do was smile: Michael Radford's amazing 1984 version of Orwell's "Ninteen Eighty-Four." We have always been at war.

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Track 7: Silver Key. The 9th track recorded. A sequence of agonized, searching notes, growing, repeating, augmented by a blooming, infectious beat; winds of swirling synths, and the guitars which attend to them; distant bells like a beacon, conquering the buzzing digital swarm, before giving way to a seething bank of corrupted violins. A track not so much about imagery as raw feeling. It's about a revisited dream place, overflowing with mysteries locked within the unconscious. The album almost took its title from this track, but something kept that from happening. Something... monstrous.

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Track 8: Unexplored World. Recorded 11th, this track is all about exploration. It is a theme I couldn't escape during 2010 and into 2011, attending several Origins events at Arizona State University. At the kickoff seminar for the 2011 event, Werner Herzog was speaking about his new film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and as I listened to him speak, I realized there were likely more places on our planet still waiting to be discovered. For as much as humanity has spread bacteria-like across the planet's surface, places of mystery remain, and this is culturally very important. This track is an ode to the unknown people of the Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This track is my internal theme to the Origins initiative. There is a rhythm here, and a depth. This is mystery and discovery. The bass notes seem to dive, to burrow, to uncover new things, like sonar pulses in the ocean of Mind. A fitting end to Monstrous Fire.

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Miscellaneous

The album has had two working titles. Throughout 2010, the project was known simply as "Ready" (which was a nod to the text prompt you see on the bright blue screen of an Atari 800 computer). In early February, 2011, thematic elements related to the unconscious started to manifest and it was dubbed "The Gods of Sleep." In late April, 2011, the album's final title was determined (see above).

Inspiration for the Monstrous Fire album flowed from several Origins events at Arizona State University in 2010 and 2011, as well as from the pages of "The Hidden Reality" by Brian Greene, and "Quantum Man" by Lawrence Krauss. It was a fascinating project to bring to completion. So many strange little details fell into place during composition and recording.

The Monstrous Fire project originally contained 12 tracks. 4 were cut. The following list contains the sequence of track creation along with the number of prototyping iterations each track experienced:

#1 ["Sleep"] - 21 iterations.

#5 ["Quantum Man"] - 19 iterations.

#6 ["Hidden Reality"] - 14 iterations.

#9 ["Silver Key"] - 17 iterations.

#10 ["Forgotten"] - 6 iterations.

#11 ["Unexplored World"] - 5 iterations.

#12 ["Monstrous Fire"] - 13 iterations.

#13 ["We Have Always Been At War"] - 8 iterations.

Tracks #2, #3, #4 and #7 remained unnamed, and never really emerged from the prototyping phase. Weirdly, an empty project file exists for track #8 though nothing was ever recorded.

MP3s, planet-killing asteroids, and the RIAA...

Initiated in 1999, Distance to Jupiter is an experimental music project.

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The following article was taken from the Distance to Jupiter information page at shimmerism.org, and it focuses on MP3.com and how it was ultimately destroyed by the RIAA (an "industry group" that clearly views the digital distribution of music as an Earth-bound planet-killing asteroid). It was last updated in 2009, but the kernel was written long before, in a time when the iTunes Music Store was still a fantasy. I am posting this here because rumors continue to circulate that Apple will soon unveil a cloud-based music "locker" and it sounds a lot like MP3.com's disastrous "Jukebox" initiative that ultimately destroyed them. I make this point not as a warning, but as a simple observation of irony. Clearly the situation has changed. Clearly, the RIAA has figured out how to survive in the 21st Century—they must become the asteroid.

It's 2009, and the RIAA continues its struggle to adapt to the digital music distribution model. This is telling. In case it isn't already obvious, the RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America, a group which supposedly represents the recording industry in the United States. I think it is important to take a look back at one of the true casualties of the RIAA's greed: MP3.com. No matter what you may think (or rather, thought) of MP3.com, it is undeniable that they unleashed—and gave power to—a legion of creative individuals. By removing the need for the RIAA entirely (the recording industry itself was bypassed), and giving musicians a means of production, artists were allowed to produce what they wanted to hear, regardless of "market need" or genre concerns. A small percentage of MP3.com users were already well-established in the music business, but they participated because they recognized the power of the paradigm. Scorn's Mick Harris comes to mind (he's been creating rhythmic, hypnotic drum and bass since '91 or so). Harris offered rare tracks and new productions on MP3.com, giving him direct access to his fans. But the true foundation of MP3.com was the world of the "unknown" artist; the bedroom-based knob-twiddlers reigned supreme. Every genre of music found its way onto MP3.com's servers. This was technology that offered us an outlet for a creative impetus we didn't understand, nor cared to analyze; all we knew was that we loved making music, and the ability to get it heard—for free—was intoxicating. Those of us who really embraced MP3.com did so because we had no choice. We were tired of consuming the mediocrity that littered record store shelves. But we all had our inspirations—we all had artists to emulate—and we all began to grow in creative ways. MP3.com became a thriving boutique of music never heard, in styles beyond comprehension. MP3.com was a cheap, efficient means of production for people who would otherwise toil in obscurity for the rest of their lives because the RIAA—and especially the record labels—had no interest in pushing envelopes or cultivating innovation.

MP3.com's mistake, however, was their "Jukebox" idea (later branded as "My.MP3.com"). It made sense: If you owned a CD, you inserted it into your CD-ROM drive, MP3.com's software identified the disc via its serial number, and magically, a copy of that CD (from MP3.com's server) was placed in your online "library"—a digital warehouse of music that you could access from anywhere, using your Web browser. The music never left MP3.com's servers. But to the collective hive-mind of a greedy industry, the potential for abuse was monumental.

The RIAA balked, to say the least. The RIAA showed—in the legal crush that followed—what they truly thought of their consumers. We were all assumed to be criminals. No critical thought was ever applied to that assumption. What followed can only be interpreted as panic. The irrational scenarios that must have played themselves out in the vapid minds of those in power at the RIAA will never truly be known. We can guess, of course, about the supposed wrongfulness of people borrowing CDs from their friends, or the looming threat of someone nefariously using MP3.com's Jukebox functionality to amass a collection of music they didn't actually "own"—but the reality was simple: the RIAA and its legal juggernaut became a modern re-enactment of a species trying to avoid extinction. MP3.com was an asteroid—and it was heading straight for the RIAA.

The end result was that MP3.com was forced to change. Their legal costs grew. And that growth was passed on to us - the artists who had sought only to be heard. We were told "If you're serious about your music, you'll upgrade to our Premium Artist service for $19.95 per month." Like the RIAA, MP3.com had sunk into irrationality and greed instead of just being honest about the battle they were losing. At what point had I—as an artist—become less serious about my music? How did MP3.com's legal woes change my attitude towards my music? How would paying MP3.com a monthly fee make me any more serious? The assumption made by MP3.com in the guise of a marketing slant to cover their legal costs was nothing short of a slap in the face. MP3.com rapidly declined. There were still plenty of users—addicted to the crumbling paradigm—who paid the fee. But these so-called artists were also aggressive marketers, obsessed with being famous. For most of us, artfulness was the key. We weren't making the music to make money. We were making the music because we had no choice, and because we wanted it to be heard.

MP3.com is now gone. It vanished, and in my case, it vanished silently, and without a word. I was surprised to learn—upon attempting to order a batch of Distance to Jupiter CDs—that MP3.com had disappeared. What was left of it—and all the music of all the artists who ever used the service—was sold to CNET. What they do with our music remains to be seen (or heard, as the case may be).

UPDATE (3/30/2011): Amazon decides to place itself in the path of the RIAA asteroid...

Distance to Jupiter on Soundcloud

Initiated in 1999, Distance to Jupiter is an experimental music project.

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I've been using Soundcloud for about a month or so now, primarily as a way of prototyping new tracks. What does it mean to prototype a track? It's about perspective shifting, and Soundcloud bestows a form of objectivity when you're immersed in a project. Working on music can become a perplexing endeavor; it's similar to that effect which occurs when you stare at a single word (on a page, on a screen) for too long - it ceases to be that word, and starts to lose context and meaning and just becomes, well, weird. The same thing can happen to a track if you listen to it repeatedly. You lose critical perspective. Knowing that the work is "out there," however, almost instantly forces you to listen with different ears - the ears of an anonymous audience, either real or imagined. It resets the context. It restores meaning. Though my music doesn't get a lot of listens on Soundcloud, knowing that someone might be listening forces me into a more objective place and lets the music breathe again in my mind. Real imperfections are more readily perceived. Imagined imperfections dissipate. Though seemingly intangible, this is one of Soundcloud's great benefits, especially since my workflow is about immediacy and capturing instinctual, improvised "moments" (getting caught up in post-processing can ultimately become damaging to the music).

Update (April 17th, 2011): The album "Monstrous Fire" is complete:



A note about track 2's evolution: it emerged swiftly, almost fully-formed, during a rainy, windswept winter day in Phoenix, Arizona (2/20/2011). The track's title relates to its inspiration - namely, The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene; I had just finished reading this book the night before, and that, coupled with attendance at the most recent Origins debate, had really pushed my mind into the deep end of the cosmos.

Update (December 3rd, 2015): Shortly after I wrote this entry, I discovered Bandcamp.com. I no longer leverage Soundcloud in my process.