Future City

It’s been a while since I put out any sort of musical project, but here’s a new one I’m releasing today: Future City. Like 2005’s Spacewreck (which I refreshed and re-released in 2017), it’s inspired by a book. Spacewreck’s title and mood came from the 1979 Terran Trade Authority book of the same name (a collection of SF book cover art turned into a futuristic guide to famous spaceship wrecks); Future City, on the other hand, is inspired mostly by The Usborne Book of the Future (also from 1979), which I wrote about here on Mewsings back in 2011.

Spacewreck told a story, but Future City is a tour of the future, starting with a ride on the Future City Express to the world-city Terrapolis, where every technological dream has come true, from fully automated homes, offices and transport, to such wonderful personal devices as the must-have Digital TV Telephone Watch. Here, we find futuristic humanity on the verge of an evolutionary step forward, as the boundary between human and machine is blurred, and some lucky individuals begin to develop telepathy. The tour takes in glimpses of other futuristic settings, including a city under the sea, a holiday on the moon, and a newly-terraformed planet. Finally, it’s all rounded off with a robot lullaby.

You can find out more at the album’s mini-site, listen for free via Bandcamp, and also buy it there to download in various formats.

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Spacewreck

I have updated my science fiction concept album Spacewreck, which I originally released in 2005. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time. The 2017 version features a few minor improvements, most notable of which is a different sound montage at the end of the track ‘Space Will Freeze Your Memories’ (which previously made liberal and, I’m sure, illegal use of film clips).

The album is now available from Bandcamp.

I’ve also put up a trailer on YouTube:

The title derives from Spacewreck: Ghosts and Derelicts of Space, a collection of science fiction art issued by the Terran Trade Authority back in 1979, and which I recall spending many hours poring over. You can learn more about this book at terrantradeauthority.com.

 

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A new look, and other updates

Prompted by Google’s mobilegeddon, I’ve updated Mewsings’ look, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Hope you like it. It should be more readable on tablets and mobiles, now. I’ve also been updating other parts of the site in a similar way, so now my Spacewreck music project’s mini-site is mobile-friendly, as is the Alice at R’lyeh mini-site. I’ll be working on a major overhaul of the rest of the site at my usual slow pace… I have to say, making a site mobile-friendly isn’t very difficult if you’ve got a CSS-based site to start with. I found the Responsive Web Design Fundamentals course at Udacity all I needed; it’s quite short, and free.

Meanwhile, I’m still working at bringing out a novel or two this year. (Not writing them — that’s already done. It’s all the details of publishing that’s taking the time.) First to come will be The Fantasy Reader. Here’s the cover:

The-Fantasy-Reader-mje

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