The Making of Spacewreck

Most of the pieces in Spacewreck started out with a single sound that suggested some sort of image or scene — drifting down a vast, endless tunnel, for instance, or watching the enormous hulk of a dead spaceship loom out of the darkness of space.

All rather spacey images (naturally enough considering the sort of electronic sounds I was using), but I had no intention at first of creating a concept album. I was just mucking around in my mad-scientist sound laboratory (mostly an old version of Cubase VST, though everything was finally put together using Apple's Garageband and, later, Logic Pro).

I began to realise I was creating not so much tunes or songs as musical environments — little aural magic spells designed to take the listener to another world.

It was only once I'd finished six or seven of these pieces that I realised a story was emerging — a sequence of musical environments is, of course, a journey, and a journey is always a story — so I sat down to work out what the story was.

It turned out to be semi-mythical, a spaced-up voyage into the underworld similar to that taken by Orpheus to retrieve his hellbound wife Eurydice.

...Does that mean I've created a Space Opera?