Today I return to the idea of a soundscape influenced by a heavenly body, this time the planet Mercury. I recently read the excellent science fiction novel Diaspora by Greg Egan. In this sprawling work of possible consciousness, space-exploring trans-humans, living in virtual reality space-faring computers to explore the far reaches of the galaxy using sensors and nanotechnology launched from their spaceships and analyze the data they receive at a rate of time eight times fast than our current perception of time. So for example, they’ll wait hundreds of years in a state of virtual stasis for a chemical process to unfold on a planet to see if its hospital to organic or inorganic life. I highly recommend this book, suggested to me by my friend Berlin/Belfast based musician, Adam Pulze-Melbye. If I ever get the courage to return to the occasional conversation-based podcast episodes, I’ll be sure to have him on. Anyway, this book got me thinking about deep-time, a concept I often return to with my music and my interest in creating sounds divorced from temporality. So for this soundscape, I imagined a time, perhaps after the sun has begun to cool down and collapse, when Mercury, which presently has no atmosphere and is way too hot to support life as we know it, could develop an ecosystem that sustains life. What would life on Mercury sound life? At the base of this soundscape is a binaural beat tuned to 87.97, the frequency of the number of days it takes for Mercury to take a trip around the sun. Also in the soundscape are my mix of inner and outer soundscapes, real and imagined of an alien ecosystem in our own solar system. Also for me, the subject of Mercury was interesting as I feel like Mercury and the so-called “Mercury Retrograde” are often maligned by friends of mine who subscribe to Astrology. I wanted to bring a healing and mysterious soundscape to this smallest and warmest planet in our solar system.
If you would like to support the production of this these sound you can purchase full length, high-quality recordings at Bandcamp to stream or download to play offline at http://mikronesia.bandcamp.com
