Jupiter is a love letter to everybody's favorite Gas Giant and its place in Science Fiction. The album is heavy and dark, with tense guitar-driven atmospheres punctuated, from time to time, by moments of release that land like strange lullabies. Each track draws inspiration from versions of Jupiter in Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series, Twin Peaks, The Europa Report, and Voltaire's Micromégas. Observations made by the Juno and Cassini missions to Jovian System have provided further inspiration for the pieces.

The album begins with an imagined Stellar Ignition of Jupiter, drops in on the Galilean moon of Io to take in the daily atmospheric collapse, and then returns to Earth to witness the Great Conjunction of Jupiter with Saturn. While the project began with pure escapism in mind, I kept finding parallels between Jupiter and our current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic that tended to pull the music back down to Earth.

As a result, the pieces range stylistically from Blackgaze and Industrial flavoured Darksynth to ethereal Dream-pop with some generative music thrown in for good measure.

The beautiful cover art was designed and created by Mary Parkinson. All Hail!

Search Party

Everytime Io passes into Jupiter's shadow, its atmosphere collapses!
Io's atmosphere is mostly composed of sulfur-dioxide and its surface pressure is quite small compared to ours (it's one billionth of ours to be exact-ish).
As Jupiter's shadow passes over Io that sulfur-dioxide atmosphere cools and falls to the surface and freezes solid. It stays like this for 2 hours everyday until it passes back out of Jupiter's shadow and the Sun's rays begin to sublimate the solid sulfur-dioxide back into a gas.

For a creature, living like that, knowing that there is a doom coming daily to which you would eventually become accustomed and resigned but would still be threatened by a continual sense of insecurity at your situation strikes me as particularly bleak. that idea informed the tonal basis for this piece.
Sonically the piece also tries to capture the disorientation of the collapse and sublimation phases.

Atmospheric Collapse

On the surface of Europa, flanked by the Androgeos and Agave Linea there is a region of the icy surface that is so chaotic that NASA (probably?) saw fit to name it after the picturesque desolation of the Connemara region of County Galway (although they spelled Connemara differently for some reason). Chaos terrains are geological formations composed of a complex mesh of fractures, cracks and ridges which both locations have plenty of.
This track tries to capture some of that chaos and present it alongside thick swirling guitars reminiscent of the atmosphere back on Jupiter.

Connemara Chaos

Published in 1752 Voltaire's Micromégas is an early example of science fiction and a mind-expanding read.
A Saturnian and Sirian, named Micromégas, take a trip around our local solar system taking in Mars, Jupiter and some of its moons before eventually arriving on Earth. Micrommégas however is 120,000 feet tall and has 1,000 senses and lives for 10.5 million years. As such he has a uniquely cosmic perspective which Voltaire uses to criticise and satirise the more self-indulgent trends of western culture.
I read it after playing 'The Eyes of Ara', a lovely little adventure game by 100 Stones Interactive that features several references to Micromégas.

With this track, I'm trying to recreate that sense of the profound difference between Micromégas and his human counterparts both in terms of scale and in terms of how they experience their lives and the universe around them. The clean intro and outdo noodling is in the style of Rainbow’s Temple of the King. I found the first 2 Rainbow records in my Dad’s record collection as a child and they imprinted on me. The following sections owe more to Randy Rhoads and Iron Maiden.

Micromégas

Stellification is the process by which a Jovian-class planet (a gas giant or brown dwarf ) becomes a star. It's not possible to ignite Jupiter and turn it into a star, it just doesn't have the mass needed. Regardless that's exactly what happened in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. There a monolith around Jupiter self-replicated rapidly around the planet increasing its mass and triggering stelification turning Jupiter into a new star named Lucifer (although he's traditionally associated with Venus, the morning star... but ok Arthur). Something similar happened in the Netflix adaption of Liu Cixin’s Wandering Earth.

This piece tries to imagine what it might be like to experience the Stellification of Jupiter from inside the windswept stormscapes of The gas giant’s tumultuous atmosphere.

Ignite The Core

No Light, But Rather

In terms of composition, this EP is getting back to basics with a more grounded approach to generative music composition. It integrates lessons learned from 10 years of data-driven and generative music performance with the past 3 years of machine learning experiments. I opted for an approach grounded in the second-order Cybernetics theories I explore in my Signal to Noise Loops project over the purely machine learning based  approach explored on my last EP: 30 Epoch Opus.

Conceptually this release is built around and inspired by John Milton’s revolutionary characterization of Satan in his epic poem, Paradise Lost.

The character of Satan in Milton's poem has an interesting backstory. 
Milton had strongly anti-Irish views, and according to Canino (1998), he used the 1641 Irish Rebellion as a model for Satan's rebellion.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23604 

Milton's Satan influenced the 'complex villain & anti-hero archetype in pop culture. Think Tony Soprano, Darth Vader, Walter White, etc. 

I think it's kinda great that Milton's Satan has the 1641 rebellion in his DNA albeit for dubious reasons. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/whats-so-american-about-john-miltons-lucifer/519624/

The link to the political climate around the 1641 rebellion puts an entirely new spin on the poem. 

The title choices across the tracks are intended to highlight these new layers of meaning. 

"Better to reign in Connaught....." -John Milton (probably) 

The art features a Gustave Doré plate from John Milton's Paradise Lost.
The high-resolution scan of the plate is from a 1983-ish copy digitized by the University of Michigan Library and maintained online by the Hathi Trust Digital Library [ https://www.hathitrust.org/ ]
It should be noted that Dorés illustrations were created with wood engraving techniques!

Darkness Visible

Opening to the ambient light is a stochastic composition expressed in an ambient style. It is informed in its structural realization by Xenakis' stochastic works. Its aesthetic aspect is realized in reference to Milton's Paradise Lost. Finally, Gordon Pask's cybernetic conversation theory provides the conceptual apparatus to bridge and integrate these elements.

Sonically the piece conjures something of the interplay of light and darkness that continually recurs across Milton's epic. The corresponding struggle between chaos and cosmos is played out as randomly generated parameters, become intelligible compositional choices thanks to a series of self-correcting feedback loops at the micro, meso, and macro levels of the piece. The sonic result is a conversation in which the light and dark become immanent for the listener through their dialog with one another.

opening to the ambient light

Loftiest Towers

In terms of composition, this EP is getting back to basics with a more grounded approach to generative music composition. It integrates lessons learned from 10 years of data-driven and generative music performance with the past 3 years of machine learning experiments. I opted for an approach grounded in the second-order Cybernetics theories I explore in my Signal to Noise Loops project over the purely machine learning based  approach explored on my last EP: 30 Epoch Opus.

Conceptually this release is built around and inspired by John Milton’s revolutionary characterization of Satan in his epic poem, Paradise Lost.

The character of Satan in Milton's poem has an interesting backstory. 
Milton had strongly anti-Irish views, and according to Canino (1998), he used the 1641 Irish Rebellion as a model for Satan's rebellion.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23604 

Milton's Satan influenced the 'complex villain & anti-hero archetype in pop culture. Think Tony Soprano, Darth Vader, Walter White, etc. 

I think it's kinda great that Milton's Satan has the 1641 rebellion in his DNA albeit for dubious reasons. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/03/whats-so-american-about-john-miltons-lucifer/519624/

The link to the political climate around the 1641 rebellion puts an entirely new spin on the poem. 

The title choices across the tracks are intended to highlight these new layers of meaning. 

"Better to reign in Connaught....." -John Milton (probably) 

The art features a Gustave Doré plate from John Milton's Paradise Lost.
The high-resolution scan of the plate is from a 1983-ish copy digitized by the University of Michigan Library and maintained online by the Hathi Trust Digital Library [ https://www.hathitrust.org/ ]
It should be noted that Dorés illustrations were created with wood engraving techniques!

Composed & Produced by Stephen Roddy.
Recorded at Lava Wall Studios between September and November 2021.
Artwork by Gustav Doré .

Stephen Roddy (Line-In)

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