‘Eta Carinae’ – work in progress

New project I’m working on – let me know what you think. Download it if you like – for free.

Once again, it’s spacey ambient stuff.

One Quarter Gravity: a short film

A promo film for ‘One Quarter Gravity’ off the Cosmotourism album is now up on Youtube. Made for a budget of zero by c-dogg.com, it is the first of a projected series of clips for the album. C-dogg promises that they will get more complex, longer and generally better as time goes on.

New Release: Flux Rope

Flux Rope: Chain reactions in the upper atmosphere triggered by the solar wind and the… actually that’s not stricly true. It’s close to the truth, but not close enough. Without the relevant copy of New Scientist I can’t explain.

This is the fourth in the Dark Flow quartet to be released in 2009 to follow Fake Universe,  Hotei Arcūs and Dark Flow

This track will be turning up on iTunes, Emusic, Amazon, etc in the next few months, but for the moment  can only be purchased from this here store.

‘Cosmotourism’ is out there – in both ways

‘Cosmotourism‘ has finally been released into the wild, after what I think might be 2 years. I can’t really explain why it has taken me so long, although there was that week earlier this year when I lost the master files. That was quite distressing. And then there were all those extra tracks that made the album about 90 minutes long. And the extra tracks that weren’t all that good. And I had to change the titles for some tracks, because they were just so bad.

I think the main reason it took me so long to get ‘Cosmotourism’ finished is because I wanted it to be perfect. It isn’t, of course. Nothing is. Perfection is in itself, a flaw. But as far as albums of ambient space music go, this is pretty darn good. But I would say that, wouldn’t  I.

Listen to the album on the player (above) or wait for it to arive on iTunes, Amazon, Emusic and places like that. If you get really impatient, you can purchase the HQ-MP3 version using the link on the player for only €6, or even get a lower quality version for free.

Spookydirt on iTunes, Emusic, etc

The latest Spookydirt release ‘Hotei Arcus’ is now for sale at emusic for just one download credit.

It can also be purchased from iTunes – HERE

Amazon customers can buy it HERE for just 69p

New Release: Dark Flow

Dark Flow: Music inspired by galaxies rushing away to a remote point of this univserse by the graviational pull of… what exactly? (The scientific name used is ‘Dark Flow’, possibly caused by the graviational action of another universe on our own.)

This is the third in the Dark Flow quartet to be released in 2009 to follow Fake Universe and Hotei Arcūs.  Coming soon: Flux Rope.

This track will be turning up on iTunes, Emusic, Amazon, etc in the next few months, but for the moment can only be purchased from this here store.

New Release: Hotei Arcūs (Box 005)

Hotei Arcūs: Hotei Arcūs is a region of the moon Titan (one of Saturn’s) where there are frozen flows of methane 200M tall and cryovolcanic lava flows. The idea of this truly alien environment inspired this 11 minute ambient landscape by Spookydirt.

This is the second in the Dark Flow quartet to be released in 2009 to follow Fake Universe. Coming soon: Flux Rope and Dark Flow

This track will be turning up on iTunes, Emusic, Amazon, etc in the next few months, but for the moment  can only be purchased from this here store.

‘Dark Flow’ – fixed?

'Dark Flow'

I was ‘this‘ far from uploading Spookydirt’s  ‘Dark Flow‘ Ep to Tunecore (and then on to iTunes, Emusic, Amazon, etc) and I happened to listen to it at higher than normal volume, and discovered that a sub-bass drone on track 2 was ruining the whole thing through being far too loud. I have spent the past 2 hours trying to find it, sort it out, and then re-master the whole thing.

I obviously didn’t spend enough time on the mastering process the first time around…

The problem with it all – not the EP itself, the process – is that i don’t listen to ambient music at high volume; it defeats the object. But I’m going to have to in future.

‘Dark Flow’ needs work…

Damn! I thought I’d finished ‘Dark Flow’, but listening to it at high volume yesterday I noticed a really nasty sound in the low bass that ruins the second track. So that’s a good hour of work to be done… damn!

‘Hotei Arcūs’ now finished… I think…

Well that didn’t take long – ‘Hotei Arcūs‘ is finished. A 12 and a half minute ambient space music track, that will soon be available to download FOR FREE at any damn sound quality you desire from 128kbs up to FLAC. The track listing is:

1. Hotei Arcūs

At one point I was going to make it part of an EP or whatever, but it seems fine on its own so that’s how I’m going to leave it.  The thought occurs to me that I could have put all of this year’s Ambient Space Music in one bundle and called it an album. But I didn’t, so there.

'Hotei Arcūs' - artwork

Some background to the ‘concept’ or whatever? It’s in one of my New Scientist back issues, and now I can’t find it! Bugger! From memory, then.  On Titan (a moon of Saturn, but you knew that, right?) they have found evidence of liquid on or just underneath the surface.  The evidence is great big frozen plumes of liquid methane, up to 200 metres high. Apparently you don’t get this kind of feature any other way. I’m going to have to go and look it up now, I bet I’ve misremembered it all…

..which it seems I did. I just found some stuff about it on the web that says…

” flowlike features in the Hotei Arcus region that embay and cover surrounding terrains and channels. We conclude that they are cryovolcanic lava flows younger than surrounding terrain, although we cannot reject the sedimentary alternative.”

So where did i get that guff about frozen methane plumes from?