To the sky - artwork update

I have to start with a small version of the image, because that is what Facebook and other semantic content scrapers will pick up.  So that's the one on the left...  but I'll include a full sized version as well.

This is the cover which Julia Eichhorn has drawn to accompany Hallam's forthcoming single: To the sky

We now have a firm release date of "next week, as early as we can manage."

While I have your attention, let me leak a preview of the lyrics (below.)

---

---

To the sky

(Lyrics by Ian Badcoe, Music by Hallam London)


Those were our days
we would space-walk in the park
I made you laugh
we kicked the grass
I didn't float home until the dark.

And you never grew cold

but you grew distant, never told me why.

I was a clown

said I'd be around

I was a fool to let you fly.

Got my space suit on...

I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...

I've got green lights right across the board

I locked everyone out,

but I do not doubt

and now it really seems

as if a man can touch the sky.

I lost those days

and how the vacuum's more complete

you are not there

not anywhere

that I can reach on aching feet.

I will not let it end

I've watched the wall clock since you're gone.

My head tilts back

to view the black

and you're a pale star in the dawn.

Got my space suit on...

I've got dotted arrows drawn upon the night
as the countdown runs
all the systems hum
I can follow arrows to the sky.

When the engines run...

I've got green lights right across the board

I locked everyone out,

but I do not doubt

but now...

Houston, I have a problem

it has to be there's love in outer space

but there is too much junk beyond the place

where all the blue turns black

and how can one man in his tiny can

have ever hoped....

I had a space suit on...

---

(This is "Rock Music Description Language" again, verses on the left, choruses in the middle, break on the right...)

The price of life

Some microfauna,
earlier today

We're in the throes of NaPoWriMo and it is eating up a lot of my spare time to try and turn out a poem every single day.

It would probably be easier if I wrote more haiku...

This is a poem from this same festival (is that the term) in a previous year.  2010 if my records are accurate.

This is maybe less shiny than some of my poems, but I think works well done as a performance with some energy.  So that is what I've tried to do in the recording.

This is a subject that I care about quite strongly.  Not wholly from the ecological perspective, although I think that very important, but also from the rawer, darker, more-fundamental scientific angle—there is, within the universe of things that we can reach, exactly one "life".  All life on Earth is the spawn of one original life creation event.  It is all, shitake mushrooms to vampire squid (look them up), the same stuff.  We have exactly one example.

Until we land somewhere where there's more...

But even then there will only be two.  The value of this stuff cannot be overstated.  Taken to its ultimate eschatological extreme it might be the difference between a universe that means something and one that goes 'fut' and passes without comment.  So look after it.

---

---

The price of life


Lot twenty-three, one bucket of mud...

Ladies and Gentlethings,
this is the finest mud that money can buy.

Why? Just look at this chemistry,
poly-heterocyclic rings, carbon chains,

substances, whose full chemical names,
would keep you writing until the stars went out.

And for the avoidance of doubt,
this is because there's Life,

right in this bucket, genuine, natural Life,
in all its unlimited, self-designing power.

There are seventy-nine different types
of bacterium here, ready to feed

on spare carbon compounds
which you might not need

and spew more biomass—
this mud can breed.

Also in here, microscopic worms
eating, excreting, aerating by turns

and food for the slightly larger
microfauna... see, I have micrographs here

tardigrades, lice, hydra,
amoebae too—further ingredients for the stew.

No, nothing as large as a mouse,
but there are... Seeds, nineteen different kinds:

from ruderal weeds with short life-times
(which, yes, fix more biomass)

to shrubs, of various size,
and trees—they need only light,
and carbon-dioxide.

In this bucket, everything you need,
to take a sterile world and clothe it
in a forest so deep, and green,
darkly shaded, pristine,
and if you haven't already got the idea
it's beautiful.

So, what I am bid for this bucket of mud?

I might add that it's rumoured
to come from the fabled blue-planet itself.

Shall we start the bidding
at ten, sterile star-systems?

To the Sky...

You haven't heard much from me about my on-going collaboration with German Rock Musician Hallam London.  Partly this has been because we had a bit of a slow period (as documented here) and partly it has been because I've been busy changing my job, delivering the kid to/from University, saving the World from killer rhubarb (don't ask) etc etc.

Also another reason is I've been busy with the songs themselves.  Hallam and I just had an amazing six week burst of creativity during which we finished five songs.  (For a given value of finished, music production goes through many, many stages such as arrangement, performance, production, mixing etc etc...)

However, it is not of these songs that I wish to speak.

In January this year, David Bowie died.  Hallam and I were just starting a new song when we heard the news.  We had some cause for introspection.  We'd never discussed Bowie, but as you can imagine he was a formative influence for us both.  We thought about doing some sort of song as a tribute, and then we had to wrestle with the question of how hubristic that was.  After some soul searching, we realised that all of our music comes from a very Bowie place anyway: it's all about gender and sanity and slices of everyday or unusual lives; we're also frequently a bit SciFi; often trying to push some envelope or other; and as every song is very different, I think we're reinventing ourselves even faster than he did!

So anyway, we got on with the song.  Unusually we reversed of our usual way of working.  Hallam recorded the musical idea first, and I analysed the metrical structure of his "na naaa nah" place-holder lyrics.  Then I wrote a prototype chorus.

So far so good, but we had to decide what the song was about, and we kept cycling back to Bowie-like (Bowiesque?  Bowiesian?) ideas.  In the end we were drawn strongly to the ideas in Major Tom and Space Oddity—and who doesn't want a space launch in the middle their song?—and a love story, obviously...

And now it's finished.  It's partly a Bowie tribute, but obviously also has to stand as a song on its own.  Hallam has gone beyond the mere "teaser" quality of our previous releases with this one.  He's hired a great drummer, and an engineer to do the mixing and production.  He's currently finalising the artwork.

It's called To the Sky, and next week Hallam will release it as a single!

Yes, you do have to wait until then...  but in the meantime here's the play-list with our previous two teasers Anger Bob and Identity...

---

---

And BONUS! a recording of The rain in certain car parks (yes I did call a song that).  This live recording isn't polished as Hallam's studio recordings, but it does have a live band and audience...