Sailors of the Sky, the third Canopy of Stars album is now available to order as a full download and also for glass mastered CD pre-order (ships 1st December 2020).
During the day I sometimes find myself staring up at the moon. When I do, I’m transported back to the school playground, where as a child, I would stand transfixed, doing exactly the same thing, as everybody and everything swirled around me. My classmates and I were born in the ‘70s, in the shadow of the Apollo missions and a combination of what we were taught at school and everything that was on TV as we grew up proved to be enormously powerful. My fascination with Apollo, space and the Universe has never gone away.
About a year before the 50th anniversary celebrations for the Apollo 11 moon landing I was watching the film ‘First Man’ when I heard the line “they are sailors of the sky”, which I thought was very interesting and poetic. A few days later I was walking on the beach on a summer’s evening, listening to the hypnotic sound of the waves lapping. In my mind I was comparing it with the gentle transit through the blackness of space and something clicked. This was my next project.
The centrepiece of this album, originally to be a 45-minute track but now presented in seven parts is a collection of musical short stories, based on the Apollo 11 mission that finally put humans on the moon.
‘Springtime’ is an evocation of the rush to the senses as winter fades and nature comes out of hibernation and ‘Ultraviolet’ was an experiment for me, straying into IDM territory, whilst retaining ambient atmospheres. ‘Lost in the City’ was inspired by the second Blade Runner film and David Mitchell’s surreal, hallucinogenic ‘Number9dream’, a novel set in Tokyo. Coincidentally, this last track is an oriental signpost towards the sounds of my next album.
On listening a few times you might notice that this album is woven together by a series of recurrent musical themes that resurface in radically different ways. As a result of this and the concept at it’s centre, ‘Sailors of the Sky’ was a lengthy project to work on but it is my hope that the listener might enjoy the voyage as much as I did.