Lift-off – An intergalactic journey through space
Lift–off is a hommage to Michael Stearns ambient music piece Planetary Unfolding (1981). Being one of his early synthesizer-composed works, the album consists of six musical pieces, describing an intergalactic journey starting from the busy and vibrant earth into the dark void of the universe. The distinct differences between the pieces resemble the transition from one galactical zone to the next. You can hear the stars and galaxies just like the empty space between them, never ending, always expanding. Stearns most important inspiration for the album was, his perception of the universe being held together by sound and resonance with the earth as it‘s center.
Today we know how the universe around the earth looks like. Modern terrestial and orbital telescopes are able to generate pictures from galaxies and starclusters far away in high resolution. Everybody can see what ESO‘s VLT sees from its location in Chile or what the Hubble Space Telescope is able to see from it‘s position floating in the orbit of the earth above the atmosphere.
Recreating Stearns path through our solar system as a gentle flow out of the milky way and through its neighbouring galaxies of the Virgo Supercluster, this book sees it‘s end steering into the endless repetition of millions of galaxies and it does not give you the feeling of the earth being the center of anything. The motif of our planet being somehow important drifts away, like the pages drift further into the depths of the space.
