‘Sun Aquarium’ was the title of an unused early track for this album of which there were two (‘Sun Aquarium’ and ‘Clockwise’ the latter was recorded as a piano track alongside the synthesiser version and appears on the ‘Mountain Surfing’ Piano E.P). The title is a personal reference to sunlight reflecting off water, or how sunlight appears dispersed through water when looking up from beneath.

The abandoned tracks from this album followed the approach found on ‘The Troposphere’ although with slightly more overdubs. But with the track ‘Rhythmic Echoes’ I found a way to move on and that involved playing rhythms through the sequencer and arpeggiator on my Novation Analogue Synthesiser and playing melodic lines over the top accompanying this with subjectively harmonic synthesiser sounds (in my opinion they were harmonic sounds, analogous to strings from space) accompanying the rhythms and melodic lines occasionally criss-crossing over each other. These were recorded in straight live takes (albeit not usually the first take and they were practiced and composed a fair bit before recording). I did like the idea that I could take risks and what happened in the moment went down on the recording allowing for the opportunity of improvisation around fixed themes. The recording of ‘Rhythmic Echoes’ involved an evening where I got really into experimenting with drum programming, but for the most part on this album I played lots of synthesiser keyboards (my favourite way to interface even electronically is through black and white keys).

Aside from 'Rhythmic Echoes' the rest of the tracks on this album were based on variations of the ‘Galaxia’ theme which I first used on ‘Galaxia Pt.2’ on ‘2015 a Space Odyssey’ recorded in 2015 (which itself is a variation on ‘Ode to Joy’ by Beethoven which I accidentally stumbled upon whilst playing the tune differently in recording the three Galaxia tracks found here). I felt that these iterations were possibly the best uses of the Galaxia theme so far and at times other strong themes that I’ve used in the past seem to seep in (Perpetual Motion at one point and Pt.14 goes into a section that sounds like ‘The Professor Reginald Barnaby Jones’ from my first full length song based solo album Mckenzie Crawley Gardens).

In January this year I bought a ‘Moog’ expression pedal and for the nearly 18 minute track ‘Galaxia Pt.14’ I used the pedal to ‘pan’ the synthesiser from speaker to speaker in real time intuitively rather than panning during post production making it even more ‘in the moment.’

Recorded between September 2023 and February 2024, I’m really proud of ‘Sun Aquarium’. All the tracks were recorded on the Novation Summit Analogue Hybrid Synthesiser with self made sounds. I liked the idea that certain elements of the music were left to chance and recorded in the moment. It’s a melodic analogue synth album and I think its one of my best. Have a listen and glide on the colours of sound...