Swimming In Plasma by Malcolm Smith

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Swimming In Plasma for synthesisers & percussion (2011) 44'20"

This is my latest track, still a work-in-progress, but you can at least hear a preliminary unmixed excerpt. It's a gentle celestial voyage through thick gloopy clouds of plasma, the kind of music all you cosmonauts would listen to on long-haul interplanetary flights or while completing docking manoeuvres (and yes, that is a euphemism!). As I discovered when I attended a lecture given by Russian cosmonauts, space is a far from quiet place: being in a spacecraft is an extremely loud working environment with all the engine noise and equipment, so this music must be listened to LOUD for total sonic immersion. It will become part of my future space-music album probably to be called "Starship Muzak" marking the demise of the NASA Space Shuttle (hopefully not the end of space exploration). I'm also working on a CGI promo video for YouTube, created solely using The GIMP :-)

Big thanks to Lorna who bought me a cool book about the Hubble Space Telescope for my birthday which has many awesomely inspiring photos of nebulae and cosmic clouds, and a chapter entitled "Servicing Mission 3 Alpha", which will be another track title :-) Read more about the recording process, and here's the instrumentation:

Roland Jupiter-6 waves with MXR 126 Flanger
Roland JX-3P bass with Lexicon Vortex and Sony DPS-F7 compression
Ensoniq SQ80 chords+melodies with Sony MU-R201 reverb
Lexicon Super Prime Time space FX
TC D2 delay
TC M1-XL reverb
Sony DPS-R7 reverb

These sounds will soon be joined by the following overdubs: [to be added soon...]

ARP Odyssey space percussion with Eventide Instant Phaser
balafon
hihats
gongs

Play/Download "Swimming In Plasma" (1'44" excerpt) [2MB .ogg file]

Tags: cosmic

[Recorded at 44.1kHz/24-bit using Ardour through the night of 2011-02-07 at my studio by Malcolm Smith, and mixed over successive months.]

This is just a 1.5-minute taster from the middle of a 44-minute as yet unfinished piece, which is still awaiting percussion overdubs and mixing.

Your feedback is appreciated (but no need to bother asking "Where are the MP3's?")