Synthesist and composer Peter John, aka Spearfisher, let us know about his new album, thinspace, that is a sort of soundtrack to the sci-fi novel of the same name.

The novel, by author Jeremy John, explores a dystopian future, where neuroscience and memory manipulation are used to shape our personalities to service the needs of an AI’s economic machine.

The album features ‘tons of crazy futuristic synth textures’, created with a Roland Juno, an Oberheim Xpander; inspiration from foley artists to classical composers; and the cello of classical performer Cicely Parnas.

We asked Spearfisher to tell us more about the project:

“Jeremy John is my brother, 2 years older. He’d started a draft of this book many years ago and it was a story that really stuck with me – creative, visionary and deep. As he decided to turn these ideas into a novel, he would bounce ideas off of me for hours as he developed the world.

Eventually, he asked me to collaborate and create a sort of “score” for the book, which came with many challenges! One of the biggest is the challenge of time – a book takes many many hours to read whereas music can only be truly listened to in a sustained way for around an hour or so. Also, I wanted the album to stand on its own completely musically and to tell this story of a kid growing up in a crazy world and eventually breaking himself to break free without the text at all.

So, I decided not to create long atmospheric textures, but to rather use each chapter as a musical locus and tell this story in a way which makes sense musically.”

He also told us about the process and musical thinking behind the new album:

“I’ve used ideas from the world of foley and found sound, like the first track, Entering the Thickspace.

In the book, Isaac is travelling from the ‘Thinspace’ (a world outside of the City’s mesh network) into the ‘Thickspace’. As he comes to this barrier, the cultural mind floods his brain with dopamine and a rush of pleasure.

I used a recording I made in the country with a M/S mic of a car coming down the road, then digitally altered/enhanced it with my Roland Juno 106 in the Prelude in order to give the feeling arriving into an orgasmic future city.

Working closely with concert cellist Cicely Parnas was central to creating this album. She is a classical cellist who performs all over the world (Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center) with rave reviews from Washington Post, New York Times and more; so it was an honor to recorded her playing on her 1812 Granchino cello.

I would often dictate music to her in real time and record, re-record and loop her playing to create dense webs of cello textures. You can hear this technique on Sol’s Dream, where the entire song comes from the first 10 notes on the cello.

I’ve used the sound of the Cello to represent Isaac and Sol’s humanity and given them distinctive musical themes to depict the characters with leitmotifs — for instance Isaac’s theme (the main character) is played at the top of Isaac is tripping, the beginning of the album and hidden all throughout the story. In the track Isaac is Tripping, we hear this theme on the cello is deconstructed after he takes acid to break free from the world of the mind, eventually losing the thread of the melody throughout the next track as animal roars and hallucinations become more real than Isaacs own humanity (the Cello).

Finally in the Epilogue, we hear a new theme played by the Cello (representing the human) and eventually becoming destroyed by a massive crushing sound (which is actually a granular destruction of the first track of the album). A massive synth (a crazy Serum patch I made) repeats the theme we just heard, musically showing Isaac as becoming totally inhuman and fully machine, showing this theme to be totally broken.

This is how the book ends, with Isaacs choice to take acid and free himself from the mind in turn forces him to delete 16 years of his memory, forgetting his entire life and losing his own mind.”

You can preview thinspace below:

thinspace is available now as a digital download via the Spearfisher site. For details on the novel, see author Jeremiah John’s site.