The album features 3 long spacey tunes, namely: Fifth blob from the sun, Sea of tranquility and Red Spot. This is the first of a trilogy of ’Songs from the Engine Room’ CDs. The focus of this one being a brief trip around our beautiful solar system as a kind of introduction to the Jupiter 8 and what inspires the music (amongst other things). All three tracks were recorded as live improvisations. I recorded several versions of each track and then picked the best. Ironically the best version of Fifth Blob from the Sun is version 8, this was purely unintentional. Some of the other versions may well surface in the near future.
The Engine Room is a concept I’m working on a the moment; the current idea being the place where all the ideas come from. One of the reasons I like improvisation is that it seems to be quite a straight forward way to tap into the subconcious (the ’Engine Room’ of ideas). When recording long tracks like this, I find myself going into kind of autopilot like trance and then the good stuff starts happening. When I listen back to it I sometimes can’t believe that it was me that recorded it as I have few memories of what actually occured. One of the reasons that these songs are quite long is the fact that it takes a little while for the autopilot to kick in. I hope that when you listen to these tunes that you will find a point where you kind of loose track of time and space in the kind of way that you mind starts wandering off when on a long journey.
Till next time...Cheers OJ
The Jupiter 8 story so far
The first real synthesizer a ever touched was a Roland Jupiter 8, I can’t quite remember when it was, probably sometime between 81 and 83. My friend whose house I was in at the time was in a fortunate position to have a Dad who worked for Roland, and so Roland things would appear in his house and then without warning disappear again.
But I did not go to see his Jupiter 8, I went to play with his Atari 800 computer which at the time had some of the best video games around (particularly Defender). Although I did we did fiddle with the Jupiter for about five minutes or so with some kind of spacey wind noises. And then the Jupiter 8 and I parted company. I have not touched one since...
Sadly Atari are no longer with us, and the same could be said for that Jupiter 8 which may be gathering dust somewhere or be in unusable pieces. But in that room all those years ago were my two main interests computers and music. And for a long time, these two interests never met. I got a job in computers and played guitar and bass in various rock and pop bands.
Only in 1999 did I start combining these two interests when I bought sequencing and hard disk recording software and got a computer powerful enough to take it.
Since then I have been experimenting with electronic music and the process of making electronic music; the goal being to make the creation of it as enjoyable and interesting as the end result. I found just programming with a software sequencer a bit like er programming a computer and as I spend most of the day doing this it made it less enjoyable. At the other end of the spectrum, recording improvised guitar or bass was enjoyable to do but did not amount to anything that would be enjoyable to listen to.
So I set about creating a ’live’ set up using modular synths, samplers and guitars which gave me the best of both worlds.
And then the toughest part came, I had to find a band name. But as luck would have it, I saw the planet Jupiter shining brightly in the sky after attending a gig in may 2002 and then for some reason thought about that Jupiter 8 all those years ago and how I had come full circle from that moment. The name has stuck since then, but I still have not got a Jupiter 8.
My first track was produced shortly after this brief moment of inspiration and I named it Fifth Blob from the Sun as a kind of dedication to the great celestial salad dodger itself. This kind of morphed into my next track which I called sea of tranquillity as it conjured up images in my mind of Apollo 11 drifting over the surface of the moon as it approached its landing spot.
And somehow as my constantly in flux live set up developed, the epic (and my longest track so far) Red Spot appeared which was originally was supposed to be a more angry track based on the most volatile part of Jupiter but somehow became a deep sprawling journey.
Anyway, that’s the story so far
There’s not 8 of us and we don’t come from Jupiter
Welcome to The Jupiter 8.
