On Black Friday, 2021 I released a solo album of 20 tracks, all recorded as a response to the despair of isolation and the horrors of… space. Yes, they were also recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, and although the “despair of isolation and the horrors of” the global disease were (and are) a daily realty, working on this album was a way to escape.

The music was inspired by Mothership, a sci-fi horror tabletop role playing game, from which I borrowed the title. More accurately, it was inspired by group of friends with whom I played Mothership (the game) via video chat. I started with one dark ambient piece to get us in the mood for the game, which led to another, and another until the album was complete. Mothership (the album) is available by the good graces of Æther Sound. Read on for the liner notes:

Mothership is a series of studies based on a hypothetical; leaving a doomed planet for the isolation of space with little prospect for survival. Composed during the COVID-19 lockdown the work was a way to imagine the terrors of futuristic yet far too possible scenarios such as a global environment too toxic to support life and beyond the point of recovery, or less likely but equally horrific, hostile alien occupation. Many of the pieces evoke the cold, indifferent, vacuum of space, while others emphasize the psychological deterioration that years of solitude and confinement in space travel would cause. Interspersed among the twenty pieces in the collection are a handful of delicate, consonant vignettes because there is no peculiarity without familiarity, and no horror without hope.

The album artwork was created using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The process, an example of machine learning, generated the image using OpenAI’s unconditional ImageNet diffusion model with Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining or CLIP (github.com/openai/CLIP) and the prompt “Dying Earth”. This was made possible thanks to a process shared by researcher Katherine Crowson @RiversHaveWings.