This piece started out with a very different intent and mood from how it ended up. Initially, I was striving for something pretty dark, which is where I was at at the time. However, as I revisited it over the last eight weeks or so, I began hearing other things in it; it called from unexpected directions. The experience was a lot like I've what heard from novelists talking about how characters develop: you start, but they tell their own stories which you are privileged to hear first and record. So the dark tritones with all the overtones and the saw pulse with the pinging echo that I initially imagined being the foundation of a brooding meditation began demanding a more present, less introverted evolution. What could I do but listen?
The title is also a reflection of this process. The initial name, which actually made itself known at the same time the original ideas for the piece did, became not merely inapplicable to the final version, but actually felt counter to it. The current title came to mind as I was working on it this evening and seemed to fit perfectly its new mood. It may merely be the fact that I was primed to think of it because I have been reading about recent developments in and corrections to scientists' understanding of exactly where Voyager 1 is, but, regardless, it felt right. It was not merely a descriptive name for the piece as it revealed itself, but a metaphor for how my own life feels right now: passing a profound but poorly demarcated boundary, crossing into a new phase in a long, important journey.
This was performed on Arturia's Moog Modular V 2.6, controlled in real time variously by keyboard and Lemur 4 for iPad; it was recorded and tweaked in Apple Logic Pro 9.
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