A culmination of over four years of studio work by Emmy-nominated composer and guitarist David Dvorin. Fascinated by the concept of “space” while growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Dvorin ponders the loss of the collective dream of looking outward towards the stars, while simultaneously exploring inner worlds during times of upheaval and crisis. Spurred on by the pandemic lockdown of 2020, Dvorin began collecting massive amounts of space-age media including vintage news reels, film footage, and TV toy commercials, concept artwork created for the space program, and audio of historical space missions mined from NASA’s deep depository. Reminiscent of his contributions to Terry Riley’s epic space-themed piece, Sun Rings from twenty years prior (commissioned by Kronos Quartet and NASA in 2002), Dvorin transformed and abstracted the audio material via sampling and signal processing, creating entirely new instruments with which to compose and utilize in his music.

For this guitar-oriented project, Dvorin played his prized 1956 Fender Duo Sonic, providing the compositional starting point for each piece. Working exclusively in the studio allowed him the ability to thoroughly explore his interest in signal processing, including a deep dive into fuzz, filters and reverb pedals used to augment the bold, rich and sometimes aggressive timbres of the electric guitar. Another instrument featured on the recording was one used by Dvorin in his professional life as a teacher of composition and electronic music at California State University, Chico - the modular synthesizer. Over the years working on the album, he amassed a collection of recordings made while improvising on the versatile instrument (itself an analog/digital flight computer of the mind) which provided the complex shifting rhythmic patterns and many of the unclassifiable timbres heard throughout the release.

Poetically, each track of the album reflects on aspects of isolation, personal relationships and the external and internal forces that shape our existence in the universe. Circumstantially feeling like a “man in space” (a term widely used in the 1950s and 1960s) due to the pandemic lockdown, Dvorin oftentimes would imagine himself living in a capsule orbiting the Earth, reaching out to the rest of humanity via projected images and sounds (furnished by online video conferencing), inexplicably locked into an earthly pull while being detached from all the goings-on down below.

David Dvorin: guitar, bass, modular synthesizer, electronics

Produced by David Dvorin 
Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by David Dvorin