Accretion Disc

Accretion Disc – Spotted Peccary Music SPM-9105

Galaxies, stars, and planets are formed by accretion processes. Imagine stars as they form by the gravitational collapse of interstellar gas, the cloud forms a flattened disk. Everything slowly lines up in a gigantic pattern, drawing in the mixtures of gathered materials as they slowly come together. Things happen. Some can be goofy and lighthearted. It is big. The form continues as a massive disc. On it comes with unbelievable speed. But because it is so huge, it suddenly appears as being slow in phantom light.

1. About the album Accretion Disc

Spotted Peccary artists Ben Cox and Thomas Park (aka Mystified) have joined forces with new artist Plexus to create Hyperion V, and have crafted their first project Accretion Disc.

I dare not struggle in mid-air as I am drawn through a door into a large space flyer which becomes visible as I enter it. These are amazing tales. The reason why we can see through the walls and see the protective coating of that ship coming is that they are generating some sort of a ray here which acts as a carrier for the visible light rays. I don’t know what sort of a ray it is, but when I get a good look at their generators, I may be able to tell. My mind goes back to the clucking sounds which, among the Gnomes of the Venusian Moons, passes for speech. I ponder anew. I shape my lips, as nearly as possible, to make the clucking sounds I have heard, and discovered that it was very difficult to manage the letter V… (pronounced “five”).

The bass is a driving force throughout these tunes, there are some unexpected instrumental sounds and wild movements. Frequently there are human voices in the mix, seemingly as textural elements. You might think about dancing but the tempo is more about experimentation so you can try some new moves with or without the dance floor. Motion and action, harmony, and appreciation. Then down I went into the deeper safety of a subterranean room, where the massive walls about me quiver to a nerve-deadening jar.

2. The tracks

Imagine being in outer space, with no gravity or maybe variable…

…diminishing gravity, or something like that. At first experiencing the inability to stand upright or to walk, the required balance and gestures, I did surrender to “Astasis” (4:26). Always seek to just relax and enjoy, remember, gravity is changing now. There is no telling, yet the form of the things which are coming.

Most real astronomical objects are not perfectly spherically symmetric. A large object, such as a planet or star, will usually be approximately round, approaching hydrostatic equilibrium, which is where all points on the surface have the same amount of gravitational potential energy, or “Surface Gravity” (4:06). The change comes again. Stealthy at first, it was a round disc of bluish white, a disc like the moon, but slightly smaller, a disc that flickers as if it had an eyelid that was being winked repeatedly, near places where machinery made soft whirring sounds; more sights than my eyes can see or my mind comprehend. Now come at last to an open chamber.

The sound? Just like appearances. The rock walls break off sharply. The mist thins. The pallid darkness lifts into a clear twilight. I have come to the entrance to the gates of distance. And there is much to be observed. I have heard about a city of the stars, and to my eyes it seems as if all the brilliance of the heavens has been gathered for this momentous building. The ringing bells, chirping robots, the humming autobots flying along. We roar out above the wilderness that is everywhere between the great cities of the new planet.

In 1772, Lagrange published his “Essay on the three-body problem.”

Normally, two massive bodies exert a gravitational force altering the orbit of whatever is at that point. At the Lagrange points, the gravitational forces of the two large bodies and the centrifugal forces balance each other, this would be a great place to park the ship and save fuel. “Lagrangian Point” (4:08) encompasses an electronic hand drum and sparse piano chords, the feeling is pulling back and forth slowly, the things of the world that await are tiny and blurred.

Sometimes, the only evidence of a binary star comes from the Doppler effect on its emitted light. Flickering “Spectroscopic Binary” (4:37) is a tango in neon bass trajectories and roaming voice fragments, I think I hear a real drum and cymbal, as the bass leads the way. Feel that the trajectory is dynamic and strong. Now think about the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. “Baryogenesis” (5:49) is when quarks and antiquarks, which are found in groups of three (baryons), or bound in quark–antiquark pairs (antibaryons or mesons) and this makes me suspect that either the universe began with a small preference for matter, or the universe was originally perfectly symmetric and keeps drifting into some new rebalancing configurations.

Anything seen up there that is not a Sun, Moon, planet, comet, etc…

…is probably a “Deep Sky Object” (4:44) and now I am lying on my back looking up, but what is up? Out here space rolls in all directions, things are mostly loose and flying around yet nothing is urgent, just constantly unfolding. All at once there is a shadow in the mist before me, a dim gigantic shape that moves toward me, and I knew that I was looking at death. I cried out…

If time is measured by local planetary motion, which causes day and night, as well as everything related to the seasons, then how do we perceive of anything that is chronological outside of our local planetary system? No reply.

This next track starts with a strong solo voice delivering a sort of an invocation, followed by a bouncy rhythm pattern, flipping, and flopping joyfully, contrasting with the solemn invocation voice, saying “Oumuamua” (4:23). I had fun riding back and forth and eventually pointing everywhere all at once. Then things got wet and deep, along comes the bass and the whole thing takes off into a geostationary relationship, “Synchronous Orbit” (5:02). You might never pay attention to the alignment of rotations, the back and forth beat, yet they exist. Protoplanets are small celestial objects that are the size of a moon or a bit bigger. Take a large planetary embryo from within a protoplanetary disc, the voices echo, the beat gyrates and spoons steadily as we go, “Protoplanet” (4:38), keepin’ a groove. A catchy amphibian chorus comes and goes.

You might know that gravitational interactions are…

…mediated by an as yet undiscovered elementary particle, dubbed the graviton. They say that the graviton is the hypothetical quantum of gravity, and in the string theory, the graviton is a massless state of a fundamental string. What I hear is something breaking free from inside a snake egg, I sense the rising danger, and then comes the wild beat, “Graviton” (3:15). Like the force carriers of a photon or a gluon, gravitation plays a role in general relativity, in defining the spacetime in which events take place. There is a burning solo jam, a guitar maybe? Could it be the snake? This is my favorite track. It is within a giant glass sphere, polished and flawless, with streaming lethal oil rainbows.

Is Hyperion V confined to representing anything like classical space music? Now the keyboard tears it up! With the successive track “Flare Star” (5:24) I can feel the brightness increase across the spectrum, from X-rays to radio waves. And then the great ship comes again. It hovers above the observatory and settles slowly down. We are landing, in very fact, upon a new world; our feet are to walk where never a human has stood; our ears will hear what mortal ears had never heard. I am trying to see everything, understand everything, at once. It is night when I swing the ship over my home port and signal for a landing. A flood of light sweeps out across the field to guide me down. The final track replaces some of the otherwise abundant comfort and elevates us into mystery. The sound of danger.

According to my favorite ubiquitous hidden sages…

…the Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking from the 1st to the 2nd of September in the year 1859, that was during solar cycle 10. Solar cycle 10 was the tenth cycle since 1755 and lasted from December of 1855 through on to March of 1867. The Carrington Event created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires in multiple telegraph stations. The geomagnetic storm was most likely the result of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere. “Coronal Mass Ejection” (6:32) spins my head backwards, in a pleasantly spooky manner. Tension builds and then reverberates into silence. But there is no telling, yet, of the form of the things which are coming.

3. Epilogue

Ben Cox has two releases on Spotted Peccary Music including Consciousness, and other tricks of the light (2020, SPM 4501), and On Water (2005, LSM03). Ben Cox has been a musician and recording engineer since the mid-1980s. His lifelong interest in music has taken many forms over time, from playing trumpet in jazz bands to singing bass in an informal renaissance music group.

Thomas Park, aka Mystified has five releases on Spotted Peccary Music including Yenisei Crossing (2020, SPM 3402), Morning City (2017, SPM 3401), Evolution (2014, SPM 2302), Emergence (2013, SPM 2301), and Epoch (2012, LSM23). The music of Mystified is mainly of an atmospheric nature, exploring texture, consistency, and a type of variety that could be called subtle. An adherence to a “less is more” approach, makes the music ideal for listening while working, sleeping, or doing other things.

The third member of Hyperion V is Plexus. More will be revealed in the times to come.

Mastered by Howard Givens, Accretion Disc comes only in Streaming, and High-Resolution Studio Master Downloads, as of this time there are no plans for releasing a physical CD or vinyl disc.

4. Where to buy the album Accretion Disc?

You can buy the album Accretion Disc at the store of Spotted Peccary Music and Bandcamp.

Written by Robin James, August 30th, 2023