Crossing Aldebaran Boulevard

This song is all about atmosphere. When I wrote this song, I had Vangelis 100% top of mind, wanting to capture some of the atmosphere of his urban album, The City. In this case I wanted to paint a picture of some far-distant future city on some far-distant human space habitation. Taking a page from the Firefly television series, I imagined a world where many human cultures meet as they do here on Earth, but fractured by the distances space brings.

I took a sample of what was described as a "Marrakesh city street sounds" sample and used that for the city atmosphere. Then I had great fun taking the Doppler effect sounds of cars speeding past on a highway and washing it though Eventide Audio's Crystals plugin, which added glassy. spacey effects that sound amazing.

The music itself is a slow burn. I kept the tempo to something very close to walking speed, building the tension of walking through a strange city. The drums are my standard "Goth rig" as I've come to think of it. The drums have an almost gated verb on them, ringy but narrow. I played around with Studio One's beat duplication system to get the sort of hip-hop-ish hi hat rolls.

The bass synth sound I selected was literally the default voice on Softube's Model 72. But it has that lovely, rumbly bass sound that I love about Moog synths. Best of all, because it has basically no release time, the sound seems to fill the entire space when it's playing, leaving an equally enormous space when it is not.

I find the final product to be full of curiosity, which was sort of the point of the song.