Music List: Sonic Re-creations of Deep Time + Big Science Events
January 5, 2023 6:20 PM   Subscribe

Help me come up with some interesting examples of musics that are attempting to be a simulation or re-creation of some big cosmological, geophysical, deep time, or otherwise sort of "big science" idea or event. Three examples inside.

This isn't for a class or anything, purely for entertainment.

ShockOne has a go at the Big Bang in Singularity (The Monochord of Creation) (first 1m16s of link).

Enter Shikari does the evolution of life on Earth up until the late stage Anthropocene with Elegy for Extinction

In one version of Blood Sugar, Pendulum jokes about "the sonic recreation of the end of the world" but doesn't deliver.

What are some other tracks illustrating or illuminating some sort of big idea or event along these lines?
posted by glonous keming to Media & Arts (14 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Holst's Planets Suite
Ligeti's Lux Aeterna
Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as used in Fantasia
Any of Tomita's "space music" like, well, the Planets Suite or something from Kosmos
posted by phunniemee at 6:53 PM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]




Alexander Scriabin planned to put on a week-long performance of Mysterium at the base of the Himalayas that would have brought about the end of the world, but he never finished it. .
posted by hydrophonic at 7:55 PM on January 5, 2023


The Knife, Planningto Rock and Mt. Sim's album Tomorrow, In A Year is an avant-garde opera based on Darwin's Origin of the Species, so it's kind of about evolution. Definitely a weird listen.
posted by yasaman at 9:21 PM on January 5, 2023 [1 favorite]


Perhaps not to everyone's taste, but the progressive metal band The Ocean did some albums about paleontological eras: Phanerozoic I: Paleozoic and Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic.

You may also be interested in the work of composer John Luther Adams, who makes grand conceptual pieces based on themes of nature. He has an art installation in the Arctic called The Place Where You Go to Listen where the music is generated based on live-updating seismological, geological, and weather data streams.
posted by fire, water, earth, air at 3:04 AM on January 6, 2023


Last year I listened to an episode of Ideas (a CBC Radio program) about a play that included a soundtrack inspired by "big ideas" in physics. Most of the episode was interviews with the playwright/performer and with physicists; but I do remember there were some samples of the music in the podcast episode. Might be worth checking out.
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:31 AM on January 6, 2023


Become Ocean by John Luther Adams
posted by umbú at 5:46 AM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Along very different lines, the Discovery of Voyager was a playful Sun Ra-style performance that spoofs the grandiosity of this sort of ‘big science’ music. It imagines what could happen if one of the voyager probes crashed onto another planet and the inhabitants actually listened to Anne Druyan and Carl Sagan’s golden record, which was designed to survive a billion years.
posted by umbú at 5:52 AM on January 6, 2023


William Basinski's On Time Out of Time is about the merging of two black holes.
posted by box at 7:41 AM on January 6, 2023


I've just remembered two more pieces that may fit your brief, both of which I was lucky enough to see the premiere of at the CSO with the composers there to speak.

James Lee III - Sukkot Through Orion's Nebula
Nokuthula Ngwenyama - Primal Message
posted by phunniemee at 8:02 AM on January 6, 2023


Sunn 0)))'s album Pyroclasts has a geological name, which is enough to prime me to hear it as a depiction of geological processes more generally.
posted by xueexueg at 3:04 PM on January 6, 2023 [1 favorite]


Jónsi from Sigur Rós has a 2021 sound “experience” meant to depict a volcano eruption. Check it out if you happen through Toronto.
posted by klausman at 7:46 PM on January 6, 2023


Star's End by David Bedford (ft. Mike Oldfield).
posted by misteraitch at 11:24 AM on January 7, 2023


Mike Oldfield's "songs of distant earth" falls in this category for sure
posted by lalochezia at 12:03 PM on January 7, 2023


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