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Deepspace — Neon Blue Utopia
(Projekt PRO427, 2025, CD / DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-01-04

Neon Blue Utopia Cover art

With Neon Blue Utopia, Deepspace (a.k.a. Australian composer and synthesist Mirko Ruckels) creates a science fiction concept about an expansive megacity somewhere out in the far reaches of the universe, a place of wondrous advanced technology, all powered by a newly discovered mineral neon blue, a place where visitors can find algeous underwater precincts, where inhabitants can live and breathe in liquid surroundings, where they can climb high towers without any fear of danger, huge biomes with forests and buildings that lie inside rooms on hidden floors, and a network of highways ferrying upside-down plasma powered vehicles. Of course these are the visions of dreams recalled, spread across 77 minutes of purely instrumental compositions that straddle the boundaries of atmospheric, electronic, dreamwave and post-rock, taking his sound into the far reaches of space and beyond, using droning guitars, synthesizers that occasionally detune suddenly, muted percussion and piano, vast expansive ambient fills, brilliant sparkles of tonal color, and sampled sounds (which can include voices), all in order to bring his visions to life, spread across the album’s fifteen long tracks. Anyone familiar with his previous Projekt label releases The Black Orchid Galaxies (2024) or even Superradiance (2022) before that should be well prepared for this next step outward and beyond into the field of imagination. Track titles like the opener “Utopia – Visions,” “A Future Urban Sprawl,” “High-Rise Vistas (Blood in the Concrete,” “Entering Aquarium Prefecture,” “Vertical Automated Parking,” “Upside Down City Traffic,” and “Sunny Hypnagogia Heights” (as well as other titles) give some idea to the listener as to the composer’s intent but even without the concept, Deepspace has created an entire world of unusually beautiful sounds and timbres that few examples of electronic based music even come close to. CD limited to four-hundred copies.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Deepspace (Mirko Ruckels)

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/neon-blue-utopia

 

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