Echoes January CD of the Month: deepspace

Travel to the Mega City with deepspace's Neon Blue Utopia, Echoes January CD of the Month

Imaginary cities.  It’s something musicians have been drawn to for centuries beginning with Atlantis to El Dorado to Minas Tirith to Coruscant to Los Angeles 2049, i.e. Blade Runner. Creating a sound that seems to emanate from these worlds is just the fuel that musicians, especially those in the more progressive and electronic realms of music, gravitate toward. deepspace didn’t go for the classics on his new album, Neon Blue Utopia. He created his own.

deepspace (stylized in lower case) is an artist who hovers just above the drone zone, a mode of music codified by Steve Roach on albums like The Magnificent Void. It’s a sound that is free of melody and rhythm and exists in free-floating unmoored textures. deepspace occupied that terrain for most of his many albums since debuting in 2006. But Neon Blue Utopia adjusts those parameters in an immersive electronic soundscape.

deepspace is Mirko Ruckels, who was born and spent his early childhood in Germany but grew up and lives in Brisbane, Australia. He started out as a rock musician, took a serious stab at singing opera, and has degrees in music and psychology. So he’s something of a polymath. But in 2006 he entered the drone zone and the next year put out four albums including The Barometric Sea and Slow Moving Live Forms Volume 1.

The name deepspace conjures up the idea of Berlin School sequencers, but Ruckels has never traded on this sound. His sound is more influenced by Brian Eno’s ambient aesthetic, of fluid impressionism, sometimes to the point of vaporous. On Neon Blue Utopia he adds in Eno’s sensibility for subtle melodies.

The organizing concept of Neon Blue Utopia is that it’s an imaginary city set in the future. It’s not a Blade Runner dystopia, but a Shangri-La of technological delight and slightly surreal wonders, including precincts that are like aquariums and upside down highways. You won’t find this expressed lyrically in this all-instrumental sound world. Instead, it’s hinted at in track titles and occasionally, more overt tone poem-like orchestrations, as in the bubbling sounds of “Entering Aquarium Prefecture.” This turns into one of the more elegiac tracks, a New Age bliss of long, horn-like melodies and sky-tracing synth pads. A similar bubbling water effect on “Bubble Echolalia District” is a bit more annoying.

Much of this Neon Blue Utopia, including tracks like “Utopia=Visions” comes out of the interdimensional sound of early Iasos from the 1970s, with shimmering synth crystals, shards of melody and the environmental sound of rain transformed through electronics. It’s a sound that hints at new vistas just over the hill.

While the early albums of deepspace were rhythm-free, he opens up an ambient groove on several tracks. “Parkour on Lazarus Heights” is powered by a modulating single note sequence, driving a short triumphal, Enoesque melody with hints of electric guitar accents. “Rainy “Mega City” 7th Precinct” uses a detuned pentatonic melody fragment over another insistent rhythm. It’s like descending through a subway of fractured mirrors.

Each track on Neon Blue Utopia creates a different space. You can free-fall into the mysterious, oscillating spaces of “Floor 426-B” or watch the buildings glide by as you rise through the rhythms of “Vertical Automated Parking.”

Some tracks turn toward dissonance, like “Upside Down City Traffic (F-Zero Dream)” with random melodic cycles, rushing wind and maximum tremolo effects. I think it’s supposed to be the sound of rushing “plasma” cars, but it sounds like an arctic blizzard more than a techno-utopia. But that’s followed by the slow moving dream of “Sunny Hypnagogia Heights” which lives up to its title of that liminal state between waking and sleep. It gently undulates like a slow breeze on a sultry day, with sustained, voice-like synth pads, echoing guitar and rhythms that shuffle in and out.  A heartbeat pulse runs through it till the end. Track names on instrumental albums are often created after-the-event. But deepspace actually does operate from the inspiration of his titles.

As the album proceeds, cracks in the utopian mirage emerge with foreboding titles like “High=Rise=Vistas (Blood in the Concrete),” “Future Urban Sprawl” and “A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District.” “High=Rise=Vistas (Blood in the Concrete),” sounds detuned and in rhythmic flux. “A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District” opens with crowd noise of people talking that gets subsumed in a synth wash that is more angelic than its title suggests, before the synth chords become just slightly discordant and unmoored. It’s perhaps the most drone-zone track on the album before the crowd sounds emerge at the end.

The final track, “Just a Pill and All This Will Stop” has obvious implications of “The Matrix,” as the music seems to suggest the pill will take us out of this world and into the Neon Blue Utopia. The melody is the wordless voice of one of Ruckel’s daughters, Pixie, filtered, harmonized and spun into a hallucinatory spiral over an ostinato sequencer melody, before settling into a long synth-pad outro.

With Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace has tapped an early New Age sound, spun through contemporary electronic computer architecture. It’s an album to get lost in, just like the Megacity of his imagination. Welcome to 2025, or is it 2125?
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