Thaneco - Tau Zero [CYD 0160]

Format: Wav

You will get a RAR file

Bandcamp: https://cyclicaldreams.bandcamp.com/album/tau-zero-cyd-0160

1.Leonora Christine 08:21

2.Destination Beta Virginis 09:41

3.So Far Away From Earth 07:15

4.Time Dilation 08:13

5.Billion Year Cycles Are Moments 05:55

6.Neverending Journey 08:24

7.Trouble In Space 09:17

8.After The Big Crunch 07:22

9.A Habitable Planet 06:12

The album is inspired by the same titled sci-fi novel by American writer Poul Andersson. “Tau Zero follows the crew of the starship Leonora Christine, a colonization vessel crewed by 25 men and 25 women aiming to reach the nearby star Beta Virginis. The ship is powered by a Bussard ramjet. This mode of propulsion is not capable of faster-than-light travel, and so the voyage is subject to relativity and time dilation: the crew will spend 5 years on board, whereas 33 years will pass on the Earth before they arrive at their destination. The ship accelerates at a modest constant rate for most of the first half of the journey, eventually achieving an appreciable percentage of the speed of light, and the goal is to decelerate at the same rate during the second half of the journey by reversing the ram scoop fields. However, the Leonora Christine passes through a small nebula before the half-way point, damaging the deceleration field generators. Since the Bussard engines must be kept running to provide particle/radiation shielding, and because of the hard radiation produced by the engines, the crew can neither repair the damage nor turn off their ramjet. As there is no hope of completing the original mission, the crew increase acceleration even more; they need to leave the Milky Way altogether in order to reach a region where the local gas density, and the concomitant radiation hazard, are low enough that they can repair the decelerator. The ship's ever increasing velocity brings the time dilation to extreme levels and takes the crew further and further away from any possibility of contact with humanity. The initial plan is to locate and land on a suitable planet in another galaxy. Millions of years would have passed since their departure, and in any case they would be millions of light years from Earth. However, they find the vacuum of intergalactic space insufficient for safety; they must instead travel to a region between superclusters of galaxies to make repairs. They do, but the extremely thinly spread matter is then too dispersed to use for deceleration. They must wait, flying free but essentially without the ability to change course, until they randomly encounter enough galactic matter to decelerate adequately to search for habitable planets. To make the waiting time shorter, they continue accelerating through the galaxy clusters they encounter, more and more closely approaching the speed of light with tau, or proper time, decreasing closer and closer to zero. By the time the ship is repaired, tau has decreased to less than a billionth and the crew experience "billion-year cycles which pass as moments". But by the time that they are ready to attempt to find a future home, they realize that the universe is approaching a Big Crunch. (The Big Crunch was a leading theory of the fate of the universe at the time this book was written.) The universe collapses (a process the starship survives because there is still enough uncondensed hydrogen for maneuvering outside the growing singularity) and then explodes in a new Big Bang. The voyagers then decelerate and finally disembark at a planet with a habitat suitably similar to Earth, on which the vegetation has a vivid bluish-green color” (taken from Wikipedia) The album was written during the period 2025-2026 in my home studio in Patras. Each track is like a soundtrack to the sci-fi novel Tau Zero. The style is influenced by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Vangelis.

Equipment used for this album:

Hardware: Moog Minimoog model D (1974 model), Moog Sub37, Moog Matriarch, Eurorack modular system, Oberheim Sem Patch Panel, Behringer Ubxa, Behringer Wave, Korg Modwave

Software: Spectrasonics Omnisphere, N.I. Kontakt 8, Gforce VSM IV, Gforce M-Tron Pro IV, Gforce Halogen, Tracktion Theia and Hyperion Acustica, Plugins Arturia FX plugins, Valhalla Vintageverb, Supermassive, and Delay Eventide Immersive, Moog MF 1045 Delay, Devicemeister Stepic, HY-SeqCollection2, Fabfilter plugins, The Glue Compressor Ozone 12, Ableton 12