Album 8 - Roseanna Angel Lawrence

The concept of time travel is fascinating and that's why the subject has appeared in so much fiction and films. Time rules us all.

For this album I wrote a short story about a young man born in London who finds a way to escape a dark destiny by travelling in a time machine. I was on a train to London at the time when I began writing this story. He travels into the past and the future and this album is all about this character. There are many different types of music some with strong melodies and others more surreal, more atonal soundscapes. This album has fewer orchestral tracks than previous albums, although the track 'London Time Machine' is an orchestral piece. it had to be strings. I imagined the character seeing the Time Machine for the first time and the machine being both grand and a kind of mystical experience for the character. I also thought the sensation of climbing/rising would work with this composition. The track is in Eminor which worked perfectly.

Some of the tracks are also related to other things relating to time that were on my mind at the time. I'm not going to mention everything here but a few of them.

Professor Ron Mallet is an American theoretical physicist who has spent his entire life studying the idea of time travel and trying to create a time machine. His quest is driven by great personal tragedy. At age ten years old his father aged thirty-three years old died unexpectedly of a heart attack. This event co mpletely devastated him as a chlid. After reading the Time Machine by HG Wells he became obsessed with the idea of being able to go back in time and save his father so that he could have time with him again. There are many other people who might want to return to a moment in the past and change it for this very reason. Many people think that you may be able to go into the future but you cannot go into the past. Ron Mallet believes that you may be able to go to the past and he explains his reasoning in interviews and in his writing using Einstein's general theory of relativity. He believes that if you can bend space there is a possibility of twisting space. He's also written a fascinating book and he has appeared in a documentary called 'How to build a Time Machine'. He has a very interesting mind, one open to all possibilities. He's also a man that achieved brilliance through great tragedy.

His reason for going back in time to save his father and speak to him is profound. Some people might think of the future, perhaps they want a cure for something and that could be found in the future. They might even want to stop something they know will happen in the future. There are many reasons someone might want to change events in time. But of course it can cause what are known as 'paradoxes' depending on what you change.

The classical tracks 'London Time Machine' and 'Changing the Past' relate to Mallet's story.

The corridor of Time featured in the strange complicated British series 'Sapphire and Steel. In the first episode two parents go missing in the corridor of time. The father collects clocks, so the house is full of ticking clocks and they all stop at one point. I liked this programme, the ideas and the surrealty of it. But many people don't like it. It's possibly too surreal for some people.

Of course in Britain one of the most famous Sci-fi series is Dr Who, the Alien Time Lord. My favourite was the fourth doctor Tom Baker but I do like the others and James Tenant was great as one of the modern Doctors. The short track 'Time Lord' goes to Dr Who. And there have been female Dr Who's now.

There was also an old short children's series called 'Time Slip' where two teenagers slip through time in a time barrier. It had amazing bizarre sounds and that's what I recall the most, the strange sounds. These sounds were used to show the entry of the time barrier. It's an aged series now. I was thinking of this on the track 'Time Slip'. Time Slip is a surreal track, it's a mixture of snythesised composition from one of my hardware synths and strings. But it has no hard melody, nothing you can grasp onto. Melodies can stick in the mind but soundscapes without any firmly composed rhythm or melody do not linger in the mind.The Brain cannot recall this type of track. I deliberately composed it like this. It has an interesting timbre and texture. However, you could not make an ear worm out of this type of track. Although, there are some people who could recognise certain patterns in a track with no hard melody. It's one of my favourite tracks on the album.

John Wyndham also had a wonderful imagination, his stories were wild and fascinating. Chocky was adapted for television in the 1980's, it's a story of a boy whose parents believe he has a strange imaginary friend, however, David Gore is actually communicating with an alien conciousness. So you have this little British boy whose spending his day with an invisible alien. This was the track 'Child from another world.'

HG Wells - His story lacked firm details about the time machine. Yet some passages are still mesmerising even with the passing of time. I chose two short passages about the sensations of time travel for this track. I also like the descriptions of him as a changed man when he returns from his time explorations.

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