Music • As Lonely As Dave Bowman: A long, dark corridor filled with lights. A memory. And then a bright room with air. (excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbTiXB1qi-Q&list=OLAK5uy_k9FCIM6shJG-dGAzhp_UNwyBAvCenSoS8&index=4
Free download: https://blacktapeforabluegirl.bandcamp.com/album/monolith
Model • Mercy West
Video & edit • Sam Rosenthal
As Lonely As Dave Bowman is named after the astronaut in Kubrick/Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. MONOLITH is a soundtrack for the final four months of Dave’s journey to Jupiter. The pieces thematically track his isolation beginning with the failure of the AK-35 unit radio antennae, skimming near the moons of Jupiter, navigating his Pod above the Jupiter Monolith, the dark channel of lights, and his enlightenment in the brightly-lit hotel suite [I’ve excised Dave’s conflict with HAL from this telling of the story.] There are no words or narration on the CD; I’m just sharing the inspiration for the tracks.
Unlike my work in Black Tape For A Blue Girl, Dave Bowman is full-on electronic music: droning space, wordless drift with long suspended passages. Covering Bowman’s journey to the Monolith near Jupiter, the album touches the edges of isolation and glacial solitude, with a discernible warm human core. MONOLITH’s epic expanses, satellite flybys, vast open textures, serene ambient moments, and warmer hues of sparse remoteness are barren, yet without leaving the listener abandoned. Think of it as drone insulation rather than drone isolation.