The first album "Planet Fall" was started late in 2008 and finished in 2009, the second album "Next Level" started out in 2010 and was completed in 2011. This album, "Phase-III Engage!" was not created until 2018, a good number of years later. For those years in between releases, I had lost interest in making new music but on a whim I went back to my old software and came up with two new tracks, they were released onto Youtube at the time but that was it until 2021 when I found a completed but rejected track and a partially complete one. I decided to quickly finish the incomplete one and then released both onto the various sites that our music can be found.

"Renew" is the first track on this album, the track doesn't really offer anything particularly new but represents my own renewed, albeit briefly, interest in making music. This track doesn't really have much relation to the story that I was trying to convey with the earlier music, other than that the mission is still on, kind of like how a TV show might get renewed for another season.

"Refresh" is probably my favourite track from this album, it is the closest to my earlier work that this album gets and it even incorporates a few samples that I used in earlier tracks. The idea behind this track is not to offer something new and refreshing but instead treats the name as being like when you hit the refresh button on a website and it reloads it, this is very much trying to recapture what I had done before.

"A New Invention" was for a long time abandoned and forgotten about but finally released in 2021 and added to the album where it might had been had I chosen to release it at the time I made it. It's a bit different to other tracks as it was intended to represent some new kind of technology or machinery discovered by the crew of the Reverence, which is why it has a more industrial sound to it, as if to represent large machinery of a factory or some kind of device that has a repetitive sound or motion as it works.

"Just Another Day" was, like the previous track, lost and forgotten until I recently found it, half finished amongst my files. I brought out an old laptop from storage that still runs all the software I used to use for the first three albums, after loading it up, I attempted to finish it, to be honest it's not my finest work but at this point I wasn't really too bothered about going back and using my old software again.

From this point on, unless I decide to go back for nostalgia's sake or for specific sounds, I have for the most part left behind the software that I used to use and have moved onto something newer, something that actually works on my current PC and because of this, all the music from "Desert Dunes" the next Planet Fall album after the one mentioned in this blog post, "The Great Beyond" which I've yet to release and the Nightmist album, which I will be discussing in not the next blog post, but the one after, all sound different and possibly all future releases will as well.

Magnetic Levitation

So as you know, because I've repeated it numerous times across this site and our profiles around the web, three tracks were created under the name of Nightmist and these later became the last three tracks on the self-titled Planet Fall album, my first album. Originally however, before switching the name from Nightmist to Planet Fall, the album was intended to be called "Magnetic Levitation" and even after the switch, the album name stuck around for a while, before eventually being named "Planet Fall", though if you look on our Youtube channel, I believe there are traces of the original album name in the artwork.

Change of Name/Change of Theme

Prior to becoming Planet Fall, there was no real theme to the music, it was only with the creation of the track "The Launch" that I adopted the sci-fi theme, the theme continues throughout our music, though there is a certain amount of context to the music that only I know about, though this blog I am aiming to pass on a little of that context.

So what is our music about? What is the context?

In the time that I have been creating the Planet Fall / Nightmist music, I have also trying to create my own science fiction universe. That might sound like a tall order and it is to be honest, It's all unpublished and nowhere near finished despite the fact that I have been working on it for over a decade. This sci-fi universe started out when I created a series of eight short films using a video game called "The Movies". I found that there were certain things that I wanted to do in the films, certain scenes, stories that I wanted to tell that were just not feasible within the framework of the game that allowed you to make them, so I started writing down my ideas. Eventually I thought about turning the films in short-stories and then using my other ideas to expand the overall story. In the end I realised that I could use the written format to do literally anything I wanted and at that point things started getting tough, I simply had too many ideas and what was originally going to be the eight short films to be turned into short-stories with a couple of new stories added in, is now twenty two stories. Many of the stories are still just concepts and are yet to be written but a couple are complete and a number of them are quite far in, to the point that they're more novellas than simply short-stories.

So where does the music come in?

If you ignore the last three tracks from the first album, the music is about a ship launched from Earth, the ship is called the A.N.V. Reverence, it's roughly akin to say the U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek, going out and exploring deep space. Within my sci-fi universe, the ship and it's journey comes from a story idea I had that has yet to be written into anything meaningful. The basic premise for the story is that Earth sends out a ship to explore the Triangulum galaxy and the music represents that journey and some of the events that take place along the way.

The first track represents the ships launch, naturally so given the name of the track is called "The Launch" (I'm not so good at picking names for tracks). After the launch of the vessel, the second track, called "The Journey" represents... you guessed it, the journey of the ship as it heads away from Earth. "New Worlds" is the third track, this represents the vessel exploring planets along the way to where it's going. Within the context of my sci-fi universe, the planet in the third track was just some unnamed world on the edge of Earth's territory, I never put a lot of thought into the details of the track other than it was somewhere just outside of Earth's space. The final track is "Reverence", this is simply to represent the ship as it ventures out into the great unknown.

The story of the A.N.V. Reverence continues in the second album "Next Level" which I will talk about in my next blog post.

So how did I first get started with Planet Fall?

As you may have seen either on this site or on one of our profiles around the web, I created the first track back in 2008. The track was called 'Alone' and I released it on Youtube under the name of Nightmist. Early in 2009 two more tracks followed under the Nightmist name and later that year a whole album came about and the name changed to Planet Fall. That was the start of Planet Fall as it is now, but it was not how I got into making electronic music, that story lies years earlier when I was at school.

I was never musically gifted, I hated music lessons, I was not very good at playing any instruments though I did attempt learning a few over the years, I played the recorder a little at school, not sure how I was talked into doing that but I was, later in life I bought a keyboard and two guitars (one bass and the other a normal electric one) I had a go with all of them but I just don't have the patience to stick with things like that so they never lead anywhere. What I did like doing however, was playing around with a little piece of software called Ejay.

Back in school, I was given a CD at some point and it had a demo of Ejay on it. Back then I never made anything remotely palatable to the human ear but I did like the freedom to make whatever I wanted with it (within the confines of the types of music you can actually make with Ejay).

Later on I bought several more up to date versions of Ejay, tried similar music arrangement software from other companies and extra sound packs and here we are today, still going, albeit with some sizable gaps in the releases.