Well, it's finally here. Estrasphere's "Pegasus Vault EP" is available for Download only at the violinist's home store: http://www.lobefood.com
The deal with this EP is basically this: When the band was recording the Palace of Mirrors album, they recorded way too much stuff to put on one CD. This is somewhat of a "leftovers" bin from that era. So, yes there are naturally some throwaway tracks but overall this EP works best as a component to Palace of Mirrors.
For those who never got the actual Palace CD with the corresponding artwork, you probably don't fully understand the concept behind it. Well, the reason why that album had such a huge influence of 60s cinema is because that's exactly what it was meant to be - a soundtrack. If you listen to the Palace of Mirrors album with all the tracks in order, you might notice that the music is trying to tell a story. Each track on Palace of Mirrors is a chapter or major plot element in the story. The Pegasus Vault EP expands on certain themes on the Palace CD, adds plot detail and development.
Anyway, the storyline of Palace of Mirrors, also called "Horse Coffin" takes place in a far future society. It's a society where everything is bound in one huge City, and everything is run and controlled by one major Company. Music is completely non existent at this point in time, and is such an ancient artform that nobody except for the very educated are even aware that it once existed. Almost everybody is genetically engineered, a society of clones. There are no real animals in existence anymore, only genetically engineered and highly sophisticated clone animals.
One night, this crazy mad scientist was conducting experiments with sound, and accidentally stumbled upon "music" or the creation of audible tones..musical notes.. He was excited by this, but had to keep it a secret because any sort of research like this was prohibited by the Company. He got ahold of an old colleague of his who had once spoken about the ancient artform of music, but did not know how to recreate it at the time. His buddy (Dr. Schimmel) was just a regular medical doctor now who didn't want to be apart of fringe sciences that could get him into trouble so he was reluctant to participate. But Dr. Smolens (all of the major characters are fictional personifications of the band members) found some others who were interested in his cause: General Harris from Urban Surveilence and his clone Adam Stacey DVM, and one of Harris' workers in Urban Surveilence named Ensign Lee.
The Company already knew that something was up, so the crew decided they'd have to leave the city for the first time of their lives and conduct their experiments out of the eye of the company in a remote location. So, they set off on their adventure, meeting a strange gruff man (Kevin) who joined their cause.
When they got to a remote location, they started working to rebuild Dr. Smolens' laboratory so they could conduct more experiments, but a bunch of clone hawks flew above them..spy hawks basically who would report the data it captured to the Company of course. So it seemed the Company defintiely knew that they were up to something, but they didn't know exactly what it was. Nevertheless, the crew was starting to get paranoid and General Timb and Adam decided they should go back to the city for a bit to make up fake logs of their activities and all that.. While roaming the city, they noticed a motorcycle driving by them every so often, and they realized they were being watched.. So they started to run away, trying to evade this motorcycle. They ran into a building, and General Timb walked through some kind of portal..which warped him the hell out of there. He got warped to some other weird dimension..one where he saw himself as a horse and colors took on the form of sounds. He woke up in his bed the next day all electrified and jittery from the strange warp..But he returned to the mountain where the crew was so they could finish their experiments.
Perhaps the reason the crew had such an interest in this music thing, was that they had actually worked together before to unsuccessfully recreate music once before..it was at a party that a very powerful man in the company held for his daughter for the purpose of finding her an eligible bachelor. Of course, there weren't any "suitors" she cared about and instead got drawn to poor clone Lee, who was just working at the party..But their eyes met and they met outside where they had a very brief rendezvous before her father's men found out and broke it up, and kicked Lee out. Of course the daughter was pretty bitter at her father about this..
So back at the site, the labatory was finally finished and the crew was about to conduct their first sound experiments..which went horrible wrong, totally chaotic and ended up destroying the lab and killing Lee. The story ends (for now..!) with a somber funeral scene, that even the girl attended (she was devastated and her dad felt about and relented and let her go.)
Soo..how does all this fit into the Palace album? Each track is a sonic expression of what's going on in that particular scene..
Title - "sound experiments"
Palace - Main theme of story
Corporate Merger - about the big city I guess..all the chaos there reflected in the music
Meow - road trippin out of the city
Colossal Risk - the motorcycle chase..spy stuff
Unfolding - Timb's dimension warp
Smuggled Mutation - Timb (violinist) all jittered after the warp
Debutante - the party the crew worked at where Lee met the girl
Flower Garden - the band's experiment where Lee is killed
Palace Rerpise - funeral, somber ending
So yeah, hopefully you'll understand the Palace album better now if it was just "lots of weird" genres before.
Anyway, to make a short story long, as I said, the companion Pegasus Vault EP is out, and builds on a lot of the themes from above..Musically there are a lot of throwaway noise tracks, some carnival organ music, jazz, spy music and other neat stuff.
I'll say more about it later if I feel like it, but if you like Estradasphere's music (all 2 or 3 of you haha) then you should check this out, and also re-listen to Palace sometime with the story in mind. the end
I had no idea there was that much of a story behind the album. Thanks for typing all that up. It'll definitely change the way I see that album.
Got to listen to it again after reading that. awesome