Stardust Sonata

Stardust Sonata is both a tribute and lament to David Bowie in ritual ambient form. Further exploring the aesthetics of nothingness. Written and recorded in 2016. Released by Fiadh Productions in both digital and physical formats in 2024.

Notes:

Stardust Sonata (FP294) is both a tribute and lament to David Bowie in ritual ambient form. It was recorded in the winter of 2016 shortly after the release of Blackstar and Bowie’s premature death. The six tracks feature ambient soundscapes driven by electric guitars and occasional electronic elements that rise and fall in a network of interlocking waves.
The sonic framework explored on Stardust Sonata was informed by Bowie’s work with Brian Eno on the first two instalments of the Berlin trilogy: Low (1977) and Heroes (1977). Side two of those records feature rich and meticulously crafted soundscapes which provided inspiration for the approach used here.
The final track on Low titled Subterraneans features reversed electric guitar lines interwoven by Bowie and guitarist Carlos Alomar through lush synth arrangements by Eno and Paul Buckmaster.
Track 7 of Heroes, Sense of Doubt, features waves of filtered noise washing over a descending four-note piano motif from Bowie and Eno’s rich synth textures. The result is a kind of desolate landscape rendered in sound.
There is an even more acute sense of doom and hopelessness that pervades Neuköln, track 9 of Heroes. This is thanks to both Robert Fripp’s menacing guitar lines and Bowie’s wailing saxophone lament which help to represent the experience of Turkish immigrants to the Neukölln region of Berlin.
Stardust Sonata forgoes traditional rhythm and percussion opting instead to play on the lamenting aspects of Low and Heroes, allowing a sense of rhythm to emerge naturally from the materials. Each piece uses digital analogues of classic tape manipulation methods, along with the biting distortion processes, granularisation and buffer processing, cavernous reverbs, and powerful time-stretching techniques to transform fully improvised electric guitar performances into fully realised pieces.
My first musical memory is of listening to The Man Who Sold The World on vinyl in the front room of our old house. His music has been omnipresent ever since. My father’s total obsession and devotion to Bowie ensured that every album release was an event akin to a visit from a mysterious Uncle dropping in to say hi between adventures. His death brought a real sense of loss and an acute awareness that something important was now absent, and in its place was a void; a concrete yet intangible nothingness.
I sat down to record the series of improvised guitar laments to explore this strange absence and the results provide the basis for tracks here. In anticipation of Blackstar’s release, I had been experimenting with signal chains for guitar that would allow me to recall some of the magic of the Berlin trilogy for a series of pieces I had planned. Instead, I recorded the Stardust Sonata. Each track would begin with the improvisation of some chordal structures. These would then be processed and manipulated in time to create the rich underlying soundbeds that provide the shifting molten bedrock of each piece. Additional passes would then weave improvised guitar lines throughout these textures to build up intricate soundworlds. Talking years after the recording of Heroes, Bowie’s producer Tony Visconti described Fripp’s contributions to that album’s title track as the “Celestial Fripp Sound”, a quality I attempted to recall and elaborate upon in both the performance and production of Stardust Sonata.
The album art here is a spin on the cover of Blackstar that integrates actual photographs of celestial bodies. It highlights that the infinite void of outer space, one of Bowie’s most recognisable themes while being a field of near-total nothingness, is also a place of overwhelming beauty and wonder.