A new single from acoustic dreamy duo Astralingua, a forerunner of their new album to be released in March (see excellent cover artwork below). They use a broad canvas of strings, woodwind and gentle effects as a platform for the distant but compelling vocals.
Composer Joseph Thompson and vocalist Anne Thompson sing all the lines as two-part harmonies and make the whole piece into many strata of gorgeously textured ethereal musings. Beginning with awe and wonder at the cosmos ‘… staring through a polished glass…all the shining stars…wonder could I truly grasp….’ the narrator soon becomes overwhelmed at the prospect of the scale of things ‘…endlessly vast…aeons roll past…’ and as happened in the most famous celestial song of all (Bowie’s Space Oddity) it ends badly ‘…the silence roars…I want no more…of life behind these doors…’
We don’t know if there is a way back from oblivion for the astronaut but this beautiful song ends wistfully as the instruments beam out into the distant galaxies. With a calm psychedelic insistency that recalls Pink Floyd’s ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ this is as good an evocation of the mysteries of the cosmos as you could hope to hear.
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