Scylla's Battle is a real death march. The pace is too slow to be an advancing, strong army but more the slaughter of the remaining few. Urban Desert starts the rising from the ashes lamenting theme - third age of things to come. The track develops and introduces a beat at a leisurely pace that's really nice and easy. The title reflects the scene well. It's the idea that large cities appear as lifeless deserts to outsiders. Deserts also appear quite desolate to many people but they generally contain substantial amounts of unique lifeforms.

To Wish Impossible Things I think is a great track - people like this track off the album mostly as it's easy to identify with - very accessible to the average listener. It's written by The Cure. It started with me playing with the main backing track on the piano. I often sit at the piano and play around with tunes and ideas and transfer them onto the computer and explore other sounds. Essentially it isn't that different from the Cure version just an instrumentation change but I really good one I think. The fret-less bass works really well. You can tell it's me playing a real one because of the slight tuning mistakes. But it adds to the realism. Having old friends Alison and Llara sing on the track works so well.

One technical thing that was really interesting about this track is the vocals were recorded on a Yamaha CBX-D5 which was my biggest purchase to date and still is (though I sold it for a couple hundred dollars a few years ago). It never really worked properly. I don't think I actually used it to record much else as it was so much of a head ache to get it to work. It was invented for use with computers and worked with Macs, Atari STs and also PCs. It didn't actually use the computer to do the recording or the processing but you connected it to the computer and a shared external harddrive. The computer was just a user interface for it. It was quite limited in a modern sense but it was a 4 track digital recorder. It had a couple of Yamaha SPX900 effects processors inside it which was a great benefit. It's real problem was that it only worked with Cubase Audio on a PC and only with Windows 3.11. You could get it to work with later Windows if you bought a $200 upgrade for the unit. It's gone to a good home now. I bought the Echo Audio Darla card in the late 90's which alongside a fast PC could do numerous more tracks and without computers crashing after every second take.

Pale Blue Dot sounds a bit Alan Parson's Project as I listen to it now. It was the start of my celebration of the cosmologist Carl Sagan. I never realised that he was such a celebrity in the US. Living is Australia, Carl Sagan was this guy who hosted a science series on public TV called "Cosmos" which I watched religiously. I had always really enjoyed science especially electronics and astronomy. I looked forward to studying the area at high school but a set of bad teachers put me off the area totally. It took Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" to get me back into science and to this day still enjoy re-reading his books and of course exploring electronics and astronomy. "Pale Blue Dot" is a small tribute to him and the Voyager project.

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