AS LONELY AS DAVE BOWMAN Pod CD Digipack 2007 (Sam Rosenthal side-project)

POD brings a new and chilling element to the ambient music genre known as drone. Inspired by the vast isolation of cold, dark space, the absence of human civilization, and the texture of pure sound, there is a curiosity and fascination with those forces that leads to discovery. As Lonely as Dave Bowman becomes a pioneer in the next stage of ambient drone.

With a chillingly isolated core of sound that detaches and draws back into itself like droplets of mercury, POD crafts a singular sound of metaphoric loneliness that is not just a strand that drifts through space but is an enveloping, permeating cloud. It travels in an infinite trajectory, exploring the realm of the unknown as if a breathing entity, expanding and contracting into eternity. It eventually evolves into a robotic drone, a swarm of emotion and memory.

As Lonely as Dave Bowman is an electronic space music deep-ambient side-project from Sam Rosenthal, Projekt and black tape for a blue girl founder. The images came first. Sam’s young son Sasha took the photos one afternoon while playing with Sam’s camera. Noticing they were striking enough to be an album cover, Sam decided to create a musical world to compliment the amorphous look the photos captured. Inspired by Sasha’s love for the films 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Sam worked in the studio in new and organic ways. Forsaking his usual melodic and lyrical approach to song-writing, he quickly developed musical pieces that are principally texture and spacial landscapes, created from a meaningful flow of synthetically produced loops and old-fashioned outboard effects.

Is the limitless expanse of space outside the realm of the planet Earth a selective environment for life or is it a cold, dark vacuum that leaves only unimagined emptiness in its wake? Will long periods of separation from humanity support the explorer or will it birth a long, never-ending core of loneliness with tendrils that reach Earth, wrapping its inhabitants in despair and uncertainty? POD provides shape and essence to these philosophical questions that permeate our thinking selves with unanswerable possibilities. The sound ponders the moment and the eternity that extends beyond it, developing a continuous flow that goes on forever in swells and ebbs like an ocean of time.