Album review: WARREN GREVESON – Voyager (CD/DVD)

WARREN GREVESON - Voyager

Market Square [Release date 05.09.18] www.marketsquaremusic.com/voyager

With the prolonged lunar eclipse at the end of July, scheduled flights to the outer reaches being planned for rich “space tourists” … in 2018 we are still fascinated with space and space travel.

In September 1977 the first Voyager space probe was launched by NASA, the start of a space data gathering programme that continues in albeit reduced form to this day. As the accompanying DVD explains, each probe included a LP-sized “golden record”. The recorded sounds of multi-lingual earth greetings and other dialogue and sounds was designed to be played out to extra-terrestrial life-forms. These earth-bound voices are repeated at the start of Warren Greveson’s own ‘Space Odyssey’.

Star-gazer since childhood, Greveson takes us on his own space-inspired journey which uses exclusively synthesisers to reflect the various phases of the Voyager project. So the first nine pieces ‘Journey to Jupiter’ represent the early years culminating in Voyager 2 reaching Saturn by 1981 reflecting the second “part” – Saturn And Beyond.

Musically, Greveson follows in the grand synth tradition of Tangerine Dream or even William Orbit, arguably more accessible and even a little funky on pieces like ‘Inferno At lo’, ‘Callisto Flyby’ and ‘Into Infinity’ – all good widescreen stuff and also a fitting soundtrack to Tim Gill’s DVD visuals culled mainly from archive footage.

One of the fascinating facts revealed by the DVD is that the launch of the Voyager mission was predicated on the alignment of the planets to achieve “gravitational assist” which means that the crafts used the planetary gravitational pull and push to be propelled more efficiently through space. If this “window” had been missed in 1977 the scientists would have had to wait another 175 years.

All you can say after such an exhilarating multimedia journey is “Beam me up Scotty”. And stop ejecting space dust from Uranus. ****

Review by David Randall

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)