This is the start of a thread of blog posts reviewing a project made by myself Macaulay Ainge and my colleague Jack Kendrick. To find out more about our project objectives and learning outcomes, find the Project Objectives and Learning Outcomes Post.

So this was my first time to sit down in the library and start thinking what exactly is this project about? Jack and I had come up with the brief idea that was a narrative-driven album directly inspired by Logic’s album The Incredible True Story and War of The Worlds by Jeff Wayne. We came up with some brief ideas about what style we wanted the album to be based around. Firstly, Sci-Fi themes appealed to us quite dearly as we loved the idea of spending time experimenting with all sorts of instrument effects to create a spacey abstract feel for the pieces.

The Incredible True Story – My core inspiration

My core inspiration is by Logic ‘The Incredible True Story’. I have recently listened to a lot of the album and took interest in the way he produced it. The album features characters in a fictional world listening to pieces of music whilst commenting on certain events that are occurring in their time. During these conversations, there are many diegetic ambiances that help feed into the immersive experience of the spaceship. So within the portrayed story both the music and narrative are diegetic. For example towards the end of the song ‘Fade Away’ the music fades away into the ambience of the spaceship’s engine sounds and the characters begin to speak about the spaceship’s interface system.

The idea of combining subtle narratives whilst presenting the music in this way is quite unique and I wanted to do something quite similar.

War of the Worlds – Secondary influences