Back To Earth
Back to Earth is a 2014 plunderphonics album released under the pseudonym “The Lyrebird”. The album is sort of a concept album, of a nameless protagonist returning to Earth only to find it empty.
I want to start with making a note about the cover. It was made for a graphic design class I was attending at my High School. It primarily consists of a screenshot of the “Freedom Ending” of The Stanley Parable (2013, Davey Wreden & William Pugh) . The Stanley Parable, including its 2011 Half-Life 2 Mod version, is a massively infuenctial piece of media for me. Stanley’s storytelling and thematic elements can be found in many places in my music.
This album was made entirely within Audacity, manipulating samples. The first three tracks feature sounds of various soda bottles distorted and manipulated utilizing various effects, notably Paulstrech. The titles actually are supposed to refference the soda flavors that were used, but I have since forgotten what they stood for.
The rest of the album is plunderphonic in nature, with each track featuring samples from different sources. Fantasy features samples from the HLRC . Monolith samples György Ligeti’s “Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, 2 Mixed Coirs and Orchestra”, which was most popularly used in 2001: A Space Odyssey(1968, Stanley Kubrick) . P0/|/3 samples Daniel Ingram’s theme for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. If I remember correctly, this included multiple layers of the song, including the full version that was never played in the show itself. The final track was initally called “Identity”, but I later added the original artist, DrDycer, and song title “Who Am I”. The original song is very good, please listen to it!
This album was an interesting exploration in plunderphonics, but I would likely not make this album nowadays. I really like the first three tracks, but the rest of the album’s sampling is rather uncreative, and not transformative enough. This album received a sequel Back to the Moon, and was supposed to be part of a trillogy of “Back” albums, but I have not made the 3rd entry yet.
