Credits

Music written by Default Media Transmitter and Xylander

Words written by Deborah Pickett, read by Eivind, CC-BY

Cover art by Key 13

About the track

Default Media Transmitter: I've spent countless hours with RFF, and it has connected me with a lot of people. One of the first RFF people I connected with was Xylander. He contacted me on Mastodon after having liked one of my tracks on RFF, and I discovered that he made music that was right up my alley. When I saw the post calling for tracks for this compilation, I immediately decided I wanted to take part in it. I asked Xylander if he was interested in trying to make something, and got a positive response. The track started with a chord progression I had recorded while playing around with the CS-80 V plugin, and I improvised a melody on top of it. I sent stems to Xylander, and we in turn added parts and edited existing parts until we both were happy with the result.

Xylander: I've never collaborated on a track before but DMT started this tune and I found it really inspiring so working on it came easily. After passing the track back and forth a couple of times I added the vocal samples which came from an RFF station break by Eivind. That led to the idea of adding a NASA recording of processed solar data. So the drone at the end is literally the sound of the Sun which just felt very cool to me.

Words

We’ve known for millennia that the moon is drifting away from the earth. An unavoidable consequence of this fact: one day there would be a last ever total solar eclipse. That one day is today.

We lucky few line up along the path of the eclipse, a metre-wide ribbon of land on top of a high plateau. Totality will last barely a second.

I stare through the filter and try not to blink. My grandchildren will want to know what being here was like.