Welcome back to the 80s – the golden age of the synthesizer and the most fruitful decade for synths in the cinema.
Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is a journey of listening and space travel. The seven-movement odyssey “explores one persons journey to outer space, by recounting the story of an unknown, elderly, pioneering, electronic musical stargazer and her lifelong dream to leave her terraced home in the mining town of Barnsley, South Yorkshire, to see Cassiopeia for herself.”
This may seem rather feathery, but it is imaginative and purposefully over the top. It paints a very vivid picture of what Peel was dreaming up. The Northern Irish artist is a pop singer-songwriter at heart, so making the transition to a fully composed score for analogue synthesizers and twenty-nine piece colliery brass band is a pretty big leap. The album artwork is also beautiful and enchanting, created by the talented Jonathan Barnbrook. So, if you’re the ‘judge a book by its cover’ sort of person, then you might be slightly let down. So much more could have been done with the amount of people that Peel had been gifted to reach.
One of the most anticipated components of this album dealt with how exactly Peel was plotting to incorporate synthesizers and brass band, two groups that are usually kept separate from one another, and assmble them in a way that reaches equilibrium. From first listen, the record is unapologetically swamped with unoriginal and repetitious content that comes off as a bit too familiar, comparable to a predictable Hollywood film score. In this context, it didn’t seem to penetrate the surface and lacked the fullness that would be expected from such an ambitious body of work. Especially, knowing that Peel is undoubtedly a phenomenal story-teller and lyricist. However, it does bear extreme reminiscent and hopeful qualities that coincide with the cosmic narrative.
“Goodbye Earth” and “Andromeda M31” carry the most weight out of all of the tracks. They’re beautifully paced with a curious atmosphere, thanks to the reversed radio receiver dialogue, swelling arpegios, and high-frequency choir-esque sounds that eventually lend itself to a full-bodied groove.
Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia is indeed unique, but mainly because it exists with an unusal pairing component, conceived from thoughts that deal with complex matters of space, human creation, and the relation of music to memory. One can easily imagine Mary Casio’s journey, constellations shining through the winds and chorales righteously stating their presence in the universe.
