Anything we could try to do lyrically would just be trite. We have so much information about the Earth, what are we possibly going to say about it?Ĭamp: I think we just decided that it would be more powerful to do an instrumental with very powerful changes and shifts. I was surprised to find that the Earth track is also instrumental. If there were actually a way to go that many light-years away, what music would be in the soundtrack to that? As far as we're concerned, being humans from this solar system, these planets are so incredibly distant, and the song needed to capture this feeling of just being so incredibly far away from home. We imagined that "Exoplanets" had to be something simple, but also something beautiful and dark. You know, what would it be like to pass by these planets? Hearst: I think a lot of this album is about a human's perspective. With "Exoplanets," for instance, how do you translate what you know about the science into sound? That was something we wrestled with: How do we bring in the details that we've learned on this journey and still make it a good song?Ī lot of the tracks are instrumental. Hearst: You could, but then it becomes They Might Be Giants or something.Ĭamp: We wanted to still have a mysterious, artistic vagueness to some of it. Some of it doesn't physically show up on the record-you can't just have a very prosaic rundown of facts. How much research did you do in writing these songs?Ĭamp: We did a fair amount of reading. The lyrics have a lot of scientific detail. Hearst: A lot more consideration was put into this album: Do these songs represent these planets? Is this how we want them to sound? We generally are like, "First thought, best thought." We would tinker and write seven different versions of "Jupiter" and say, "We don't want any of those let's use this one instead."Ĭamp: Which is definitely a new process for us. Hearst: The luxury and the problem of recording in your own apartment is there is no clock. I would say the full-on process was three years, starting in 2007. So this album has been in the works since 2006?Ĭamp: We sat on that first song for a long time before we really started to think about a full-length record. Music has changed our knowledge of the solar system has changed.Ĭamp: The irony of course is that Pluto hadn't been discovered at that point, so we're back to where we started. Hearst: I was actually doing some research on Pluto and I thought, well, it's almost been 100 years since Holst's Planets. But I think we were so happy with the result that Mike was like, "Why don't we do an entire planets record, à la Gustav Holst?" Michael Hearst: It was 2006, when the International Astronomical Union made that decision.Ĭamp: So we wrote the song without really thinking further about it. When the press started talking about it, we thought, well, that's a perfect topic for a One Ring Zero song. Joshua Camp: It was definitely the demotion of Pluto that inspired the whole thing. How did the concept for the Planets album come about? The group's latest album, Planets, devotes a song to each of the solar system's planets-Pluto is included-before venturing farther afield to close the album with an instrumental track, "Exoplanets." We sat down recently with Joshua Camp and Michael Hearst, who together contribute guitar, theremin, accordion and melodica, among many other instruments, to the group's shuffling circus sound, at a bar in Brooklyn to talk about music, astronomy and, of course, the ongoing Pluto debate. All in all, the universe now appears to be a very different place.Īs the 2016 centennial of The Planets comes into view, New York City band One Ring Zero has delivered an updated look at the solar system. Since that time, Pluto has been added to- and then subtracted from-the official roster of planets, and hundreds of more distant worlds, known as exoplanets, have been discovered orbiting stars beyond our sun. Clyde Tombaugh, the American astronomer who would discover Pluto in 1930, was just a schoolboy when Holst's landmark composition was written, and the sum total of known planets was a tidy eight. In 1916, when British composer Gustav Holst finished his famous orchestral suite The Planets, the solar system was thought of as a relatively simple and unique place.
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