Cosmic/Space Disco

Recently whilst exploring my Spotify I had a wee eureka moment and ended up going down a rabbit hole of 'cosmic disco' research. This happened when I was listening to a song by Todd Terje and I just love the album artwork he has which is created by Illustrator, Bendik Kaltenborn (who I was in conversation with last year for PP!). As I looked further into Kaltenborn and Terje's relationship I just ended up diving into the origins of the cosmic disco movement and found it all really interesting. 

I watched a documentary called, Northern Disco Lights which explored the history and evolution of the Norwegian side to cosmic/space disco. It all started in the remote city of Tromsø with a group of teenagers all bored out of their minds in the long and exceptionally dark Norwegian winters. Through building synthesisers, starting pirate radio stations and making music they ended sparking a change of events that gave birth to a huge cultural shift in the dance music scene of Norway and in turn globally. 

I was really inspired by the makeshift and sort of cut-and-paste attitude of the music genre. I think that this would be a nice theme to explore in my work. I'm now thinking that I could use this scene and the context surrounding it to create some sort of research driven set of outcomes that still relate to music and encompass that subjective side of things whilst still be held in place by a research based structure. This makes me feel a whole lot more comfortable with the direction of my project!

The whole 'cosmic' connotation that comes along with this particular genre is really intriguing to me as I have been developing a bit of an ethereal, spacey aesthetic in some of my work recently and would like to push this further through investigating this subject area. Also if I decide to use this scene to explore some sort of narrative then that will also give me the opportunity to explore the graphics side of my practice further which I have also been desperate to do. 

For the meantime I have been drawing in response to some cosmic disco mixes and tracks which has been fun and helped me get back into the spirit of creating! I don't intend to make this brief simply a load of images created in response to some songs however. I want to find inspiration in the overall context of the music as well which is why I intend to delve deeper with my research over the coming days.../weeks/months!