Back to the Stars (Radio Edit) by Alphanaut

About the artist

Lush orchestral electro-pop, untethered jazz, supple melodies and lyrics that interject impressionistic twists into traditional song structures: Alphanaut is the musical collective created by songwriter-performer Mark Alan and Little Sun is the newest Alphanaut full-length release.

Across a spectrum of styles, Alan’s intimate narratives and lyrical confessionals frame the artful soundscapes. “I’m beginning to breathe,” offers the prologue in “Falling to Earth,” the opening track to Little Sun. While assurance rises from the music like a warm mist, there are opaque clouds, shadowy hues and spectral voices in the translucent washes of electronic surf.

The arrangements and productions of Little Sun cast wide panoramas, but the 13 songs retain the confidental intimacy of personal journals and creative impulses captured on an iPhone – small imprints that evolve into radiant choruses. The songs are visual impressions, sounds correspond with images and colors, and unexpected detours lead to uncharted sonic destinations. “I tend to think very visually when writing music,” says Alan.

While Little Sun traces silhouettes of art-rock and Euro-pop, the singer-songwriter introduces warmer organic elements via a close coterie of players who bring strings, bandoneon, upright bass and ukulele to contrast with Alan’s cinematic keyboards. Little Sun was tracked primarily at Alan’s Los Angeles home, where technology afforded him the luxury of a low-pressure production schedule and late night vocal sessions. The intensity was in the songwriting process and a collection of songs penned within a three-month window.

An interest in a wide range of expressive forms is a Mark Alan trademark. Growing up in dairy country near Seattle, he absorbed pop and rock from his dad’s collection of ELO, Santana and Neil Diamond, but was also intrigued by jazz and the cryptic trilling of Chinese Opera. First playing with rock groups in his hometown, he relocated to Los Angeles and formed the band November which evolved through constant cast changes, struggling to create music outside the post-grunge mainstream.

With Alphanaut, a name inspired by a cult Seventies British sci fi show called Space: 1999, Alan created a debut EP The Lunar Age and the full-length Out of Orbit, both appreciated for their dreamy textures and revitalized synth pop flourishes. Little Sun advances and expands on this framework, adding an emotional authenticity and a skillful cast of supportive players.

Mark Alan considers his music to be a mirror of his personality, “Introspective, passionate and politically-minded.” Animal rights and environmental awareness are among these essential passions as is his continued fascination with his adopted city, Los Angeles, and its immeasurable cultural diversity.

The song suite that comprises Little Sun is a concept driven work about the life cycle of a beloved canine, transfigured from stardust to flesh, each song a chapter in the story from birth to the ultimate passage back into the realm of the spirit.

Above chasms of detachment, traumatized love and the shattered vacuum of loss, exists the cosmic perspective, finding the strength to let go of a loved one when it is time for them to depart this life, and the certainty of rebirth. Alan says Little Sun is intuitively inspired. “These songs are not intellectualized, they are pure emotion – the cycles of life: births, deaths and the joys and heartaches in between.”