The Ocean return with Solaris, a 70-minute meditation on exploration and extinction

Berlin atmospheric post metal visionaries The Ocean will release their twelfth studio album, Solaris, on September 25 via Pelagic Records.

Solaris follows 2023's Holocene and marks the beginning of a new chapter for the band, introducing an expanded international lineup while returning to the cinematic, crushing sound that made albums like Pelagial and Phanerozoic modern progressive metal landmarks. 

Following from Light Pollution, Belligerence and Ultima Esperanza, the band return with 
Thorsten Quaeschning of Tangerine Dream for, Milk of My Dreams.

"Milk of My Dreams is the second half of the 20-minute closing piece of The Ocean’s new and 12th studio album Solaris, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name."

Entirely electronic, dark, hypnotic and danceable, it leads the Berlin-based heavy music collective into unfamiliar terrain, trading weight for pulse without losing any of its intensity. It closes the album’s 70-minute monolith on an unexpected note: alien yet coherent, disorienting yet strangely inevitable.

While most of the instrumental foundations of Solaris were written during the pandemic, Milk of My Dreams is a much more recent piece, composed last year as the band began recording vocals for the album. New vocalist Enrico Tiberi wrote much of the track as a series of variations on musical themes introduced in the preceding song, Ultima Esperanza.

Rearranged by Robin Staps and shaped by significant contributions from synth pioneer and Tangerine Dream bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning, the track became a distinctly collaborative and experimental undertaking — and may well mark the beginning of a broader creative relationship with Quaeschning.

The band first met Quaeschning while tracking drums at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios, where David Bowie recorded “Heroes.” They later spent a week at Quaeschning’s studio in Berlin-Rudow, working not only on Milk of My Dreams but on the electronic dimension of the album as a whole.

The band comments:

“Working with Thorsten has been an incredibly inspiring experience and with all of us being huge Tangerine Dream fans, a great honour of course. His knowledge of electronic music, synthesizers and sound design is extraordinary, and at the same time he’s an immensely talented and curious musician. His studio feels like a synthesizer museum — everything is connected, switched on and ready to play. What’s particularly remarkable is his ability to take a sound you can only describe in words and translate it almost instantly into something you can actually hear.”

Thorsten Quaeschning says about his collaboration with The Ocean: 

“It was a real pleasure to work on the new album by The Ocean Collective. At the same time, it was an interesting challenge for me, because I had to adjust some of my usual working methods and leave the safe harbour of familiar procedures. From my own musical microcosm, The Ocean Collective’s music moves through a wide range of shifting time signatures, which meant that most hardware step sequencers no longer worked in the conventional way.

Of course, I could have programmed and recorded individual sections of two, three or sometimes eight bars, but I decided to play many of the sequences by hand. This made it possible to react more quickly to the time signature changes, while also giving the sequences a more organic feel through dynamics, touch and subtle timing differences. I’m very happy to be part of this album and I’m looking forward to seeing where this new collaboration may lead.”

Solaris is the name of an intelligent ocean in Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, and combines the dystopian sci-fi storytelling with existential contemplation inspired by the journals and records of historic explorers of past centuries like Magellan, Sir Francis Drake or Amundsen. It asks questions of those among us who are seekers; what is the psychological cost of being so driven? What is the tipping point between exploring new terrains and dominating them for our own gain? Can exploration be redefined to be conceived as a process of silent observation, documentation and learning, rather than bequeathing our own ideas and values on others?

The album serves as a critique of the underlying motives and psychological dispositions of an explorative mindset and a thirst for power. It is an existential questioning, a probe of reason of the general purpose of technological advance, in the specific light of the destruction of our habitat. It's a dystopian outlook into a future where Earth has become uninhabitable – not despite, but as a direct consequence of human intelligence, as the foundation of technological advance.

SOLARIS TRACK LISTING

52°30'11" N, 13°26’12“ E
Departure Song
Light Pollution
Simulacra
Belligerence
Ultima Esperanza
Milk Of My Dreams
51°28'30" S, 73°6'11” W

Solaris will be released on September 25 via Pelagic Records.

Pre-orders are available now:
https://orcd.co/theocean-solaris

Merch, Bundles and Boxsets available here
wildthingmusic.com/collections/the-ocean 

DISCOGRAPHY
Fogdiver (2003) • Fluxion (2004) • Aeolian (2006) • Precambrian (2007) • Heliocentric (2010) •
Anthropocentric (2010) • Pelagial (2013) • Phanerozoic I (2018) • Phanerozoic II (2020) • Holocene (2023)

The Ocean are

Robin Staps – guitar, vocals 
Mattias Hägerstrand - bass
Jordi Farré – drums, percussion 
Enrico Tiberi – vocals, keys
Lane Shi – vocals
Emmanuel Jessua – guitar
Marco Gennaro – guitar

In addition, the following musicians performed on this record:

Thorsten Quaeschning – keys
Orestis Zafiriou – keys
Simen Eifring – trombone
Jiawei Zhang – vibraphone

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