Cybernation - The Dark Plane (Canada, 1987)

 

From the 'Museum of Canadian Music':

Space themed prog with a heavy Pink Floyd influence (despite the year of release), and some deeper electronic tracks.

It's a good but simple description, definitely not with much 1980s influence at all, perhaps at most dipping a toe in the year 1980.  You can see the mastermind / composer / player, who hailed from Winnipeg, Manitoba, is James Rewucki, with nothing else documented under his name.  What about the music? It's pretty impressive dark electronic, with the 'Wish You Were Here' type of sound (which is what they mean by PF, not earlier PF and definitely not The Wall-era).  I love that it's not boring and drony in the usual Tangerine Dream manner, and always maintains acute interest.

From the composer:

"Cybernation was my first album, I was 21 when I made it, it was just an experiment to see if I could produce something that sounded halfway decent out of my home studio at the time. This was 1987 and we were just at the beginnings of the ‘home studio’ trend and so the gear was nowhere near what is available now, but I had an Akai MG1214 recording console which was pretty much the Cadillac of home ‘all in one’ studios at that time, it was 12 tracks, analog half inch tape in a cassette based format that was made exclusively for that machine. I also had an Akai sampler, some out board effects, guitars, a bass, a Korg DW8000 synthesizer and a sequencer.

I recorded the album playing all the instruments myself in a period of about a month and then it was mixed and mastered to 2 track analog tape at Century 21 studios here in Winnipeg in one 4 hour mixing session. I was just teaching myself to write songs, as well as, how to sing at the time. It sounds pretty dated, but that is part of it’s charm, I was really into Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno at the time and I think that influence definitely shows. All in all, 30 years later, I’m glad I made it and I do ponder the idea of revisiting the old multitracks and reworking the album to make it sound like what I had in my head but was unable to achieve at the time with my limited resources and experience."

- James Rewucki

An interesting lost treasure though for those who love electronic music with a healthy dose of composition and variety.  It's surprising he is so adept at piano, synths, and all guitars too.  The deeply reverbed vocals are a bit hard to take, but don't cause excess interference in listening pleasure.  Obviously, those typical sci-fi themes of aliens, space travel, etc. permeate throughout.

The first track called Silence clearly introduces the whole work:

Then the Finale, with Reentry and Homecoming, ending in a forest with stream and bird songs:

Many thanks to all those who assisted with this endeavour including the original requester, finder, uploader, downloader, assembler of the package, etc. and all the way down.