Cosmic Angst : Liminal

A new Cosmic Angst album is out Wednesday 4th March on Bandcamp, and while it is a short one, it represents several years of tinkering with some new sounds and ideas, an effort to only create new material for the project if I felt there was something different to say.

As indicated by the imagery on the cover, the central two pieces on Liminal conjure up (for me at least) an urban atmosphere - a departure from what I usually do with the project.

I don’t think dystopias really exist. Nevertheless, for some years now I’ve been preoccupied by the sense that I seem to be living inside the kind of near-future setting I read about and watched in my favourite science fiction as a teenager in the 1990s. I suppose that is the problem with the “near-future” - eventually you catch up with it, if it is accurate. And it was! No flying cars yet though.

Rather than lean too hard on the banal trend of describing music as having a ‘science fiction’ theme, what matters more here is that word ‘liminal’. When Preliminal was written (so-called because I knew it was the harbinger of further work to come) sometime between 2020-22 (during Covid, of course), there was something in the sounds I was using that put me in mind of an out-of-place feeling I’ve had in certain environments since childhood. I grew up in a brutalist ‘new town’ of multi-storey car parks, underpasses, and other artefacts of mid-20th-century futuristic urban planning, but it isn’t only something that occurs in man-made spaces. There are liminal times of day, and times of year, and though most of us live far from any true wilderness, it is in these places and at these times that the færies dwell. “Færie is liminal - it’s in the bushes,” I wrote in a diary not so long ago. But I’m drifting back into mythology…

So Preliminal brings us into this new Zone, sounding (I hope) somewhere between the Cosmic and the (urban, dystopian) Angst. Liminal • a and Liminal • b are perhaps the most specifically themed pieces I’ve written for Cosmic Angst, being wholly intended to evoke an urban, and probably night-time, environment. Luminal sat untouched for a long time (pretty much four years!) because although I liked the idea of a continuation from the opening piece, it kept turning into a traditional Cosmic Angst space-disco epic (especially with the introduction of the lead sound about a minute and a half in). I was trying to push into new territory, and this felt like a retreat into the familiar. In the end, towards the close of 2025, I realised that if the album’s theme was this often grim ‘future-now’ we find ourselves in, there was nothing wrong with a little light at the end of the tunnel.

Preliminal was previously released on my Body Cosmic compilation, and Memory Tapes, vol. 1 from the Rewind It label. 

The Bandcamp version of the album includes a bonus track combining Preliminal and Luminal into a single fifteen-minute piece. For an alternate version of the album, sequence tracks 2 and 3, followed by the bonus track.

Liminal will be available on streaming soon.