Product Description
2 Atlas 8 – Redshift=Lullaby
3 Atlas 8 – EMERALD OBSERVATORY
4 Atlas 8 – Arid Sector, I Think I Found Something Beautiful
5 Atlas 8 – Ascent Theme
6 Atlas Minor – Droid.Botanist
7 Atlas Minor – Juno, Queen of the Clouds
8 Atlas Minor – ORMENOS V
9 Atlas Minor – POLY=VISTAS
10 Atlas Null – NULL SPACE
11 Atlas Null – Emergent Field
12 Atlas Null – Distant Lights (We Will Never Reach Them)
13 Atlas Null – Quantum Labyrinth: Every Turn, Already Taken
14 Atlas Null – LOCAL_SPACE_ENTANGLED
15 Atlas Null – 000, 000, 000, 000
16 Atlas Prime – THE VIEW OF Atlas Prime
17 Atlas Prime – CENTRAL/Route 07
18 Atlas Prime – Bliss Gardens – Ten Wonders You will Instantly Forget
19 Atlas Prime – GLASS 3 Error Cathedral
20 Atlas Prime – The Vast Gate
Genre: Future Ambient, Spacewave, Downtempo
The Music:
Deepspace, the soundrealm of Australian musician Mirko Ruckels, builds musical worlds: cavernous, desolate, crystalline, pulsing, rhythmic, vibrant, luminescent. His newest is a four-part odyssey of twenty tracks ranging from deep drift to neon night-city beats, broaching ambient, chillwave, IDM and space music. Each set of tracks belongs to one of four worlds orbiting a star in a forgotten system: Atlas, located at the edge of known space in a time that is post-earth. The ever-yearning chords familiar from previous deepspace albums are all here, radiating and luxuriating, finding an unusual and beautiful place to inhabit often with a foot-tapping electronic pulse. The planetary revolutions ebb and flow before moving on to new sounds and territories, vibrant and driving.
Each planetary suite on The Atlas Sector has its own sonic biomes: luminous drones orbit fractal melodic fragments that appear and disappear. Detuned synthesizers shimmer and decay like signals from abandoned relay stations. Catchy electronics broadcast from an off-world radio station capture a steady heartbeat with the precision of stellar mechanics, while deep sub-bass currents shift like tectonic forces beneath alien terrain, often not sounding out of place in a cosmic discotheque pulsing with soft blue light.
The sound is enveloping: vast interior spaces rendered in tone and texture. Warm analogue layers dissolve into digital frost. Harmonies fuse into multi-layered polychords, and reverberant melodic figures arise and vanish like half-remembered transmissions from vessels long out of range.
There is a story beneath the surface, though it is never told aloud through the music. The Atlas system pieces are littered with the evidence of habitation: dormant machinery, drowned architecture, orbits that hold their shape long after civilizations have disappeared. The music documents and implies these aspects through bespoke motives, sequences, timbres, textures, and mood.
Wander these alien sonic environments and unleash your own imagination.
Those who wish to go further can. The Atlas Sector is accompanied by a companion gamebook: an interactive exploration of the Atlas system that extends the album’s world beyond sound, available to listeners at https://www.projekt.com/atlas.html — It is world-building in the truest sense: the album as terrain, the listener as explorer.
The Gamebook:
The Atlas Sector is accompanied by a fully-interactive sci-fi gamebook: a digital adventure in the tradition of Fighting Fantasy, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, where you make the decisions, reimagined for the ambient music experience. You can simply put the album on and drift away, or you can engage in the gamebook for a unique journey that is possibly the first of its kind.
Mirko says “I’ve always loved science fiction worlds, and it dawned on me that I’ve been soundtracking them for a long time via music, so I figured it was time to put the two together in a way that is a step beyond anything I’ve done before. It feels exciting, yet risky and slightly scary to put an ambient album and a gamebook together, and I figure that’s a good sign, which is why I’m doing it.”
Players take the role of a lone explorer aboard the Juno, a small but capable spacecraft, navigating the Atlas system: a mysterious star cluster centered on a pulsing stellar body known as Atlas Source. Four planets orbit it, each with its own geography, inhabitants, dangers, and secrets. A fifth, unscanned world lurks at the system’s edge.
The gamebook is open-world and non-linear with metroidvania-style progression: items found on one planet may unlock paths on another. Across almost 400 locations, players explore ruined observatories, underground citadels, pirate-infested trade routes, floating labyrinths, and ancient alien structures. You will decode signals, navigate black mazes, barter with strange merchants, and piece together the mystery of what the Atlas system truly is.
The companion gamebook features a real-time 3D map of the star system, a digital adventure sheet for tracking inventory and notes, and an integrated music player designed to score the journey. The album and the story are built for each other: the music deepens the narrative, and the narrative gives the music a world to inhabit.
This is ambient music you don’t just listen to. It is your soundtrack as you explore.
Gamebook Instructions:
1. Download the album from bandcamp. Inside the folder are the album tracks.
2. Click the gamebook link: https://www.projekt.com/atlas.html
3. You’ll see that you can start reading straight away and can just drag the album tracks (even as a zip file) into the bottom left window, and press play. Note there is an interactive map you can use to understand the system you’re about to explore.
Unleash your curiosity either as a pure listener, or reader and listener and experience the sonic terrain of The Atlas Sector.
No AI was used to make this music or to write the gamebook, written in the gamebook authoring software Twine 2.
Composed, recorded and mixed by Mirko Ruckels at Bickering Goat Studios using keyboards, guitar and found sounds
Mastered by Angel Marcloid at Angel Hair Audio
Vocals by Pixie Green-Ruckels on tracks 1, 5, 7 and 16
Thanks to Sam Rosenthal and Shea Hovey for their support and expertise, and thanks to my beautiful family.
Reviews Editor –
From Hypnagogue
Safe to say, most of us will never know what it’s like to travel in space. Certainly not in a science fiction movie sort of way where people board luxurious starcraft and set off for distant vistas. In lieu of that, I will settle for strapping into Deepspace’s The Atlas Sector and letting the music paint those images for me. This is a spacey, 97-minute joyride to the star “Atlas, located at the edge of known space in a time that is post-earth.” Mirko Ruckels builds the trip across four quadrants, each with its share of sonic diversity. There are shimmering starlight pads and drones like cloudy nebulae; there are smooth downtempo passages that would be at home in some starcruiser’s glass-domed space-lounge; and there are energetic, vibrant stretches like we’re entering atmosphere to catch the first glimpse of an alien world. Laced throughout with classic spacemusic and EM sensibilities, The Atlas Sector is definitely a round-trip ticket. You’ll listen all the way through without a single bump in the trip, and then book passage again. -John Shanahan