Product Description
2. Parkour on Lazarus Heights
3. Rainy メガシティ 七 Precinct / Rainy Megacity-7 Precinct
4. Entering Aquarium Prefecture
5. Bubble Echolalia District
6. Floor 426-B
7. Vertical Automated Parking
8. Empty Office Space
9. Upside Down City Traffic (F-Zero Dream)
10. Sunny Hypnagogia Heights
11. Unmarked Area?
12. High=Rise=Vistas (Blood in the Concrete)
13. Future Urban Sprawl
14. A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District
15. Just a Pill and All This Will Stop
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Limited Edition of 500
• Echoes Radio CD of the Month January 2025!
• Neon Blue Utopia Listening Party Saturday January 11, RSVP at Bandcamp
Echoes Radio: "His sound is more influenced by Brian Eno’s ambient aesthetic, of fluid impressionism, sometimes to the point of vaporous. On Neon Blue Utopia he adds in Eno’s sensibility for subtle melodies… with shimmering synth crystals, shards of melody and the environmental sound of rain transformed through electronics. It’s a sound that hints at new vistas just over the hill… It’s an album to get lost in, just like the Megacity of his imagination. Welcome to 2025, or is it 2125?"
Chain DLK: "Ruckels has crafted an album that doesn’t just create a mood; it builds a world. His meticulous layering of detuned synths, shimmering drones, and hyperreal textures draws listeners into a space that is both futuristic and achingly intimate." -Vito Camarretta
Exposé: "77 minutes of purely instrumental compositions that straddle the boundaries of atmospheric, electronic, dreamwave and post-rock, taking his sound into the far reaches of space and beyond, using droning guitars, synthesizers that occasionally detune suddenly, muted percussion and piano, vast expansive ambient fills, brilliant sparkles of tonal color, and sampled sounds (which can include voices), all in order to bring his visions to life, spread across the album’s fifteen long tracks." -Peter Thelen
Message intercepted whilst in the outer regions of the Titan system: (distorted and garbled message with frequent drop-outs) “ …. the strangest pla- … come and see … neon blue … unbelievab- … vast and beautiful … but just be … (transmission suddenly terminated).” [co-ordinates of location delivered with message]
Neon Blue Utopia is the 16th album by space-faring Australian composer deepspace and his fifth on Projekt Records. Fusing ambient, electronic, spacewave, dreamwave, shoegaze and post-rock, deepspace creates a tantalizing and dream-like wide-screen experience filled with hypnotic fractal detail and immersive sound dimensions. Embellishing on the last studio album The Black Orchid Galaxies, this release meticulously pushes the deepspace sound into new and unexpected sectors. Through detuned synths, droning guitars, shimmering infinite washes, occasional filtered drums and hyper-real found sounds, it’s a kaleidoscope of fragments not unlike a technological aural reef — soaking, submerging and surrounding the auditory senses.
Like something out of an Iain M. Banks novel, Neon Blue Utopia portrays a place from deep inside the collectively-created musings of science-fiction thought: A vast megacity, hanging somewhere in the cosmos, a place of liminal wonder, bizarre and unclassifiable, comforting yet frightening. A place exists, of immeasurably advanced technology (powered by recently discovered mineral, neon blue), where visitors can visit algeous underwater precincts, where inhabitants are suspended in breathable liquid, going about their day; immense towers where one can parkour up high without danger; biomes with forests and buildings inside rooms on hidden floors of apartments; suburbs filled with huge soft bubbles that pulsate sound; highways of upside-down plasma-powered cars; near-infinite vistas thousands of kilometres high above a nearby planet. The music suggests these seemingly impossible ideas by sonically representing places that are vast, oddly microscopic and everything in between. This album is the most surreal and luminescent voyage yet in the deepspace catalogue.
Says deepspace (Mirko): “I had a dream where I took an elevator to a particular floor of a building. When I entered a door on that floor, it opened into a huge room filled with a forest, with an entire city centre inside it. The ceiling was several hundred metres high complete with clouds and stars, and the buildings were not full-size but an uncanny “dreamsize” in between, maybe 5 or 10 metres high, like a model city, but with actual shop fronts inside them. It was wonderfully surreal. I took that idea and expanded it to other areas, such as a huge megacity with different precincts containing marvelously unusual features, such as aquariums the size of buildings and other weird dream-like features. This turned into the idea of Neon Blue Utopia.”
No AI was used in the creation of this music and cover artwork. Every sound and image was composed, arranged, performed and edited by brain, eye, ear and hand.
Travel to the Mega City with deepspace’s Neon Blue Utopia, Echoes January CD of the Month
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ARTIST BIO
deepspace is Brisbane, Australia-based ambient artist Mirko Ruckels. His hypnotic, glacial, dreamy and atmospheric work is created with synthesizers, software and acoustic instruments such as bells, guitars and piano. A love of drones and ambient sound led to a wondrous moment in 2006 when he began creating atmospheric environments that evoke liminal moods and spaces.
Composed, performed and produced by Mirko Ruckels
Vocals by Pixie Green-Ruckels (tracks 1, 3 and 5)
Mastered by Alvin Boule at blackparticle
Cover artwork by Tomas Rodriguez
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
With Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace (a.k.a. Australian composer and synthesist Mirko Ruckels) creates a science fiction concept about an expansive megacity somewhere out in the far reaches of the universe, a place of wondrous advanced technology, all powered by a newly discovered mineral neon blue, a place where visitors can find algeous underwater precincts, where inhabitants can live and breathe in liquid surroundings, where they can climb high towers without any fear of danger, huge biomes with forests and buildings that lie inside rooms on hidden floors, and a network of highways ferrying upside-down plasma powered vehicles. Of course these are the visions of dreams recalled, spread across 77 minutes of purely instrumental compositions that straddle the boundaries of atmospheric, electronic, dreamwave and post-rock, taking his sound into the far reaches of space and beyond, using droning guitars, synthesizers that occasionally detune suddenly, muted percussion and piano, vast expansive ambient fills, brilliant sparkles of tonal color, and sampled sounds (which can include voices), all in order to bring his visions to life, spread across the album’s fifteen long tracks.
Anyone familiar with his previous Projekt label releases The Black Orchid Galaxies (2024) or even Superradiance (2022) before that should be well prepared for this next step outward and beyond into the field of imagination. Track titles like the opener “Utopia – Visions,” “A Future Urban Sprawl,” “High-Rise Vistas (Blood in the Concrete,” “Entering Aquarium Prefecture,” “Vertical Automated Parking,” “Upside Down City Traffic,” and “Sunny Hypnagogia Heights” (as well as other titles) give some idea to the listener as to the composer’s intent but even without the concept, deepspace has created an entire world of unusually beautiful sounds and timbres that few examples of electronic based music even come close to. -Peter Thelen
Reviews Editor –
From Chain DLK
In Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace (aka Mirko Ruckels) invites us to don a virtual EVA suit and plunge into a dreamscape where sci-fi visions meet the glowing hues of an otherworldly metropolis. With his 16th album – and fifth release on Projekt Records – Ruckels extends his ambient odyssey, creating a shimmering kaleidoscope of sound that feels as vast and surreal as the megacity it sonically portrays.
This is no mere ambient record; it’s an astral map, a soundtrack to a city suspended in neon-drenched infinity. Inspired by a dream that feels plucked from the subconscious of an Iain M. Banks protagonist, the album sketches a city where physics politely takes a backseat. Bioluminescent aquariums the size of skyscrapers, upside-down highways, forests tucked inside urban spires – it’s as if Blade Runner had a lucid dream after reading The Culture series and listening to Brian Eno on loop.
The album opens with “Utopia=Visions”, a sprawling track that sets the tone with cascading synths and an airy, celestial ambiance. It’s like stepping into the neon fog of the titular city for the first time, eyes wide and senses overwhelmed. From there, deepspace takes listeners on a tour through its many precincts. “Parkour on Lazarus Heights” is a playful ascent, with nimble arpeggios and basslines mimicking the adrenaline rush of gravity-defying stunts. Meanwhile, “Rainy Precinct” paints a delicate sonic portrait of rain-slicked streets under glowing blue signs, capturing that sweet spot between nostalgia and futurism.
One of the standout tracks, “Bubble Echolalia District”, is both whimsical and hypnotic. Its pulsing rhythms and delicate melodies create a sense of floating through an otherworldly marketplace filled with surreal, pulsating orbs. By the time we reach “Empty Office Space”, a quieter, more introspective moment, it’s as though the city itself takes a breath, its endless buzz fading into an eerie silence. Vocals from Pixie Green-Ruckels add a tender, human layer to tracks like “Entering Aquarium Prefecture”, where her ethereal tones ripple through waves of detuned synths and subtle drones. The result is deeply immersive – less a song and more a sonic submersion into an underwater precinct of dream logic. The album concludes with “Just a Pill and All This Will Stop”, a track that gently dismantles the dream. Its muted tones and soft echoes feel like the city dissolving around you, pixel by pixel, until only its memory remains – a fitting coda to a journey that never sought closure, only exploration.
Ruckels has crafted an album that doesn’t just create a mood; it builds a world. His meticulous layering of detuned synths, shimmering drones, and hyperreal textures draws listeners into a space that is both futuristic and achingly intimate. And yet, there’s a playful humor in the album’s surreal vignettes – a sense that Ruckels is not only exploring the liminal but also having a bit of fun with it. Who else but deepspace would give us tracks like “A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District” or “Upside Down City Traffic (F-Zero Dream)”, titles that seem pulled straight from a fever dream of SimCity crossed with “Mario Kart”? Ultimately, Neon Blue Utopia is an invitation to wander – to lose yourself in its fractal details and re-emerge changed. Just don’t forget your coordinates, or you might find yourself staying a little too long in this strange, luminous megacity. -Vito Camarretta
Reviews Editor –
From Echoes Radio
Echoes Radio January CD of the Month
Travel to the Mega City with deepspace’s Neon Blue Utopia, Echoes January CD of the Month
Imaginary cities. It’s something musicians have been drawn to for centuries beginning with Atlantis to El Dorado to Minas Tirith to Coruscant to Los Angeles 2049, i.e. Blade Runner. Creating a sound that seems to emanate from these worlds is just the fuel that musicians, especially those in the more progressive and electronic realms of music, gravitate toward. deepspace didn’t go for the classics on his new album, Neon Blue Utopia. He created his own.
deepspace (stylized in lower case) is an artist who hovers just above the drone zone, a mode of music codified by Steve Roach on albums like The Magnificent Void. It’s a sound that is free of melody and rhythm and exists in free-floating unmoored textures. deepspace occupied that terrain for most of his many albums since debuting in 2006. But Neon Blue Utopia adjusts those parameters in an immersive electronic soundscape.
deepspace is Mirko Ruckels, who was born and spent his early childhood in Germany but grew up and lives in Brisbane, Australia. He started out as a rock musician, took a serious stab at singing opera, and has degrees in music and psychology. So he’s something of a polymath. But in 2006 he entered the drone zone and the next year put out four albums including The Barometric Sea and Slow Moving Live Forms Volume 1.
The name deepspace conjures up the idea of Berlin School sequencers, but Ruckels has never traded on this sound. His sound is more influenced by Brian Eno’s ambient aesthetic, of fluid impressionism, sometimes to the point of vaporous. On Neon Blue Utopia he adds in Eno’s sensibility for subtle melodies.
The organizing concept of Neon Blue Utopia is that it’s an imaginary city set in the future. It’s not a Blade Runner dystopia, but a Shangri-La of technological delight and slightly surreal wonders, including precincts that are like aquariums and upside down highways. You won’t find this expressed lyrically in this all-instrumental sound world. Instead, it’s hinted at in track titles and occasionally, more overt tone poem-like orchestrations, as in the bubbling sounds of “Entering Aquarium Prefecture.” This turns into one of the more elegiac tracks, a New Age bliss of long, horn-like melodies and sky-tracing synth pads. A similar bubbling water effect on “Bubble Echolalia District” is a bit more annoying.
Much of this Neon Blue Utopia, including tracks like “Utopia=Visions” comes out of the interdimensional sound of early Iasos from the 1970s, with shimmering synth crystals, shards of melody and the environmental sound of rain transformed through electronics. It’s a sound that hints at new vistas just over the hill.
While the early albums of deepspace were rhythm-free, he opens up an ambient groove on several tracks. “Parkour on Lazarus Heights” is powered by a modulating single note sequence, driving a short triumphal, Enoesque melody with hints of electric guitar accents. “Rainy “Mega City” 7th Precinct” uses a detuned pentatonic melody fragment over another insistent rhythm. It’s like descending through a subway of fractured mirrors.
Each track on Neon Blue Utopia creates a different space. You can free-fall into the mysterious, oscillating spaces of “Floor 426-B” or watch the buildings glide by as you rise through the rhythms of “Vertical Automated Parking.”
Some tracks turn toward dissonance, like “Upside Down City Traffic (F-Zero Dream)” with random melodic cycles, rushing wind and maximum tremolo effects. I think it’s supposed to be the sound of rushing “plasma” cars, but it sounds like an artic blizzard more than a techno-utopia. But that’s followed by the slow moving dream of “Sunny Hypnagogia Heights” which lives up to its title of that liminal state between waking and sleep. It gently undulates like a slow breeze on a sultry day, with sustained, voice-like synth pads, echoing guitar and rhythms that shuffle in and out. A heartbeat pulse runs through it till the end. Track names on instrumental albums are often created after-the-event. But deepspace actually does operate from the inspiration of his titles.
As the album proceeds, cracks in the utopian mirage emerge with foreboding titles like “High=Rise=Vistas (Blood in the Concrete),” “Future Urban Sprawl” and “A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District.” “High=Rise=Vistas (Blood in the Concrete),” sounds detuned and in rhythmic flux. “A Glitch has Appeared in the Business District” opens with crowd noise of people talking that gets subsumed in a synth wash that is more angelic than its title suggests, before the synth chords become just slightly discordant and unmoored. It’s perhaps the most drone-zone track on the album before the crowd sounds emerge at the end.
The final track, “Just a Pill and All This Will Stop” has obvious implications of “The Matrix,” as the music seems to suggest the pill will take us out of this world and into the Neon Blue Utopia. The melody is the wordless voice of one of Ruckel’s daughters, Pixie, filtered, harmonized and spun into a hallucinatory spiral over an ostinato sequencer melody, before settling into a long synth-pad outro.
With Neon Blue Utopia, deepspace has tapped an early New Age sound, spun through contemporary electronic computer architecture. It’s an album to get lost in, just like the Megacity of his imagination. Welcome to 2025, or is it 2125?
THE END