My friend Conor has invited me to play bass on his Alien Items project.Alien Items takes its name (and some inspiration) from a computer game called Elite, that we played as kids. I'm pretty excited about it, for all sorts of reasons.
Elite was a space trading game in which players would fly from galaxy to galaxy trading commodities, dog-fighting with pirates, improving their spaceships and undertaking dangerous missions.
I would describe Conor's music as a kind of melancholy soundtrack to the vast, empty reaches traversed by the lonely space-farer; or to adapt a title from Philip Glass, 'music for space-stations.' I hope you may hear it for yourself in due course.
Simple and compelling, Elite also had a striking aesthetic of wireframe spaceships and planets that was elegant and immersive at a time when 3D gaming didn’t really exist.
I’ve always loved wireframe models - probably because of Elite - so I have designed a font (also called Alien Items) that echoes the Elite aesthetic and the sparse sound of Conor's music, to use on the project's future releases.Anyone interested in playing the game can download Chris Pinder's Elite - The New Kind (PC) here.
