Solaris

This is a great contrast.

In our source curation, we have Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary juxtaposed against Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker.

And this contrast exposes the two fundamental ways humans react to the terrifying scale of the cosmos.

Andy Weir's work, which is being brought to the screen with Ryan Gosling in the lead, operates on the premise that the universe is a series of incredibly complex, highly lethal mathematical equations.

That is where Andrei Tarkovsky enters the room.

Yes.

Diego highlights Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris based on Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel.

Tarkovsky despised the focus on technological fetishism in science fiction.

I mean, this is always on the short list for best science fiction movies ever made.

And I think I'm not as much a fan of this as I am Solaris.

You know, I prefer Solaris.

I think that...

This is still an interesting movie, but the sort of tedium that you felt with Solaris, I can kind of get into Solaris and at least, you know, once you're on a space station and space stations are cool, right? There's a lot of this that is just sort of like three middle-aged old men walking around fields, you know, and walking through tunnels.

And there's a kind of... ruin aesthetic that I kind of dig.

I usually dig, but you know, you sort of have to use a lot of your imagination to imagine there are swirling traps and vortexes of reality on either side of them at all times that are never really depicted.

I mean, I'm not going to, you know...

It's still a good experience.

Well, famously, if you heard the Solaris episode, Fred Barrett first watched Stalker on like a 480p Google Play.

This is

the way.

So for me, I watched this.

There was a...

I had a bit of a crunch in the last few from recording Solaris to Mirror to Stalker.

A lot of prep all around the same time.

Today we welcome back to the podcast, Robin Stapps from The Ocean.

The Ocean will release Solaris this Friday on Pelagic Records.

Robin talks about starting and running Pelagic Records.

deciding to keep The Ocean going after the major lineup shakeup, the unique process of working with two vocalists on Solaris, the thematic direction of the album, and more.

I'm a massive fan of both The Ocean and Pelagic Records, and it was a delight to have Robin back on the podcast to talk about both.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of As the Story Grows.

So how did that affect your approach when thinking about writing the next album? Did you just because I mean, Holocene didn't start with you, but like, did you because most of the music starts with you? Did you just approach it as I know I'm going to do another one? Or did you want to have a band in place before starting that process?

Well, that other one was already there at that point, to be fair.

You need them that time of day.

So we're here today to speak about the fact that The Ocean released your 12th studio album, Solaris, on September the 25th.

So how are you feeling, mate? It's not far away.

Yeah.

yeah nice the press release says that thematically solaris picks up where holocene finished off like can you elaborate on the concept in the ending overlapping story act

So the last track on Holocene Sub-Atlantic is kind of the bleak, dystopian image of an earth that has become uninhabitable and a group of human survivors leaving to find a place to live somewhere else.

And Solaris is the story of that journey.

It connects exactly there.

Brachial is correct.

Mike? Which Soviet sci-fi film is often cited as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time? Solaris? I've been saying Solaris for a long time.

Solaris is correct.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, honestly.

General rule here, Mike, is if I'm pronouncing it differently than you, I assume I'm wrong.

We wish her all the best in pushing back the frontiers of man's limitations and hope she brings us all souvenirs.

In our last episode, we discussed Andrei Tartovsky's 1972 adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris.

We'll return to that movie after we spend a little time with its newer equivalent, Alexander Ullum's feature debut, It Ends.

This little 89-minute indie movie, made for just $80,000, had an interesting path to the screen.

It's a good calling card.

I don't know if it describes the movie.

We talked about doing Slacker as a pairing, and I think we're going to find more connections with Solaris.

I don't know.