Post-metal heavyweights The Ocean reveal new single ‘Milk of My Dreams’

Post-metal heavyweights The Ocean today reveal their newest single ‘Milk of My Dreams’, featuring Thorsten Quaeschning of the legendary Tangerine Dream.

The single is another glimpse of The Ocean‘s forthcoming Solaris record, to be released 25th September (Pelagic Records).

‘Milk of My Dreams’ is the second half of the 20-minute closing piece of The Ocean’s new and 12th studio album Solaris, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s film of the same name. Entirely electronic, dark, hypnotic and danceable, it leads the Berlin-based heavy music collective into unfamiliar terrain, trading weight for pulse without losing any of its intensity. It closes the album’s 70-minute monolith on an unexpected note: alien yet coherent, disorienting yet strangely inevitable.

While most of the instrumental foundations of Solaris were written during the pandemic, ‘Milk of My Dreams’ is a much more recent piece, composed last year as the band began recording vocals for the album. New vocalist Enrico Tiberi wrote much of the track as a series of variations on musical themes introduced in the preceding song, ‘Ultima Esperanza‘.

Rearranged by Robin Staps and shaped by significant contributions from synth pioneer and Tangerine Dream bandleader Thorsten Quaeschning, the track became a distinctly collaborative and experimental undertaking – and may well mark the beginning of a broader creative relationship with Quaeschning.

The band first met Quaeschning while tracking drums at Berlin’s legendary Hansa Studios, where David Bowie recorded ‘Heroes’. They later spent a week at Quaeschning’s studio in Berlin-Rudow, working not only on ‘Milk of My Dreams’ but on the electronic dimension of the album as a whole.

The band comment: 

“Working with Thorsten has been an incredibly inspiring experience and with all of us being huge Tangerine Dream fans, a great honour of course. His knowledge of electronic music, synthesizers and sound design is extraordinary, and at the same time he’s an immensely talented and curious musician. His studio feels like a synthesizer museum — everything is connected, switched on and ready to play. What’s particularly remarkable is his ability to take a sound you can only describe in words and translate it almost instantly into something you can actually hear.”

Thorsten Quaeschning says about his collaboration with The Ocean:

“It was a real pleasure to work on the new album by The Ocean Collective. At the same time, it was an interesting challenge for me, because I had to adjust some of my usual working methods and leave the safe harbour of familiar procedures. From my own musical microcosm, The Ocean Collective’s music moves through a wide range of shifting time signatures, which meant that most hardware step sequencers no longer worked in the conventional way. Of course, I could have programmed and recorded individual sections of two, three or sometimes eight bars, but I decided to play many of the sequences by hand. This made it possible to react more quickly to the time signature changes, while also giving the sequences a more organic feel through dynamics, touch and subtle timing differences. I’m very happy to be part of this album and I’m looking forward to seeing where this new collaboration may lead.”

Solaris is an album that tells a story of cosmic escapism: a journey on that ship, which is essentially a celestial rescue boat escaping from a metaphorically sinking Mother Earth. The rescue boat can be imagined as a historic naval vessel, and the lyrics and episodes of the album  make reference to the real-life explorers of the past who set out to discover (back then) unknown continents and uncharted territories: Da Gama, Magellan, Sir Frances Drake, as well as the Polar explorers Amundsen, Scott, Rasmussen etc.

The Solaris album artwork is a collaborative effort by German artist Phillip Janta (Metallica, Queens Of the Stone Age, Envy) whose distinctive, highly detailed line work is instantly recognisable, and Norwegian artist Martin Kvamme who is the graphic designer behind most of Mike Patton‘s numerous projects. The deluxe version of the album will be accompanied by a hardcover, fabric-wrapped book with copper hot foil print, printed inner sleeves, a 32 pages book, seven art prints by Phillip Janta as well as a customised, retro-futuristic star constellation finder.

The Ocean Line-up:
Robin Staps – guitar, vocals
Mattias Hägerstrand – bass
Jordi Farré – drums, percussion
Enrico Tiberi – vocals, keys
Lane Shi – vocals
Emmanuel Jessua – guitar
Marco Gennaro – guitar

In addition, the following musicians performed on this record:
Thorsten Quaeschning – keys
Orestis Zafiriou – keys
Simen Eifring – trombone
Jiawei Zhang – vibraphone