Kelly Olynyk slipped the red vinyl record out of its sleeve and reverently placed it on his new, never-used turntable. As he did this, many emotions flooded his mind: anticipation, nostalgia, even a little bit of fear. For the first time in many years, he was about to listen to the first and only recorded output of his former band, Starcubism.
He took a deep breath to prepare himself, then pressed the button on the turntable that would set the record spinning. As the album got set to begin, Kelly took a seat in the most comfortable chair in his living room, intending to let the sounds of the album, which was titled “Visions of Mars (Cubistic Journey Part I), engulf him fully.
The first track, “Through Nebular Vortices”, announced its presence with a quiet, but quickly crescendoing, synth lead. Even within the first few measures of the piece, Kelly could close his eyes and imagine himself standing behind a Moog synthesizer, the familiar notes spilling from his fingers with practiced ease. The synth motif was quickly combined with the talents of the other members: Ferguson on guitar, Conrad on bass, Ichabod on drums, and Moonbeam providing the native instrumentation of those who had called North America their home for millennia. Each member was given space in the mix to show off his individual talent, but the cohesion between their seemingly disparate parts was obvious. With each key change and tempo shift, Kelly was right there, predicting and anticipating it. It was like Starcubism had never been gone.
“Through Nebular Vortices” drew to a close, and in the brief seconds of silence between this track and the next, Kelly was temporarily pulled out of his reverie to realize that there were tears on his cheeks. His heart ached to hear a bandmate affectionately call him “Moog Man” after an especially impressive improvisation. His mind desired nothing more to go back to that self-storage unit where Starcubism had created true musical magic.
As the record continued to play, Kelly found he could still visualize the keyboard part for each one. Some of his bandmates’ instrumental flourishes took him by surprise now as they did then, but his own parts were all firmly implanted in his mind. Songs like “Awakening in the New Existence” with its extended jazz solos, “Altars upon the Cosmic Ocean” with its neoclassical guitar wizardry, “Unification with Phobos Agleam” with its orthodox tributes to the legends of space rock, “Realms” with its progressive synthesizer explorations, and “Painting the Space Tribunal” with its extended ambient interludes and tribal drumming, all of it took Kelly back to a special time in his life. A happy time. A creative time. Most of all, a simple time.
The record finished, but when it did, Kelly could only feel like the next chapter of his life had just begun.