Ancient Ocean
Titan's Island

THE REVIEW

'Titan's Island' (Beyond Beyond Is Beyond Records) is an album with the same expressive power as an interstellar galactic cruiser with a specific weight of tens of thousands of tons. At the same time, it is a mythological journey through space that echoes the heroic deeds of the Argonauts in a distant future time, who, under the guidance of Jason, set out from Argo and moved into the hostile lands of Colchis, a region corresponding to part of today's Georgia (Europe), to reclaim the Golden Fleece.

We are faced with an album as ambitious as the space race in the sixties and as beautiful as viewing the planet Earth from the surface of the Moon. In this work, Ancient Ocean, the moniker of J.R. Bohannon, born in Brooklyn (NYC) and currently residing in Kentucky, literally writes a hypothetical page of our future history. Based on scientific components and the revelations of the Cassini space probe, it undertakes an ideal journey towards Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, and according to certain studies, the only celestial body (among all those in our solar system) capable, like Earth, of hosting life.

The impressions derived from listening to this space-opera, in which Bohannon collaborates with Aaron Martin (cello), Gabriel Birnbaum (saxophone), Daryl Groetsch (synth), Jeanann Dara (violin), are imposing and of cosmic drama. The sensation is that of literally drifting in infinite space, as if while performing an EVA (extra-vehicular activity), an unexpected accident completely detached us from any connection to the spaceship. Like being severed from our mothers by the cutting of the umbilical cord, we suddenly transform into something new, becoming a stellar body ourselves in the infinite expanse of the absolute cosmos.

Nonetheless, the music of 'Titan's Island' is something expansive and never invasive, capable of adapting to the dimensions and space that surrounds us. It offers each cosmonaut who ventures into listening a secure grip to hold onto, allowing them to regain command of operations with renewed vigor and resolutely steer toward the final objective.