A window into the centre of our galaxy. Yes, those are all stars.

There is no darkness at the heart of our galaxy.

The album Fabric of Space Divine recounts one of many possible paths for evolution before Earth, on Earth and in the universe.

All ideas exposed in the following storyline are highly debatable, of course. The entire idea of a deep past and evolution into the deep future are based on Stephen Baxter's 'Manifold' books.

We generally accept that the universe had a beginning, called the Big Bang, in which all that there is, was condensed in a single point, called Singularity. This point 'exploded' and expanded. Soon after the initial explosion, structures began to form: waves, or particles – which are really one and the same thing. Any structure is the same as information. In the course of time, these structures formed more complex superstructures: matter. Matter in its turn formed even more complex superstructures: stars, planets, and other complex bodies, like intricate knots in the fabric of gravity. Or a glass of malt whiskey.

Singularity.Chaos.Light describes the big bang and the structure-less universe in the beginning.

The second part, Sol 01, is the lighting of the first sun in the universe (to provide some musical silliness, part 1 ends on the musical note G, 'sol' in solfege, which means Sun).

The next step is the emergence of structures capable of expanding and/or replicating themselves by incorporating and processing other structures: Life.

Seed of Complexity is about just this, attempting to describe the emergence of cellular life: single-cell, dual-cell, etc., up to five-celled beings. This could go on, of course, but to most human ears, the most natural rhythms are those that have four beats at the most. Try counting continually and in a regular fashion to five and see if you feel it to be natural! It doesn't? Five-beat rhythms sound strange to the untrained ear, and I have used this as the starting point for life capable of processing information, i.e., sentient life.

From there I jump directly to human beings. (My apologies to all very tiny earthlings for leaving out most of early evolution, but I really did not want to make this into a double album, which are always pretentious, and the album is pretentious enough as it is already.) Human beings have a vain habit of trying to understand, especially things that cannot be understood. That is what the five parts of Explanations are about. I tried to be as impartial as I can about each religion (i.e., 'explanation'), and I only tackled a few of them.

Beyond Nature is about Ancient Egyptian religion. The lyrics are an actual ancient Egyptian poem that I adapted slightly. Please accept my apologies for not any starting earlier on in human history, but my sweet wife is such a freak about (non-new age) Ancient Egypt, so I had a very good source for researching...

Beyond Trinity is a mildly unsympathetic look at Christianity's Trinity concept, in which I postulate that the 'Holy Spirit' is none other than Mary, and Mary is none other than the much older Mother Earth religion, ingested by Christianity under the guise of a mysterious Third Part of god. Note that to this day, the Catholic church refers to Mary as 'mother of god'. (I confess that once again I have ripped this idea from a book that you might know anyway: The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley-Zimmer, which I read in my tender teens.) When early Christians reached regions where Mother Earth was worshipped, the people there readily transferred their Mother Earth onto Mary. So in the end – and that is my own idea again – Christians worship nothing more than a family, a divinified image of themselves. And of course, a human being like Jesus is much easier to worship than an unforgiving father such as Jehovah ("I'm warning you, if you say Jehovah again..." - "Jehovah! Jehovah!"). A remarkably Freudian constellation. As Joseph Heller says: Go Figure….

And on we go: Anthropocentrics offers no musical clues, I am sorry to say. It is simply an instrumental piece which goes by a title that means that we see ourselves as the centre and meaning of all that there is. This is what has been happening, and unfortunately most of us still do not grasp the idea that this is not true.

Beyond Multiplicity is about the Islam, a fully monotheistic religion in which, at least ideally, god must not be thought of as a human being. Although I am not a religious person, I see great appeal in the Islamic belief. But then again, I am greatly fascinated by the entire Arab culture, including of course its music. In fact, I recently bought a Turkish ney flute, supposed to be played by sufis, and I can't get a single sound out of it. Just goes to show.

Beyond Good and Evil is of course a hint at Nietzsche and atheism, the first step beyond human morality and towards a belief in evolution, albeit misused to this day for racist purposes (it should be noted that Nietzsche profoundly disliked all the German people, and in his books he openly attacks anti-Semitism).

The Here and Now is described in Middle. As I know nothing but my own Here and Now, it is all I can describe with a minimum amount of confidence.

Ice Prospector is the first song into the future: humans live and work on earth's moon, and the hero of the song is a water ice miner on the moon's south pole.

And off we go into the deeper future: Digital is about a human being whose entire information is being transferred onto an information processing system. This may sound far-fetched, but recent advances in neurology, especially the similarity between the glial system in the brain and distributed data processing could eventually lead to neural network-based computing systems capable of harbouring and 'running' all information contained in a human brain. Note that brain interfaces are no science fiction, and are already being tested on people with disabilities, e.g., brain-controlled wheelchairs and remote-controlled robot arms. The poor hero of the song gets wiped out when a data error occurs. Maybe he should have used something better than a 22-core Pentium 3000.

Beyond takes place a long time after that. Humans can now be transferred onto data systems and live there, even be transmitted to remote locations. In this song, a human being has been uploaded to a science probe that is about to land on the Jupiter moon Europa, which is believed to be covered in an ice mantle with a deep liquid water ocean underneath. Our hero finds life (wishful thinking...).

Communication is the ensuing attempt of different life forms to communicate.

Expansion is much deeper into the future: humans and/or other beings in the universe no longer depend on mechanical or bio-engineered systems to hold and process their information. And as our sun reaches the end of its life, they have to find a way to manipulate gravity, and therefore space, allowing them to roam freely as pure information-coded space. Such beings might trigger the emergence of life on other planets. Of course there might already be such beings roaming the universe.

Stelliferous is even further into the future, a time when the universe is filled with pure digital beings that manipulate space itself, harvesting energy from black holes, and shifting large portions of space-time around for their own purposes. As these beings have no 'body', they can easily merge into single beings, or even into one single being, to achieve their goals. This happens at a time when the universe has expanded immensely, and almost all stars are reaching their end, a time when black holes are beginning to dominate the universe.

Beyond Zero Kelvin: the universe has expanded so immensely that even black holes have disappeared. All that is left are proton waves, that are so long that they span almost the entire universe. But if the universe chills down to a temperature of zero degrees Kelvin, i.e., absolute zero, nothing will move any longer, and the surviving single being will cease to exist as it will slow down eternally into nothingness together with the universe. This being now fills the entire universe and is, to all purposes, the universe itself. It is God. And in order to avert the end of all, God/the Universe contracts into a single point, creating a singularity, with all the rules for the next universe implanted in it.

One is the big bang that ensues. The last note is a D (in solfege: “Re”, one of the names of the Egyptian sun god and creator).

None of this is naturally meant to imply that mankind will be part of the future of 'cosmic evolution' outlined above. But while none of this is meant to be the truth, I do believe in evolution at a cosmic level.