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From the album "A Present From a Small Distant World" (Redshift Records, February 19 2021)

Vocals: Kristin Mueller-Heaslip
Recorded by: Paul Talbott at Union Sound Company
Editing and Mixing: Paul Talbott
Mastering: Sage Kim at Lacquer Channel

"Toronto composer Alex Eddington's unorthodox debut album A Present from a Small Distant World is many different things all at once. Sometimes dark, sometimes downright silly, certain moments bear a resemblance to traditional art song, whereas on other occasions Eddington unfurls strange synthetic textures. Its uncharacteristically broad aesthetic reach is matched by its temporal span. Traversing — and often revisiting — music from the past 18 years, it serves as a portrait of his close collaborative relationship with soprano Kristin Mueller-Heaslip, who plays a number of different protagonists throughout the album. While its nearly two-decade coverage accounts for a certain amount of the album's gleeful heterogeneity, this can also be attributed to its underlying inspiration, which is revealed in the opening cut. There a faded-xerox-choir of Mueller-Heaslips intones Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech that launched the Voyager spacecraft and its so-called Golden Record—a phonographic disc containing an encyclopedic dog's breakfast of earthly texts, images, and music—into space. "The chances that an alien civilization will intercept and decode the record are not high," explains Eddington, "but there is something wonderful about sending greetings hurtling outward." ... Scintillator's gibberish text...was excavated from Eddington's spam folder. Mueller-Heaslip imbues it with maximum urgency, her intensity only magnified by searing electronic effects that Eddington integrated for this recording." (Nick Storring)