What is life like in the future? What adventures await Mankind as it explores the cosmos? For those of us brave enough to speculate, Illegible Records offers a soundtrack of sorts for the journey in the form of Celestial Mechanics. This trip into the unknown started mid 2006 when Illegible Records artist Ghetto Gas John listened to the work of fellow Illegible musician Chris Hough. Listening to Chris' "Polarity Shift" album, John felt himself inspired. "The kind of music," said John, smoking a cigarette "I could really get into and work with". Chris also felt a collaboration could develop and the pair began to write and rehearse material through the remainder of the year. Encouraging the relationship, label head Eric Blades accepted an invitation to one of their sessions and, immediately impressed, signed them as a new group to the label. The duo continued work on a collection of material into 2007 and after playing out live to favorable response, prepared for recording at Studio Lagoon to be engineered and produced by Eric Blades himself. The tracks, initially somewhat fun and free spirited, began to take on a whole new sound and dimension almost immediately and the group found itself considering expansion to include a dedicated bass player. Enter Randall Carlson, who, already in production on another Illegible Records project (see INTELLIGENT DESIGN), accepted the invite without hearing a single note of the recording. "I thought they were pretty cool live," he says, adding that he was "honored" by the position. With the group lineup in place and the album nearing completion, a funny thing happened on the way to post-production: Eric heard something. Flexing his muscle as producer, he asked John and Chris to listen to the material in the studio carefully and consider his idea that the collection of songs that at first were seemingly unrelated now took on a new consistency and theme. His proposal was simple: go with this instance of studio creativity and release the album as a larger concept complete with a full storyline underneath. He even offered to write it. "To me, it was a very natural progression of what this project had turned into," says Eric "I heard events and locations in the music and really wanted to contribute this new aspect to it all outside of producing the record itself." Remaining mum on the details of the story itself, Eric reveals that it will stay within the realm of the astronomical theme the forming duo originally envisioned as it relates the tale of a new interstellar spacecraft and it's maiden voyage from Earth. "I wish I had unlimited funds," comments John on the story "I'd make a movie."

With the acceptance of Eric as it's fourth member in the role of 'Storyteller', Celestial Mechanics prepares for an exciting audio-visual presentation of it's project. "This is really exciting for me," adds John "This whole thing has gotten so much bigger than it originally started out as - I couldn't be more pleased." Join the launch - late summer/early fall 2006