Beau Finley – Base Camp Departure
Jon Miller – Spinning
Georgie James – Places (Instrumental)
The Iris Bell – Shade
Aaron Agre – Cloud Empty (Selenelion) II
Tristan Welch – C.
Beauty Pill – The Western Prayer
Handsome Hound – Our Problems
Atoka Chase – Burn the Light (or Of Matriarchs and Alcohol)
Terracotta Blue – Hallow’s Eve
The Radiographers – Little Black Glove
Bossalingo – Manha de Carnaval
John W. Warren – The Frog Prince
Honey Pot Canoe – Reginald Fessenden
John Hogge – Shanai
Mathugh – I.X.X.I.
Dot Dash – Summer Lights
Buildings – For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky
Calm and Crisis – Moving Parts
Aphids – Two

D.C. musician Bill Crandall does not share that excitement.

“Are we really so irredeemable,” asks the Petworth resident, “that we are reduced to putting our hopes in a planet that offers literally nothing of what we need?”

The former guitarist in rock band Dot Dash addresses this question with his project Místochord (pronounced MEES-toe-chord). He recently released New World Voyage, a concept album about a fictional trip to Mars and the mental burden that comes with extreme uncertainty.

“I imagined what that would actually be like for the first people to leave Earth,” Crandall says. “Even those who took ships across oceans to past new worlds could assume they’d find air, water, food and a chance for basic Earth comforts where they were headed.”

New World Voyage begins its story with a crew’s departure into space. The group includes children and adults, and the songs explore their individual states of mind as their journey stretches on. Crandall, an award-winning photographer by day, pairs the album with a booklet of abstract images further illustrating the mix of anxiety and hope characterizing the trip.

The music consists of fleeting melodic phrases over a bed of minimal electronics. Crandall says the tracks represent what the crew would sing to themselves for entertainment, calling them “melancholic future folk songs set against the backdrop of the sounds of the ship and space.”

Crandall spent four years obsessively working on New World Voyage. “I had to learn Ableton, learn MIDI, relearn how to get the most out of my voice,” the musician says. “I really didn’t know what I was doing. It was terrifying, but I wouldn’t stop.”

It was upon meeting collaborator Sean Winters and producer Mike Fanuele that Crandall’s ideas took clearer shape. He hails Winters in particular as the album’s secret weapon.

“Sean’s work was so critical to the power and depth of the final result,” says Crandall. “I said, ‘I’m the crew with their hopes and fears, and you’re space, gamma rays, cosmic s**t-storms, mechanized environments, signal distorting and fading across vast distance. All I ask is that you let the crew live.'”

The music and art for New World Voyage are available for download through Místochord’s Bandcamp page. (Extremely limited physical copies, which include a print of his original cover art, go for $250 a pop.)

Crandall says the journey hasn’t reached its conclusion yet — he has already created enough music for a follow-up to his interplanetary migration tale.

The original version of this post inaccurately described the role played by Sean Winters in the making of New World Voyage. He was a collaborator, not a producer. 

But “Walls Closing In,” a standout from Dot Dash’s latest album, Earthquakes & Tidal Waves, is a change of pace. (Listen below.)

“It’s kind of the heaviest song on the record, and probably the heaviest song that this band has ever done,” says guitarist and vocalist Terry Banks, 50, who’s played in Glo-Worm, Tree Fort Angst and St. Christopher in addition to The Saturday People and Julie Ocean. (Dot Dash’s other guitarist, Steve Hansgen, once played in Minor Threat.) “I’m not saying it’s some incredibly visceral thing — music gets a whole lot heavier than that. But for us, it’s pretty heavy.”

By contrast, other album cuts sound almost sweet.

“The song before it [“Tatters“] is a very light, jangly pop song, so I felt like the obvious thing to follow it up with would be the heaviest song on the record,” Banks says. “And it’s not like this cliché of ending the album with the heavy rocker. It’s kind of right in the middle, and maybe it forms a midway point or apex or something like that.”

But despite being heavier than the rest of the album, “Walls Closing In” is undoubtedly the work of Dot Dash — which is to say, it’s a shrink wrap-tight pop song.

As for the song’s lyrics, Banks isn’t getting too bogged down by details. “I don’t feel like any songs that I ever come up with are necessarily specifically about anything,” he says. “They’re kind of arrived at in a sort of instinctive way.”

Rather than moving from one concrete point to another, a lot of Banks’ lyrics tend to be semi-impressionistic, drawing from a stream-of-consciousness writing style. He says that he tends to feel like songs come out of thin air, “but then I’ll realize that that chorus or that phrase sort of relates to some passing thought or some conversation I had.”

But before you try to start ascribing meaning to Banks’ lyrical style, he makes one thing clear: “We have no message, there is no message.” Dot Dash songs are open to interpretation that way.

“The message is whatever you take from it,” Banks says.

Dot Dash plays an album release show at Comet Ping Pong Friday, April 24.