Spectral Spaceships — Writing a Song About Space with Bojangles
The challenge from Bojangles was simple and strange: make a track that's all about space. No other rules. Here's how Spectral Spaceships came together.
Most of my tracks start from a drum pattern or a sample. This one started from a prompt. Bojangles — my cousin and the other half of Fear and Loathing in Los Angeles — threw down a challenge: write something that sounds like space. Vast, weightless, a little lonely. That was the whole brief.
The Challenge
A theme is a different starting point than a loop. Instead of asking "does this knock," I kept asking "does this feel like out there?" That one question shaped every decision — what to add, what to cut, how much air to leave between sounds. Space is mostly emptiness, so the hardest part was resisting the urge to fill it.
Building the Sound
The palette leaned on wide, spectral pads drenched in reverb, a slow-moving lead that drifts more than it plays, and an 808 that sits low and patient underneath. Long pre-delay and decay made everything feel like it was happening in a huge, dark room. I kept the low end centered and let the textures pan wide so the whole thing felt like it had real width — like you could look around in it.
"Space is mostly emptiness. The hardest part wasn't adding sounds — it was leaving room for nothing."
Finishing It
This one I actually finished — mixed all the way to a v4 before I let it go as a proper single. That matters, because most of what I make stays as loops and sketches. Working to a theme gave it a finish line: it was done when it sounded like the prompt. Give it a listen below, and if it takes you somewhere, leave a comment on SoundCloud — that genuinely makes my day.
