Iotronica - Of Moons and Stars, the cosmic ambient / new age space music album of the year?

By chance I came across this old school space music album released earlier this year, and I thought it was pretty neat. The cover alone should give you an idea what to expect:

http://www.israbox.com/uploads/posts/2014-10/1413009251_folder.jpg

Iotronica's webpage has the following to tell about her:

iotronica creates Ambient Space Music from her studio in a remote village by the sea in Cornwall, UK. She gave up her singing career in the 1980s and it wasn't until 2010, after an inspiring dream about one of Jupiter's moons, Io, (in which she dreamed of sounds that had never been heard on Earth) that she decided to indulge her passion for music once again, and in a very short time, composed some highly original Ambient Space Music. She went on to receive radio airplay, live radio interviews and also received interest from a well known Electronic Music Record Label, AD Music, all within a few months of her first composition.

That's pretty much all I know about the artist, but her music certainly hits the sweet spot if you happen to like things like Vangelis' analog synth albums from the 70s, or Constance Demby's cosmic visions on the Hearts of Space label. And lately I've been kinda fascinated by the kind of new wave ambient artists like Iotronica or Meg Bowles, who seem to exist completely outside the "mainstream" of ambient and electronic music. I guess it would be naive to assume they don't actually know about the trends in electronic music outside their own new age sphere, but at least they don't seem to care much about those trends... Which I think is cool, because who else would be making this sort of beautiful, ageless synth music?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLxVXyubw9qoFzkZ3rC0hXdsf7W_MuhmSn&v=RLq-dQesLEk

Looks like the whole album is available on Spotify, so you can check it out yourself if you feel like taking a trip around Jupiter's moons.

digging this

hmmmm

Tuomas, have you heard the band Radio Massacre International?

https://radiomassacreinternational.bandcamp.com/

I think I've heard some tracks, but IIRC they had more electric guitar I can stand for. Other than that they sounded pretty cool though... Do they have any guitarless space music records?

The early records under the name DAS are sans guitar.

Thanks for the tip, I'll check them out!

Basically, my platonic ideals for space synth music are, on the one side, Vangelis' Heaven and Hell and Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat (grandiose stuff with choirs and uplifting melodies), and on the other side, Meg Bowles' Blue Cosmos and Pete Namlook/Tetsu Inoue's Shades of Orion albums (slow, all-encompassing cosmic drones). So any recommendations along those lines are welcome, I'm not super familiar with the genre. I guess Iotronica is somewhere between the two extremes, it's not all drones, but the melodies and choral bits are more subdued than with Vangelis or Demby.

To be clear, I meant recommendations in the new age/space music end of the spectrum, ambient stuff like FAX, Biosphere etc, I'm quite familiar with.

This gets a little sleepy for me around the midway mark, but the pulsing synths/soaring strings combo on the first few tracks is fantastic. Gonna check out some Vangelis next.

this sounded cool, a bit Michael Garrison if you will!

great album i just discovered:

http://www.secondlanguagemusic.com/SL028.html

oops wrong thread.

semi- pertinent tho!