On April 1st 2026, NASA's Artemis II lifted off from Kennedy Space Center: the first crewed mission to travel beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Carrying astronauts Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Canadian CSA astronaut Jeremy Hansen, it was humanity's first return to lunar distance in more than fifty years. I watched the launch live, and it was one of those moments where you feel the weight of what's actually happening in front of you.

Cislunar is the direct result of that moment. The title refers to the region of space between the Earth and the Moon, the corridor through which Artemis II and her crew travelled. All four tracks take their names from spaceflight terminology: the countdown to lunar departure, the trans-lunar injection burn that commits a spacecraft irrevocably moonward, the strange suspended quiet of zero gravity, and the phosphene light that astronauts report seeing behind closed eyes in deep space (ionizing radiation passing directly through the optic nerves.)

Lunar T-Zero opens the EP at the moment of ignition: propulsive, tension-coiled, built around the kinetic energy of a countdown reaching its end. It incorporates actual mission audio from the Artemis II launch, sourced from NASA's publicly available audio library. That audio, the real voices of mission control and the real sounds of a rocket leaving Earth, sits at the core of the track. Credit and sincere gratitude to NASA for making this material available under their media usage guidelines.

Translunar follows the injection burn, the point of commitment when the spacecraft leaves Earth orbit and the Moon becomes the destination. The atmosphere shifts: still driven, but with something vast beginning to open around it.

Zero G is weightlessness made sonic. The rhythmic anchor loosens, the textures float. This is the long middle of the journey, the quiet between worlds.

Phosphene closes the EP in that liminal space beyond the atmosphere: the light that doesn't come from outside but from within. It is, deliberately, the strangest and most interior of the four tracks.

The four tracks form a single arc: ignition, transit, weightlessness, deep space.