Streaming May 2026.
You can preview the latest mix of 08 – Infinity here …
As with all our music, this post is modelled after the booklet insert you can find a premium boxed CD, with a bit of creative background and musical information.
Project and Creative Vision
A musical scraps book has existed on my personal devices for a really long time, since high school. Thanks Apple. While “Curiosity“, the previous such endeavour, contained “promising” piano jingles in my collection, this time it is about electronic and experimental musical segments I produced on my system. Mostly the various iPads I carry to places.
I arranged the tracks organically, with a tacit (or overt, depends on reader) projective geometry treatment of Cosmic time where infinity is a point where infinitely long ago and infinitely long after meet. The album picks up from “Last Stars”, a time trillions of years in the future, where even hydrogen begins to look scarce. We pick up various fragments of songs as we go, these symbolise the human experience of exploration and connection — all in deep time and as an almost forgotten memory indistinguishable from legends.
“Infinity” describes a heat death and final erasure of everything we will have tried to leave behind. And then a new Universe starts. Light dances, stars form, life emerges.
The end.
Matters on the Title and Cover Art
The retail version of the album shall be titled “Anthology of Decoherence: The Last Question“.
The latter half is of course a nod to the 1956 short story that Asimov claimed was his “favourite story” he had written. I won’t spoil it if you haven’t read it and I do not make explicit references to the story in my track selection.
The times between my first reading of the story — not suspecting that something spanning merely pages can enchant me to go out and stare into an cold autumn night sky for hours after reaching its end — and my brutal brain destruction at the statsmech final exam, where I realised my decision not to prepare a formula sheet (permitted) wasn’t epistemological prowess but utter conceit, that period happened to also be the time of my life where most of the musical segments here took shape.
For the cover, I knew I wanted to render one scene, namely when Jerrodd and Jerrodine (their children not shown in my work …) arrive at their new home after a hyperspace jump from Earth to a new world, X-23.
“So many stars, so many planets,” sighed Jerrodine, busy with her own thoughts. “I suppose families will be going out to new planets forever, the way we are now.”
“Not forever,” said Jerrodd, with a smile. “It will all stop someday, but not for billions of years. Many billions. Even the stars run down, you know. Entropy must increase.
Isaac Asimov, “The Last Question”
From early on, I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to properly learn pixel art and procedural dithering.
Here you can see the first checkpoint I found from November 2024, vs. what is heading to distributors. The native resolution for the final version is 1000 × 1000 pixels. Supersampled 3x so it survives some compression and resizing …
Statement on generative media use:
None. None in the music or mixing. None on the cover.
I mean I asked Docktaur Geepeetee to draw this for me long before I had a project, which largely follows the same format and the columns outside possibly inspired the glass seams I designed in the final.
(Generated, January 2024)
Tracks Information
01. Last Stars
Notes:
Just a quiet love song. Back when “Afar” was titled “Universe: Mvmt 2”, this was “Universe: Mvmt 1”.
From my early college years.
02. Frontiers / For the Science Fiction Writers
Notes:
Written in 2019 after my last workshop session (no Zoom back then, via Facetime) with the Berkeley Sci Fi writers workshop. Initially titled “Lost in Space” but you know that’s too generic. Not only for my standards, it is literally the history of the world (idea I attribute to Bill Wurtz).
That session was also on the first iteration of my story “Stillwater”. It’s something I’m actively redeveloping into both a better short story and a science-backed visual spectacle.
03. Into Thin Air
Notes:
In high school a bunch of area chemistry nerds and myself (mostly remotely) made a video collage of cool chemical reactions. During lockdown I contacted the old friends to get all the original footage and attempts were made to compose in sync with them.
Into Thin Air was one such project. It was only piano. The conversion into Rock happened later …
04. Hyperspace Friendship
Notes:
For how much I wanted to do with it, it’s comical how little I’ve managed to build it.
It was made — and since largely unchanged — during the first weekend after Auckland Physics assigned me my own Mac mini, which for a brief time was my most powerful computer. It dramatically increased the numbers on how many parameters I could automate and how many tracks I could mix in Logic Pro.
The biggest thing that changes were titles — seeing a trend here. This melody was originally named “A Comoving Project” and designated the lead track for an earlier anthology project simply code named ACN.
It’s retitled as “Hyperspace Friendship” this month. For one, the cosmologists, the only group capable of half understanding what I meant before … they don’t care. For two, the echoes across wave bands does to me remind of a good friendship.
Earlier iterations for the ACN album is shown here. I’m just happy the music is out to face the world. Indifference and confusion alike, I can move on.
05. World Lines 山河
Notes:
A version with a lot more drum and bass was a published single at some point, but this is the essential mix … or original draft.
This was actually a love song. For that particular love the world lines diverged long ago.
The old single song cover is included here for archival completeness.
06. TVM (Radio Edit)
Notes:
Read more about it on the dedicated TVM Companion Page.
I wanted to draw a snow globe in the cover for the album to pay homage to this track… but it was technically hard and distracts from the book reference. So maybe later.
07. Party at the End of Meaning
Notes:
Written on 31 December 2018 and finalised to go with my Sky Tower new year fireworks video.
Not really nihilist or absurdist. But definitely makes me think.
08. Infinity
Notes:
It had to be track 8.
09. Bosonic Dance
Notes:
Like ACN, another track that I’ve held on too way too long to not have gone far.
Written while sitting at the overpass between Birge and LeConte (now name changed of course), I waited for my friend to finish and drop off her homework and, well, had an iPad with me.
Originally titled “Light”, and both titles came from that week’s statistical physics material, and also “Fermionic Dance” would be sad. Let’s swap and change sign!
10. Reionization / Night Drive
Notes:
Lead track when I participated online at the 1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity…
Not very quantum except they shared a room with quantum mechanics in my brain.
11. First Stars
Notes:
Like 04 – ACN, this is another track that I once hoped to lead its own EP. ACN was later, assembled during PhD year 1, and this was earlier, when I was still undergraduate.
Initially titled “Carving Stars”. I imagined a heavily polluted industrial world, where smogs above are as thick optically as cotton, or a rock wall. All the residents know of are their eternal city lights bounced off the bottom edge of the clouds.
To make them see stars would literally be like to carve away the cave walls in which Plato’s Allegory of the Cave prisoners are confined, and hence this verb not usually associated with stars “to carve”. Sentimentally, this is like the time during LA power outage, people called the police about UFOs hovering over the city. That was the Milky Way.
The version released today is really just the central verse slowed down … I still have a lot of ideas about this. Maybe revisiting soon.
12. Abiogenesis
Notes:
Oldest track here. Done on the family iPad Air in 2014 and one of my first ever uses of the drum machine in GarageBand.
Yourong Frank Wang 
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