No doubt about this one. Browsing through Peter Andersson's Bandcamp, spotting cover art of celestial objects, and I'm on it like a wook with white powder. Just the concept alone gets my astro-dork endorphins going. Think about it, a whole other moon orbiting Earth, one that has somehow gone undetected in all of mankind's star gazing. Or even better, an Elseworlds concept, where there's always been a second moon, one woven into the very fabric of our culture since cultures began. We've set so much of our society around the regular rotations of Luna, could you imagine what else might be added to that with a little sister of sorts? The possibilities are mind-boggling!
Even ignoring the cultural implications though, the astronomical ones alone are fascinating. Where would such a moon feasibly be? How would its gravitational pull affect Luna and Earth? How large would such a body have to be to even sustain an orbit without other astrophysics interfering with it? There have been transient bodies that have, for a time, shared Earth's orbit, and even briefly come under its gravitational pull, but most of the time is kicked back out into the cosmos by that jealous hanger-on Luna, forever dominating our skies for attention.
I find it interesting that Mr. Andersson chose an image of Charon for a stand-in of Moon Two. This image was extremely new when he released this album, the New Horizons probe having done its Pluto flyby barely a year prior. And while the make-up and orbital mechanics are quite different between the Pluto and Earth systems, there is some similarity, in that they're both examples of a double-planet system. True, the Pluto-Charon relationship is more a true double (dwarf) planet example, each always showing the same face, their the barycenter outside either body, whereas that's not the case with Earth and Luna. Still, it's the only shared example within our solar system of a proportionally large moon orbiting another body.
Oh dear, have I ever gone way off topic here.
As mentioned before, Atomine Elektrine was the alias Peter used when exploring music outside the confines of dark ambient's domain. That initially meant skewing closer to techno, but when he relaunched the project with the Nebulous album, it's become more about space ambient and dronescapes ever since. Unsurprisingly, this has led to his music inching ever closer to Berlin-School, because the never-ending fascination with Tangerine Dream's early works is forever etched into space ambient's DNA.
The Second Moon definitely has that vibe, lengthy pieces built around pulsating synth melodies. For sure opener Sepharial's Lilith harkens more to the darker drone of raison d'être, but beyond that, it's spaced-out sounds with slowly evolving arps. By the time we're at final track Green Crescent (or even bonus Bandcamp track 2006 RH120), it's upper astral all the way, gazing back at the pretty pair of Earth and Luna from the surface of an ignored, forgotten sibling's surface. Always lonesome, the second child.
