The Landing is a solo artist seeking to turn the struggle of finding one’s place in the Universe into an anthem for the optimistic. A classically trained musician who has scored films and written original pieces for orchestra, The Landing labels his music as “Space Pop,” taken from a style of music popularized by composers of the 50s and early 60s during the birth of the space age. Drawing inspiration from this period, his lyrics and artwork also use space imagery and exploration as a theme. Influences for The Landing come from an eclectic mix of classical music, space-age pop, EDM and indie-pop.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. I’m one person (people get confused about that) writing, producing, and releasing Space-pop tracks from my apartment in Brooklyn, NY. The music I write is a response to the wealth of inspiration our Universe provides, and an effort at turning the struggle of finding my place in it into an anthem for the optimistic.
Top 3 favorite or most visited websites and why? Space.com, Citizen Science projects from Zooniverse.org. We live in a time where everyday we’re making new discoveries billions of miles away from home. This is incredible! I consider myself so lucky to have been around during this age of exploration and discovery and just want to be as active a participant as I can be.
How has living in New York City affected your music? There’s a reason New York City is referred to as the center of the Universe. Anything you want to do, you can do. Anyone you want to be, you can be. Everything is possible here and that’s a great place to create and get inspired.
What kinds of things are influencing your music right now? Us! Humans, we’re absolutely astounding. The things we’re capable of, the dreams we chase, the feats we accomplish. It took us only 65 years to get from the first ever manned flight in Kitty Hawk, NC to putting a man on the Moon! And now it’s looking like another 65 years from then and we’ll have put footprints on Mars! We’re rockstars and that’s really all I can say.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on? I’ll be releasing my sophomore EP, How Strange to Be, in June. This is a follow up to my debut EP, We Are, released last May, and a product of being completely overwhelmed with this predicament we find ourselves in: Being. I’m really excited to be sharing these kinds of ideas through music.
Who would you ideally like to collaborate with? So in the videos I make I like to have a lot of dancing. Now I know Neil Degrasse Tyson is a good dancer (if you don’t believe) and it would be absolutely amazing if I could get him to make just a few moves in one of my videos some day. Or Bill Nye of course!
What do you want a viewer to walk away with after hearing your music? Questions! I really want people to ask different questions after hearing a song. After listening to a final lyric like “What a thing to be, a symptom of reality” I want people to have a new question about what it means to be, to ponder their place in it all. Mainly because these are the questions I have! Most of the time my songs stem from asking a question.
Can you share one of the best or worst reactions you have gotten as a result of your music? At a show once we ran into some difficulties with our equipment and ended up having to play the whole set stripped down. I found that the songs still seemed to translate to the audience and a lot of people who hadn’t heard my music before came up and told me how much they enjoyed the set. This of course was one of the best moments for me, to know that I don’t need to dress my songs up in electronics to have what I’m trying to say come across.
