Hibernal - Beyond

If you are unfamiliar with Hibernal like I was, it is the brainchild of Mark R. Healy from Australia.  Along with Rowan Salt, a cast of professional voice actors, actresses, and quality sound effects, each album by Hibernal is a science fiction (sf) short story mixed with some of the most chill post rock available.  There is no singing and minimal song structure, only atmosphere and acting.

You might be thinking, "yeah, I'll pass," but that would be a mistake. The voice acting isn't your typical prog cheese in a can and the stories are great.  Full disclosure, I've been an avid fan of sf since I was reading H.G. Wells and Michael Crichton in middle school.  Mark writes good science fiction.  His work is closer to the harder stories you might find in Analog SF magazine than your typical space opera junk sf.

In fact, Mark is a professional writer as well as musician.  His books are available on Amazon and most of them are free if you have a Kindle Unlimited account.  You can also get 2 free books from Mark R. Healy's website directly if you subscribe to his newsletter.  [I'm not making money off of anything here, simply providing information and links for your convenience, dear reader! -FL]

If this style of music isn't your typical jam, I'd say give it a try anyway if just for the story.  Each album is priced right and in fact, as of this writing, all 9 albums can be had in CD quality FLAC on Bandcamp (see link below) for less than $15.00 USD.  For the well-initiated in modern prog, the closest thing I can compare it to musically would have to be Riverside's Eye of the Soundscape.

Let's talk about Beyond.  I'm obviously not going to give away the story, but here are the first lines of the first track, The Emptiness, to whet your appetite:

It was meant to be a routine mission.  A crew of two sent to investigate an anomaly in the Rigel system at the foot of Orion.

We'd done this kind of jump a hundred times before, maybe more.

But when we came out of the slingshot, we had no way of knowing what lay ahead; a force that was vast, incomprehensible.  As ancient as the stars themselves.

And in the emptiness of space, it waited for us.

Rigel is the big bright blue star at the bottom right.

As you let that sink in, the drums kick in with a slow beat while rhythmic keyboards and electric guitar set the soundscape.  Lifeless World has a more bass-driven rhythm with some nice reverb-heavy guitar tones.  The guitar is more central in Deep Down, with some subtle bending and vibrato with tones punctuated here and there by a distorted keyboard.  It'd be futile to give a track by track analysis.  Suffice it to say that the musical atmosphere provides an appropriate background for the actors and the highly rhythmic nature of the music accentuates the time-sensitive nature of the story.

In all, Hibernal - Beyond is a fun listen.  It's a bit more heavy on the electronics than I'd prefer - I specifically miss the acoustic and distorted guitars, but I think it makes sense to leave them out, given the cold, hostile environment of deep space where the story takes place.  That being said, I can't complain too much about an album that had a pretty good sf short story with some atmospheric music that kept me entertained almost an hour and cost less than five bucks.

Hibernal - Beyond is available in CD quality from Bandcamp and on Amazon Music HD.