This Friday, June 30, the progressive rock band Aisles premiered on streaming platforms the instrumental suite “Bahamut”, created in collaboration with the writer Francisco Ortega. The suite includes seven tracks, and a total of thirteen minutes, in which the group goes through different narrative passages inspired by the science fiction novel “Bahamut”, released by the Chilean author last March.
This work has influences from progressive metal, from the ambient of keyboardist Rick Wright from Pink Floyd, to the sound of Porcupine Tree, and Muse in the period of their album “Absolution”, and is the first publication of Aisles together with the drummer Alvaro Poblete.
“Bahamut” is a science fiction novel that is also an anticipatory historical thriller, which uses technological and cultural phenomena with which we already live. The author mixes various topics with ease, such as religion, technology, physics, astronomy, artificial intelligence, etc., all under the guidance of prominent scientific, academic, and even political advisers. For the speech of one of the characters, which is an artificial intelligence, the author used Dramathon and ChatGTP, two artificial intelligence applications, with the purpose of accentuating the coldness of a machine.
In addition, the writer conceived his novel listening to progressive and ambient rock – the ideal music for a science fiction work – and thought that Aisles could accompany this story. “I have always thought that the soundtrack for the book had to be kind of a progressive rock opus, and it seemed to me that, among the Chilean bands, Aisles was the one that worked best with the speed, the vertigo and the spatial and temporal changes of the novel, because they handle these changes in the metrics of their music very well”, comments the author of “Bahamut”.
This is the second collaboration between Aisles and Francisco Ortega, after working together for the video clip of the song “Fast”, released in June 2021, and inspired by dystopian anime such as Ghost In the Shell, Devilman Crybaby and Akira. The clip is based on the city of Santiago, under an omnipresent control system and with a violent society. This time, Ortega asked the band to write the music for the book’s trailer, but soon after, the group worked on an entire suite based on the novel.