For his latest album, Buffalo electronica producer, Spruke, came up with a clever though possibly daunting idea: make each and every copy of the album unique. He’s not just talking about tweaked album artwork, he’s talking about original sounds, some of which are customizable by the customer. The album is called Music to Die Alone in Space to, and the 30-year-old artist has just successfully funded the production of it via Kickstarter. Not only did he reach his goal of raising $2,000, he raised more than 10 times that, with a final result of $25,680. (becoming a Kickstarter “Staff Pick” on the first day of his campaign helped, he says). This week we talked to Spruke a.ka. Bill Boulden about how he’ll deliver what he promised to his fans, and how this album will stay true to its outer space environment.

Where did the idea for this record come from?
This record kind of came from two distinct things I was working on that sort of converged. One is that for a while I had been trying to make an album about loneliness and losing consciousness—the idea of an album so neutral and fading away that you could actually gently die to it. The other thing that converged with this is an idea I have been playing with for an album that could somehow be unique to every single person who owned it—which is in this age of people collecting numbered vinyl releases and wanting everything in flac and high quality—what could be more of a collector’s edition or an audiophile thing than a copy of an album that is unique to them? And all that kind of converged in Music to Die Alone in Space To with the idea that you’ve got an album about an astronaut who is out there drifting alone, and every single person who purchases this album gets a rerecorded copy unique to them that’s distinguishable and has new music, making it different from all other copies of it. So it’s their own personalized sort of end-of-consciousness experience.

So not only will each copy of the album be different, but people will have the option to customize their copy to a degree. 
So there are, I want to say, four chief aspects in the way every recording is different. They are the voiceover artist, the actual music that gets exported, the choice of user supplied content, and the cover art—there are going to be 12 or more to choose from, so your copy can be delivered with whichever art you like. In addition to the cover art, there is the issue of the voiceover identity. I think in today’s culture a lot of big media gets fed through the Hollywood filter where everything is continually pitched from this, like, Midwestern male point of view—if this was a movie or a big budget project, you would have somebody in a John Glenn voice saying, “Here I am floating in space,” but I don’t think that’s actually going to resonate with every single person who listens. So if you are an American of Indian descent and you think that that would sound most natural to you like your peers, then you can ask for a voiceover done by that, or if French is your first language and you identify as female, you can ask for a voiceover performed in French by a Frenchwoman. [Listeners] will be given a list of options based on a series of polls. So obviously costs notwithstanding, I can’t price this anywhere where a whole new professional voiceover happens per individual customer, but we’re going to be collecting feedback from people where I’ll be asking everyone what would you most like to see and we will be combining the most common responses, trying to make sure that at least all languages that are requested and accents or genders that are requested are hit at least once.

You took great lenghts to make sure that the sound of the album stayed true to the environment in which the story takes place.
So they like to say restrictions breed creativity. I have a massive amount of respect for albums that impose a set of restrictions upon themselves so as to create a closed sound. The artist says “this is what a sound from this album sounds like and if it sounds like anything else, it’s not from this album.” And some great examples of that to me have been Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak or Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack or the first album from She Wants Revenge, where the artist says, “Look, here is what we’re dealing with; my album is 808 and Auto-Tune.” And so they really create this enduring piece of art that lives as an album, not with singles or anything, but as an entity. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. So my restrictions for this album were no Earthen sounds at all. No instruments that resemble the earth because you are alone, you are in space—there is not a piano in your environment, not even to represent things either. I think there is this cheesy idea, like what am I going to do, float by a supernova and have it go “ahhh” and make it sound like a choir of medieval monks would have made from 13th century Europe? That’s not actually how it would happen. So the only percussion you have is heartbeats; the only real tangible sounds are internal suit sounds—the sound of the artist’s breath. And then since that represents the structures—there is this track, “Neutrinos,” which has the synthesized sound of what it might be like if millions of weightless particles were penetrating through your body. And so when the challenge is using this limited palette, it’s surprising how much music you can make from this. And in the end, you listen to a song and you have to say, “That’s a song from Music to Die Alone in Space To, it has to be.”

Can you give us a little hint to the fate of our hero in this story?
It doesn’t work out well. They don’t encounter a space object which is moving at a velocity comparable to them, since if you encountered any object in space, the odds are very great that, relative to your frame of motion, it might be going 60 million miles an hour or something. No, the person gradually runs out of air until they experience asphyxiation in the last track, and even that is represented in the music. I took great pains to do some research and try to understand what the sound of that is like and there are a lot of musical elements that actually bring to mind the auditory sensation of asphyxiating.

What’s next?
Given that every person’s copy will take between one and two hours to export, since I have to set all the equipment and then actually record it and bundle it up, I expect to be generating copies of this album for about the next eight months. After that, who knows, we’ll see if I would ever want to work on something like this again.