Origin of Ocean

What a difference three years and a new vocalist make. German-Swiss band the Ocean has had nearly 40 members since songwriter/guitarist Robin Staps founded the Ocean Collective a decade ago. The addition of vocalist Loïc Rossetti has, according to Staps, influenced the very nature of how the Ocean creates music. Heliocentric is the first of two companion albums to be issued in 2010.
Musically, Heliocentric stands apart from everything the Ocean has ever recorded. The band’s production and compositional approaches are much more spacious than on previous outings. For starters, Rossetti spends most of his time actually singing rather than growling. There are more textures here, but they are employed economically…

What a difference three years and a new vocalist make. German-Swiss band the Ocean has had nearly 40 members since songwriter/guitarist Robin Staps founded the Ocean Collective a decade ago. The addition of vocalist Loïc Rossetti has, according to Staps, influenced the very nature of how the Ocean creates music. Heliocentric is the first of two companion albums to be issued in 2010.
Musically, Heliocentric stands apart from everything the Ocean has ever recorded. The band’s production and compositional approaches are much more spacious than on previous outings. For starters, Rossetti spends most of his time actually singing rather than growling. There are more textures here, but they are employed economically…

Since 2007's Precambrian, the Ocean has become increasingly conceptual. Two separate offerings from 2010, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, had longtime fans in a quandary as to whether the band were visionaries or merely pretentious. Over two years in the making, Pelagial was originally envisaged by guitarist, lyricist, and band mastermind Robin Staps as a single piece of instrumental music that charted the seven levels of the sea - Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic, Abyssopelagic, Hadopelagic, Demersal, and Benthic - by portraying their depths musically, from the surface where light enters (Epipelagic) to the murky, enclosed-in-darkness ocean floor (Benthic) where bottom feeders live. Staps was also influenced deeply by Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, a work that charts the journey of three men through a bleak (presumably post-apocalyptic) landscape to a room where all desires can be fulfilled…

Since 2007's Precambrian, the Ocean has become increasingly conceptual. Two separate offerings from 2010, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, had longtime fans in a quandary as to whether the band were visionaries or merely pretentious. Over two years in the making, Pelagial was originally envisaged by guitarist, lyricist, and band mastermind Robin Staps as a single piece of instrumental music that charted the seven levels of the sea - Epipelagic, Mesopelagic, Bathypelagic, Abyssopelagic, Hadopelagic, Demersal, and Benthic - by portraying their depths musically, from the surface where light enters (Epipelagic) to the murky, enclosed-in-darkness ocean floor (Benthic) where bottom feeders live. Staps was also influenced deeply by Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky's masterpiece Stalker, a work that charts the journey of three men through a bleak (presumably post-apocalyptic) landscape to a room where all desires can be fulfilled…