Album Notes

Recording artist Jon O'Bergh has gone in a daring new musical direction with his fifth CD release, "Songs from Other Planets." "This music is unlike anything else you've ever heard," O'Bergh explains. "It's like taking a cosmic voyage out of this world."

O'Bergh describes the music as a cyberjazz blend of alien voices, ambient textures and extraterrestrial grooves. Drawing on influences as diverse as New Age, world beat, sci-fi, and Brazilian nuevo bossa nova, the music manages to be both retro and futuristic. The alien voices were created using special effects, transforming vocal tracks into otherworldly sounds that suggest a host of unusual creatures. Asked what inspired him, O'Bergh says, "Music is a part of the fabric of the universe, from the rhythmic signal of a pulsar to the harmonic spectrum of vibrating atoms. I wanted to express this combination of the wonderful and strange with the familiar."

O'Bergh also displays on his website (www.obergh.net) a photo gallery of aliens which he calls the Extraterrestrial Music Guide. Fans are encouraged to submit their own mock photos of aliens for inclusion on the site.

O'Bergh has released four previous CDs: "Millennial Landscapes," "Sacred Spaces," "Meditations from a Lost World," and "Carta," which held the #1 spot on the New Age Voice chart nationwide for two months. In 2003 he co-produced with singer/songwriter Marcel the album "Uptown: 2025 A.D." Emerging from that collaboration was "Songs from Other Planets."

"There are more galaxies in the visible universe than there are stars in a single galaxy such as our own Milky Way," O'Bergh muses, "which alone contains some 100 billion stars. Even if there is only one planet with life in each galaxy, that would still leave trillions of planets with life. Without a doubt, there are other intelligent beings out there."