Michael Giacchino, composer for Rogue One and Star Trek, makes a sci-fi album about 2020

If you've watched a sci-fi or Pixar film within the last decade, you've more than likely heard the music of Michael Giacchino. The composer has done music for many a genre film or TV show, from Lost to the Jurassic World sequels to Doctor Strange. He's also tackling the upcoming score to 2022's The Batman. But for the first time, Giacchino has released an album of his own: Travelogue, Volume 1., and it's very much genre as well. 

The composer has always wanted to make his own album, and Travelogue by Michael Giacchino and his Nouvelle Modernica Orchestra, finally sees his dream realized. When the pandemic hit, he decided to make music for himself. Speaking to Variety, he talked about how the album came from combining his loves of Kirk's ship logs in the original Star Trek, 1960s radio dramas, and the music of composers such as Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny. You'll definitely hear the influence of all three when you listen to the concept album. 

Check out a sampling below:

Travelogue sees an astral traveler in search of a better planet than the one she just left, which was full of racism and political strife. The traveler, voiced by Janina Gavankar, comes across Earth in 2020, and arrives only to be dismayed by how similar the two worlds are.

The narration is full of “little soliloquies,” as Giacchino calls them, written by Alison-Eve Hammersley, which pay homage to William Shatner’s occasional narration in Star Trek: TOS. 

“I wanted to tell this weird cosmic tale of responsibility and the idea of what do you do when things get bad?" Giacchino told Variety. "Do you run off and try to find a better place that isn’t so horrible? Or do you stay and fight to try and make it better?”

You can listen to the 11-track, 55-minute album on digital storefronts, and Mondo will be releasing physical vinyls in the near future.

And as for the second volume? "I have the whole story mapped out," Giacchino teases.