This is an incomplete list of the songs and artists that built the soundscape I tried to stay in while writing Bury’em Deep (and editing and rewriting it, and, well, you know).

The initial bulk of the music was industrial, with a few other genres tossed in. I think there was something about the frequently wordless, highly rhythmic, often distorted quality of that music that drove my sense of living inside a spaceship. My vision of those spaces was not the JJ Abrams Star Trek Apple Store feel of white, glass, and lens flares. It had more in common with World War 2 era submarines. Any gleam or shimmer came from the false realities of glasses’ environmental skins.

The next place I took musical inspiration from was synthwave. Something about the way those sounds combined with the more grating and grinding industrial music fused the feeling of large heavy machinery with complicated computers. Better yet, the synthwave often had a driving beat as well, something that mimicked and pantomimed the rhythms of the industrial tracks that had first sparked my imagination.

This means that alongside Front 242 (Tragedy For You), lots of VNV Nation (specifically tracks with fewer words), Foetus (Love, and (Not Adam)), and Ministry, I had heaps and piles of tracks from Makeup and Vanity Set (everything they made for Brigador, plus at least five other albums), Perturbator, Lazerhawk, Kavinsky, and Waveshaper.

Then, the more idiosyncratic additions and odder pairings, the ones that I couldn’t ignore:

VNV Nation’s song 4 A.M. flows seamlessly into the choral version of Barber’s Adagio for Strings that you find at the opening of the Homeworld soundtrack. I later discovered Edward Higginbottom’s choral version of that Adagio for Strings. I used the rest of the Homeworld soundtrack too.

I listened to two remixes of tracks from Star Control 2. They were Starbase – Under a Red Sky, and Property of the Crimson Corporation.

I listened to Holst’s Planets, and Clutch’s eponymous album. I cycled through several tracks off Tomoyasu Hotei’s album Electric Samurai (especially Dark Wind and Howling). I listened to SomaFM’s space mission station, and Science from the album Sounds of GE. Sometimes I listened to Orbital, primarily their Blue Album and In Sides. I used tracks from Receiver, by H Anton Riehl, and NASA’s Symphonies of the Planets: Voyager Recordings.

Sometimes I listened to one album or track on repeat for hours on end. My musical desires grow strange(r) while I’m writing.

If you have any of that music, I suggest playing it while you read the book. If you don’t have the book, I suggest listening to that music and imagining what it feels like to live trapped in a tin can in the far reaches of our solar system.