Classical Guitar Duo Cochran & McAllister went big for their new album Pale Blue Dot. The guitar virtuosos drew inspiration from space, from time, and from the writings of beloved astronomer Carl Sagan. “We wanted to make a record that follows a narrative,” explains Scottish guitarist Matthew McAllister, “Carl Sagan’s famous presentation about a photo taken from the Voyager II satellite in which the Earth is a tiny little speck in an enormous galaxy…we just found that to be a humbling and inspiring concept.” American composer-guitarist Matthew Cochran turned that inspiration into a large-scale suite for two guitars, appropriately titled Pale Blue Dot. Cochran also contributed a series of ambitious and highly original arrangements by legendary jazz composers Chick Corea, Pat Metheny and Ralph Towner. The project concludes with the duo’s stunning performance of a suite from Hans Zimmer’s ephemeral score from the Christopher Nolan epic, Interstellar.
The duo performs the album in a variety of live venues ranging from traditional concert halls to planetariums, often supplemented with mind-blowing and universe-expanding videos and images provided by NASA. “It just seemed like a logical extension of the project to find visuals that match the expansiveness of the subject matter,” says Cochran, “which, ironically, makes us feel very, very small by comparison.”
