Tiny Planets by Vanishing Shapes

We're very excited to be sharing these songs with you all and also the stories that have shaped them. Tiny Planets is about neighbouring planets, their communities, their interactions and the way they are governed. Like most stories there are good, bad and ugly times.

We start on a planet that is over industrialised with all power and control being possessed by a single person. Using power to further establish complex methods of control and to gain monumental amounts of wealth they leave almost the entire planet in a state of working poverty. Constantly unable to make ends meet no matter how much time they spend working hard labour away from friends, family and the enjoyment of life the people begin to realise. This planet was meant for all, but is being destroyed for the cyclic privilege of one. They revolt.

With the mass of the planet once again united their brutal overlord is unable to apply the force required to sustain power. As punishment for the economic enslavement of an entire planet, dictating systematic prejudice and leading mass environmental vandalism amongst many other abominable crimes, they are ejected from the planet to contemplate an eternity of drifting through space in a spacecraft with no means of control. In wake of the uprising, community and peace is restored and although irreparable damage has been caused to the planet positive change is afoot.

A nearby planet has enjoyed an existence that is often dismissed as utopic. The communities genuinely care for one another and the planet that gives them life just as much as they care for themselves. They are able to see past their own being and make small sacrifices to help others get as much out of life as the next person. As such there is widespread peace between the inhabitants and the planet is covered in the natural beauty easily afforded by not taking more than required from it. Unbeknownst to the people of this planet the prison ship containing a person once at the pinnacle of a system that actively destroyed this way of life to instil divides of discrimination, subjugation and privilege has entered their gravitational pull and become dead in orbit.

After years of orbiting the planet the usurped leader finds a way to override the prison ship’s systems and force a crash landing on this new planet. Upon arrival a sinister plan is made. The exiled dictator calls on the faithfully brainwashed from the first planet, manipulates people from the new planet to use them as pawns against their own and launches a bloody invasion. A new system of governance is forced across the land and the people who had lived peacefully on the planet for generations. Over time systems to oppress, subjugate and divide are built and the former glory of the people and the planet are forgotten.

Tiny Planets is an EP based on the dark origin story of our modern Australia, and echoing the similarly shared history of many parts of the westernised world. Many texts, both historical documents and works of fiction, have explored the invasion of foreign lands and subjugation of traditional land owners yet there are continuing, unapologetic narratives of denial coming from both leaders and communities alike.

For almost half a decade Vanishing Shapes have been inhaling the coal dust of Newcastle and exhaling sparkles all over the Eastern side of the continent. Their music, often being described as ‘fairy music’, is an eccentric amalgamation of various trad-folk styles meshed with modern art music, progressive rock practices and a healthy dose of classical expertise.

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