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Sometimes you remember a crucial moment in your life - and suddenly that memory triggers an avalanche. In Matthew Thomas Dillon's case, it was a visit to the EPCOT Centre in Florida, a theme park of the future and part of Walt Disney World, which became the key inspiration for the second album of his Windmill project. "It was a perfect trip," says Dillon, "my grandparents were still alive, the worries of adults were still far away for me and my brothers. I can still remember everything exactly: what EPCOT looked like, its colours, its sounds, its smells.
I was hypnotized." The 28-year-old remembers exactly how he felt: "Walt Disney had created an extraordinary world, a testament to the great ideas of the 60s and 70s. EPCOT was like a city, but everything was designed from the ground up. I found it incredible: even though I knew we were mortal, I realized that people's ideas can be limitless."
Anyone who knows Windmill's debut album "Puddle City Racing Lights" will know how much Dillon is fascinated by the limitlessness of ideas. And the new album "Epcot Starfields" is huge, fantastic and absolutely unique. Dillon recorded the album alone "on the edge of madness", in a tiny bedroom with dim lighting. But it sounds like it comes from a much larger, infinite space.
The subject matter has completely consumed Dillon and the album: the opening track, "Airsuit," tells of the end of life on Earth; "IMAX Raceway" recalls his trip to the Kennedy Space Center, NASA's spaceport; "Ellen Save Our Energy" is named after Dillon's favorite ride, Ellen's Energy Adventure, at EPCOT; and "Epcot Slow" is steeped in fear of the future and the track that set the whole album in motion; "Epcotman" tells of Disney's creative obsession; "Photo Hemispheres" is dedicated to ecologically-minded astronomer Carl Sagan; the closing track, "Spaceship Earth," sees our eventual demise.
When Dillon finally asked co-producer Tim Knott, who had worked on "Puddle City" before, after a year of working on the project alone, he also delved deeply into the subject. So deeply that he first watched "Tron," the key film in the development of the album, before he started working.
The album cover, which was provided by artist Jonah Buckley, and the lyrics seem to tell of a love story in space. But Dillon insists that there is more to it and that the whole album is based entirely in reality: "It's mainly about the brilliant and limitless idea of humanity and how it inevitably comes to an end. Every human being's life is great, but the chance that humanity is aware enough of itself and its responsibilities is one in a billion. And how do you prepare to say goodbye to your own life or that of the people who shared it with you? 'Epcot Strafields' is about the perfect moments in our lives and the sadness of having to let it all go at the moment of death."