SuperScience is the solo music project of Randal Silvey.
Inspired by the music and themes of 70s, 80s, & 90s horror and science fiction, the sound of SuperScience is a heavy mix of retro synth and synthwave with elements of dark synth, post-industrial, and metal.
Randal Silvey is an artist, podcast producer, and audio/video editor. He has been writing and producing music since 2000 as a solo musician as well as in collaboration with other artists. Musically, he has embraced many genres but typically with a particular focus electronic genres and digital production.
History
SuperScience was born out of Silvey’s love of ’70s and ’80s horror films and musical scores. Key influences being the classic synthesizer scores of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth and the works of Tangerine Dream. While researching similar artists he discovered the newly thriving synthwave scene of the early 2010s. While retro synth was often an element of his previous work, finding the synthwave community inspired him to lean into the sound even harder.
His 2014 album, Redeemer, was originally released under the artist title of CTRL_ALT_DSTRY. When it came time to release a follow-up album, however, Apple appeared to have changed it’s rules regarding artist titles containing special characters such as _. At the time, Apple’s Itunes was the top digital music store so Silvey made the decision to change the artist title.
Redeemer was re-released under the SuperScience title and promptly followed by the full length 2015 album, Blood. Blood remains his most popular album to date. In 2016 he released the 3 track EP, Stranger, before taking an extended 5 year hiatus to focus on his freelance podcast editing and production business.
SuperScience returned in October 2021 with the Candy Sack, a Halloween themed album. Candy Sack featured previously unreleased tracks and a few tracks released on compilations, some pre-dating Redeemer. This served to “tie up loose ends” from the strictly synthwave era of SuperScience before Silvey pushed the project into new territory.
1980s nostalgia played a large role in the popularity of synthwave. Being an ’80s kid, ’90s teen, and knowing that pop culture nostalgia would inevitably transition from the ’80s into the ’90s, Silvey conceived SuperScience with the plan to transition along with it.
With 1996: The Future, he began incorporating elements of the genres that dominated his teen years, namely metal and post-industrial, while still retaining the retro synth roots of SuperScience. The 2022 full-length album opens with several songs that deliberately dance between synthwave and metal, post-punk, and post-industrial genres. The tracks becomes more and more experimental before wrapping back around to close out the album with a pair of spacey retro synth songs.
This new era of SuperScience has brought a dramatically increased output from Silvey. Six months after 1996: The Future came Tooth & Claw, released in February 2023, which dove even further into metal. He wrapped 2023 up with another Halloween album, Candy Sack II, a thematic sequel to Candy Sack. Unlike it’s predecessor, Candy Sack II featured predominately new material and more explicitly sets up a narrative story that was hinted at through the tone and artwork of Candy Sack. This is the first SuperScience album to feature full vocals on a majority of it’s tracks and demonstrates a more cohesive meshing of metal and synthwave.