by Backroads Music\u002FHeartbeatsMichael Lee Thomas's new work is an ambitious concept album, documenting in music the 12-year explorations of the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. The extensive liner notes detail every phase of the journey, as the Voyagers visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The music is appropriately drawn on a grand scale with synthesized fanfares and dramatic orchestral flourishes, complete with pounding tympani and crashing cymbals. Also included are simulated outer-space sounds, electromagnetic frequencies that, through computer technology, have been converted into audio signals. Perhaps most effective are the quieter sections, with more delicate restrained synthesizer passages, buffed with ethereal choral voicings. Guitars appear prominently midway through the album, with particularly effective stereo interplay between two of them on Separate onto the Stars, portraying the parting of the ways for Voyagers 1 and 2. The final cut opens out into a song, sung in quasi-operatic style by a female vocalist, singing the words Forever...forever...forever as the space probes head into deep space toward the edge of the solar system.