KeplerElectronics
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Port Blue's The Airship released in 2007 to relatively little fanfare. While it has collected a moderate amount of success over the past 17 years, most of that is due to the notoriety of the artist's other projects. Port Blue is one of the (many, many, many) other side projects of Adam Young, the one-man band behind Owl City. Similarly to contemporary tracks from Owl City, Port Blue has this sort of nostalgic, dreamy quality to its music that I and many others fell in love with back in the early 2010s.
Port Blue emerged in the late '00s as an offshoot of Adam's old band Windsor Airlift. Windsor Airlift initially started as a punk band but eventually morphed into an ambient/post-rock project inspired by artists such as Unwed Sailor. Windsor Airlift's (impossible to officially obtain downloads of!) albums Moonfish Parachutist and Qiu! would prove to be blueprints for the Port Blue sound, featuring ambient pads, hip-hop inspired beats, field recordings and a distinct flavor of piano melody. I have a hunch (that hasn't been proven) that the reason these albums are so hard to find is because Adam did most of or all of the work on them. Windsor Airlift has some releases predating these missing albums on their bandcamp, which indicates that it is a conscious decision to not make them available and not simply because they are old and unpolished.
The album is set firmly in this idyllic vision of the 1960s/70s for me, the field recordings, track titles, piano melodies, and the French spoken in the intro to Over Atlantic City all combine to create this for me. Something about the music screams postwar British Literature to me. The early title for Into the Gymnasium was The Resilient Miss Kate De Vries, which also reminds me of something you'd hear in a Paddington Bear or similar novel. The album is often said to be inspired by Kenneth Oppel's Airborn, which is heavily inspired by this period of time. While I haven't read the book myself, it's on the list, and apparently the early titles of tracks on this album are direct references to characters in the book. I have listened to this album countless times and never read the book, so it's definitely not required reading.
~~A look at the album
The album starts with the track Up Ship! which sets the tone beautifully with a soft piano line over the sound of ocean waves and radio static. We are then treated to one of Port Blue's common tactics, a second piano that strictly plays a melody line. While the underlying piano is relatively dry and unprocessed, this melody piano features a significant amount of echo that accentuates when Adam repeatedly plays the same note.
~~Space to breathe since the next few paragraphs cover the same track
The following track Over Atlantic City starts with a selection of French dialogue, after which it continues the same piano tropes as in Up Ship!. The French dialogue is commonly attributed to Einstein, though I have been unable to find any evidence of this despite hours of looking through both English and French sources.
Returning to the conversation about Windsor Airlift, Over Atlantic City by Port Blue appears to be a reworked version of Windsor Airlift's When I was a Pedant Clerk... with a slightly slower tempo and sweeping arrangement changes in the second half. The drums in the Port Blue version are also more hip-hop influenced compared to Windsor Airlift's more rock-influenced drum patterns. Both tracks supposedly released in 2007 according to official sources(Bandcamp/Itunes), though some sources indicate that the Windsor Airlift version originally released in 2005. I'm inclined to believe the 2005 release for Pedant Clerk since the Port Blue version sounds more polished from a mixing perspective. Both tracks have merit, I tend to prefer the beginning of Over Atlantic City because it's slower and more mellow tempo fits the intro better, but I also really like the piano at the end of Pedant Clerk.
Apparently Over Atlantic City was originally titled Over Lionsgate city, as some early uploads of the track feature this title. I also have in my possession an official live recording of the track from the Vaudeville Mews in Des Moines on May 3 2007 which features the early title. I may be the only person besides the band to have this live version, I was given a massive archive of Windsor Airlift tracks back in 2015. The band sent me a link over Facebook that included some extremely rare and sought-after ones on the condition that I promised to not distribute them. It feels weird to be this conflicted about having a bunch of lost media. Anyways, the live version features a lot more guitar and bass work and live instrumentation than the record version.
~~Returning to the rest of the album
Another notable track from the album is The Grand Staircase, a track built around soaring synth pads and an extremely fun drum break. While the track is one of my favorites on the album, it seems it's most notable for being sampled and rapped over by Lil B in his track The Age of Information. It's actually incredible that the track can feel complete and full in its original incarnation while still feeling perfectly complete with someone rapping over it.
The following track Sunset Cruiser (initially titled Mr. Chen, Sailmaker) shares the most in common with the previous Windsor Airlift works, with soft piano layered spiraling clean guitar work and field recordings. To me, this track embodies that 1960s view of an airport or train station, with calm chatter in the background and light chimes for announcements. It's a sendoff, an explorer looking for their next adventure, a student excited to travel to university, with a tiny amount of homesickness.
I'm not going to go over every track on here, since a lot of them I have similar sentiments on, so I'll skip over a few tracks.
Into the Gymnasium (or The Resilient Miss Kate De Vries in the demo stage) is maybe my least favorite track on the album. It feels like this track has more Owl City DNA than Port Blue, which makes it feel out of place to me. It's not a bad track, just a 7/10 in an album where I would rank most of the other tracks 9s and 10s.
Arrival at Sydney Harbor is unique in that it starts in an almost melancholy way, the first few chords of the progression make it seem like it's that rainy scene after something sad has happened. The track doesn't stay that way for long, as it quickly comes back to the positive side, with driving guitar and piano layers that play off of each other in nice ways.
The Gentle Descent is the only track on the album to eschew melody entirely. It's a 1:46 dose of pure pad bliss. I actually used to put this song on for years to help me fall asleep, there was one year that my Spotify Wrapped said I listened to this track over 7000 times. It's relaxing and meditative and I love it.
The album ends with At Anchor, a piano-driven track that starts with the sound of rhythmic footsteps and distant chatter. This track has some of my favorite piano on the whole album, it's so emotional to me for some reason. It's a simple track with very few elements, but they work together extremely well, and this track is an excellent sendoff to the album.
~~Wrap Up
I first listened to this album in middle school, and even as I've expanded my tastes and experienced ambient and other similar genres, this album sticks out to me for several reasons. It's unabashedly positive. Even if parts of the album feel melancholy, it rarely feels depressed or anxious like a lot of other ambient and instrumental works, especially those coming out in recent years. All the tracks on the album are in major keys if I'm not mistaken, which really helps add to the adventurous, uplifting spirit.
This album feels unique to me, and maybe that's just because I haven't delved too much into the pre-vaporwave ambient scene. Regardless, it's still a phenomenal album in my eyes. I highly doubt this album will ever get pressed to vinyl, but if it does, I'm getting in line immediately. Not every track I'd consider a 10, but the sum of its parts makes the album as a whole a 9.99 or something like that. This is an album that has completely changed the way I write instrumental music, everything I make is filtered through the lens of Port Blue, and this album is the most distilled form of that idea Adam ever released.
