Combining Pacific Rim and The Shipping News in a way you never knew you needed, Crossworlds is the short story of quaint seaside village life and terrible sea monsters. The 40-page book, written by Jordan Crute and Joshua Van Tassel and features illustrations by Geordan Moore along with its own soundtrack, is Moby Dick with a sci-fi twist and a side of Clint Mansell. And for now, it’s also a beautiful limited edition.
Loosely based, at least topographically, on Port Rexton of Newfoundland, the story centres on a curious seaside village, an even more curious family of lighthouse keepers with a mysterious past, and a whole lot of unanswered questions that come to light when the town is attacked by a giant sea monster. A woman in the village is forced to take matters into her own hands, and choose between saving the town and risking her family’s questionable legacy.
Joshua Van Tassel, originally of the seaside-but-ever-so-slightly-up-river town of West LaHave, Nova Scotia, says that the tale was born of the accompanying music; the scenes fleshing themselves out in his mind as he wrote the songs.
“When I make instrumental music I always have some sort of scene playing in my mind that I try to write a score too,” says Van Tassel. “I had a larger scale story come to me, so I wanted to try and represent it in a physical way as well. I’m an avid reader, and I was hoping to give people a bit of an auditory and literary escape-hatch from [their] screens.”
Van Tassel brought the story idea to editor Jordan Crute to expand the concept into a novella form, and Geordan Moore of Quarrelsome Yeti for the illustration. Then he began working with the musicians…
“We’d read the chapter together, discuss the scene, vibe and characters involved, and then record the themes with all amps and humans in the same room together using only distance mics. The idea was to avoid hearing each individual instrument and instead blend them into a new sound that had familiar elements to it but that was still unidentifiable.
I then would take those themes, and build up the rest of the piece around them. Everyone involved was so respectful and on board, it was really inspiring.”
Aside from the typical otherworldly instrumentation employed, Van Tassel says they managed to incorporate plenty of authentic hydrophone and general nature recordings on the album, “and all of those came from the south shore in Nova Scotia and from Newfoundland.”
As per the story’s big baddy, Van Tassel took the opportunity to delve into research on the giant squid and turned up plenty of information from own backyard. He notes that Newfoundland, where Van Tassel did much of his writing for the story, has played a huge role in the study of giant squids, and is one of the few places in the world that has a viewable and mostly whole preserved squid available to the viewing public.
“The funny thing about giant squid is that we really know SO little about them,” says Van Tassel. “They rarely wash up, have only been photographed a handful of times in the past decade, and are incredibly advanced and terrifying hunters. They very well could be alien.”
While the story is short and sweet, and not unlike Japanese fiction, leaves a lot of corners for the reader to colour in on their own. We hope it might be best to think of Crossworlds as an introduction. There’s more than enough room to grow into a larger project, and Van Tassel says that they’re prepared. After all, should it become a film there’s already a soundtrack…
“We have all that mapped out for the most part, as well as how the creatures came to earth, their home world/worlds etc. there’s a lot of back story that didn’t make it due to it changing the nature of the story. I wanted it to still feel human and of this world, and the more sci-fi elements we left in the further I felt we got from the heart of the tale.
Jordan and I have definitely talked sequel and may investigate some web options for releasing off shoot stories. We both had a lot of fun and we have some ideas already formulated of where the story is going next.”
Van Tassel says they’ve looked into quite a few possibilities and mediums for future stories, including graphic novels and films, but he’s somewhat concerned that more ambitious projects may become prohibitively expensive.
“To be honest, this one took almost three years in total to make happen and a lot of money, so it may be a while before a full on proper sequel happens. [We’re] hoping for smaller scale things, if people react well to this one. It was certainly a lot of fun to do musically and creatively.”
Better catch up before you have to worry about the next one. Copies can be ordered online via Joshua Van Tassel’s Bandcamp