Asterisk from Spontaneous Music by Simon Slator

This fourth Spontaneous Musing turned out to be not so spontaneous after all.

One of the most annoying times for the muse to bite me is at 6:30 on a weekday morning. When that happens, I have all of thirty minutes to get as much down as possible before everybody else's alarms start going off and the school run begins, closely followed by the start of my working day. That was the case on the 17th March when I lay the groundwork for this Spontaneous Musing at 6:30 in the morning; I didn't come back to it until over a week later.

The title, '*' (or 'asterisk'), comes from something I'd read online. Apparently, in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the "answer to life, the universe and everything" - the number 42 - comes from the ASCII code for an asterisk, which in computing terms is often used as a wildcard to mean "it could be anything". Whether that's accurate or just a theory, I don't know; but what I do know is that, inbetween work on volumes 3 and 4, I turned 42. It got me thinking: if this next year could be anything, what would I want it to be? I reflected on the weeks leading up to my 42nd birthday and thought I'd like it to be comparably relaxed but also offer up some opportunities to learn... more

Tracklist

4.	Asterisk	31:26

Credits

from Spontaneous Music, released August 17, 2025

License

CC BY 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.